back from the beach

My mom and I have what has become an annual tradition of taking the kids to a rented beach house on the Jersey shore. We're back now, and my mind has shifted from the big concerns of a beach vacation: Is today a beach day? Will tomorrow be a beach day? (I decided they all were, unless it rained, and it didn't. Much.) Will we make it to the end of the week without going to the laundromat? (We did, although now I have a lot of laundry to do.) Will I have enough yarn to finish these socks? (No.) And, will it be the Tilt-a-Whirl or the Ferris Wheel tonight? (It was mostly the Tilt-a-Whirl.)

I've given my last post and the response it generated a lot of thought. (You know, in between playing frisbee and watching the surfers.) Just to reassure all of you who are my friends IRL, and who have expressed concern for my marriage and my/our feminism: yes, darlings, of course Joe and even the kids do all kinds of things every day, to help me, to contribute to our household and my peace. It was rhetoric, written in a hurry on a day when I was overwhelmed. It happens. Part of me wants to say SHEESH people, don't you know a rant when you read one? It was a VENT, not a position paper.

But I think I really was trying to say something, unbalanced though it was. So I will try again.

It turns out that holding all of this together is a lot of work. Being a SAHM is challenging, and part of the challenge seems to be that nobody (including myself) expects it to be particularly challenging. How hard could it be, really? You keep doing everything working parents do, but you have the major bonus of NO JOB. Or, for those of us who are freelancing in one way or another, no job that expects you to show up at a particular time. Your time is your own, to schedule as you choose.

There's the problem. Scheduling. There is a lot to do. You've got to get the grocery shopping done, the house clean to whatever standard you have chosen, the children clean and fed. Then there's the homeschooling, which (like every other job worth doing) can take as much time as you choose to give it. It's not like you're ever 'done.' Add to all that an old house with projects that never seem to get completed, and then throw in an avid interest in reading or sewing or knitting or spinning.... poof, your days are full.

Now, tell me what it is you do to feed yourself. Everyone agrees that it is necessary for mothers, working or not, to take care of themselves, right? And for me, personally, it doesn't count as 'me time' unless my children are elsewhere, out of earshot and being taken care of by someone else.

So... what's it going to be?

You need a walk every day? A half hour of yoga? Meditation, tennis? Great, when are you going to do it? There's no money for a babysitter (you don't have a job, remember) so you've got do it when there's another parent at home. At 6:30 in the morning, before your husband leaves for work? After dinner every day, when you're already bone tired from the aforementioned never-ending list?

Do you see how sometimes, some days, it can be just a pain the ass to get that so-called 'me time?' How some days you're just going to blow it off and sit on the couch, or (more likely) get another load of laundry done or go out and weed the garden instead? Some days, it's just one more thing to put on the list, and since the list is endless anyway, why add another thing to it?

And yes, I can see that this doesn't make sense, that the most important thing is to take care of myself, before the laundry, before the weeding, before the damn dishes. But the reality is that it doesn't always happen that way, and on the days when I can't fit it in, the expectation that I find time to take care of myself feels like just another place for me to fall short.

what's up with that?

So there's this virus going around our homeschool playgroup. The kids are fine, but the moms... well, we're breaking down. Too much laundry, too many bickering kids, too many dishes, too many demands. Nobody, it seems, is finding a way to adequately take care of herself. Me included.

Isn't it an incredibly cruel irony that we take care of the kids, the dinners, the shopping, the vacuuming, and then we're also supposed to be taking care of ourselves? Like if we don't do that, we're failing in a new way, or there's a new layer to our failure. As if there weren't enough opportunity to fail already, as if anyone could ever do this job well enough to call it done. It's not enough that we have to listen to our kids natter on and on about legos and role playing games and the latest skinned knee and everything else. Oh no, we also have to make sure we're taking care of ourselves. Have you noticed that when you talk to a friend about what a difficult time you're having, she invariably asks, "What are you doing to take care of yourself?"

Enough. I'm going to start asking the husbands, "What are you doing to take care of the center of your family's universe?" I'm going to ask the kids, "What have you done to help your mom out lately?"

Really. Enough.

now what?

I was all set to post yesterday about how if I could just let go of my ambitions to write professionally, teach kids other than my own, and help teachers learn to be more flexible and inclusive in their classrooms, I would love this life.

I have incredible freedom. I can't believe that I can actually find moments in my day every day to spin, for fun. I can read what I want, I have enough yarn in my stash to knit for the next ten years, at least. I can enroll my kids in a class at the local science museum, and then we can play hookey if we like. We can spend the day gardening. We can sleep in, or get up early. We can walk to the grocery store, or we can set up a lemonade stand.

But some days, freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some days, I get really cranky. Some days, I don't want to hear either boy call out, "Mama!" ever again. Ever. Some days, like yesterday, I realize I'm out of patience because I'm literally out of gas: I often forget to eat lunch because I'm so engrossed with gardening or spinning or a book I'm reading or even, sometimes, doing something with the kids. Eating turns out to be one of the least interesting things I do, so I skip it in favor of something else, but then that turns around and bites me on the butt because I actually do need to consume some calories.

And those are the days when I look around me and all I see are piles of books I should be reading, essays I should be writing, laundry that needs folding, and crumbs everywhere, again. I get conflicted: I think, if only I didn't care about anything other than the house and the kids, I might actually be able to get it all done, most days. If only all I wanted was just to do a really great job teaching them and spending time with them.

Those are the days I think I should try to ditch my professional aspirations, as well as my fiber hobbies. And that's what I was thinking yesterday: I should get some focus and get down to what's really most important, just the kids and their work, their needs. Yeah, that's the ticket. Just forget myself for the next fifteen years or so.

As you might imagine, this line of thinking gets pretty depressing, pretty fast, but there are days when it really does seem to be the path of greater sanity. The solution to having a life in which one is juggling too many priorities is to eliminate some of them, right? And since I'm not planning to give my kids away (this week) it seems clear that I should eliminate the priorities not directly related to supporting the kids and their learning.

And then I read this post. The inimitable and very talented prairiepoppins of Handmade Homeschool reminds us that not only do we need to keep our own passionate selves going for our own sakes, but that it's really what's best for the kids, too. Our children need us to be actively engaged with our own passions, not only because it feeds us, but because they need to see how an actively engaged person lives her life. Devoting ourselves exclusively to our children does them a disservice, because it gives them the notion that not only are they the center of the universe, but that mothers/parents can't do anything else but take care of kids.

Which is not so.

So now I want to hear from you: what do you do to keep yourself going? How do you keep it all together when everyone is coming to you for most of what they need? How do you get time for yourself? What do you do to feed yourself?

Tell me, please. I need to know.

mark bittman=my hero

If you've been reading this blog for a while, or if you've clicked around a bit, you'll know that while many aspects of my crazy new unscheduled homeschooling life suit me to a T, I have really struggled with the unending requirement that I provide my family with reasonable things to eat at reasonable times. I don't mind keeping the house clean (probably because I've noticed that I can do it when I feel like it, and no harm done if I don't) and I enjoy reading books, making music, going for walks, and doing projects with my kids.

But I can't stand having to make food all the time. It just drives me crazy that no matter how many times I feed them, the kids keep wanting to be fed. If I were just taking care of myself, I'd probably skip cooking altogether and subsist on rice cakes, peanut butter, and salad, but the children protest. For a lot of families, this would translate into a dependence on prepared foods, but our budgetary restrictions (can't spend money on gardening, yarn, or roving if I'm spending it all on Amy's frozen foods) combined with our dietary restrictions (no wheat, no dairy) make this pretty much out of the question.

So cook I must. In my journey down this path, I have served some pretty lame dinners. Tortilla chips and smoothies is a good example. The kids have asked for repeats on that one. But I can't do that every night. Toast and eggs is also good, but again: can't do it every night. I've also discovered that while I have no objection to eating meat in most forms and from most sources, I am completely grossed out by the handling of meat that is required before it can be cooked.

Enter Mark Bittman. Most of the rest of the world already knows about him, but my first exposure was three weeks ago, in the book section of a WholeFoods in Philadelphia. I was there with friends, but I didn't need to shop, so after I'd exhausted the entertainment options of the lotions and potions section, I settled in with this book:

I liked it a lot. The recipes were simple, and arranged by ingredient. This is a brilliant innovation to me, because of the way I shop. I don't plan meals (this might be a big part of my problem, I know, but I just can't bring myself to plan, most of the time) so I shop according to what looks good. And I don't plan meals around a big piece of meat, as many do, because of the aforementioned gross-out factor. So I tend to bring home several bags of assorted produce, and imagine that somehow, this week, inspiration will strike and I'll be able to magically pull together some interesting dinners. Totally unreasonable, I know, except that with this book, it looked like this "strategy" might actually work.

Only problem: $35 price tag. No way. So I got home and checked half.com, and found it for a lot less. Then I dithered for a while, wondering if what I really needed to do was just get off my butt, plan ahead, make some dinners. Did I really need this book? So I dithered a little longer, and then I just ordered it. It came over the weekend, and I've used it twice, and folks, let me tell you, this book is the answer to my particular conundrum.

Both times I've started with an ingredient: shiitake mushrooms on Saturday, green beans last night, and both times I've been able to make something delicious without fussing over it. The recipes are simple, quick, and easy, and didn't call for anything we didn't already have in the house. Last night I was happy about what I'd cooked for dinner, for the first time in longer than I care to really think about.
That's herbed rice with chopped red pepper in the foreground. This is my own recipe, and possibly the only thing I still make from my many years making food in restaurants. Just saute a finely-chopped onion with some herbs, add leftover rice and mush it around.

The oval dish contains green beans with miso-walnut sauce, recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. Delicious. And I'm serving salad in my salad spinner (why waste a dish?) but that's homemade salad dressing in the peanut butter jar to the left.

Big One and I enjoyed this meal very much, and Papa enjoyed it too, when he got home. Here's how Little felt about it:
'Nothing to eat, Mama.'

Sigh.

'Okay, I'll have some salad, but then I want a glass of soy milk.'

But people, I was excited about this meal. I was invested in this meal. I am happy to respect his desires to eat a very bland diet (I remember exactly what this felt like) but I also know that one of these days, his palate will change, and I want him to keep trying things until it does.

So I insisted. I didn't insist he eat an entire serving, but I told him he would have to take a tiny taste of both the rice and the beans before he could have some soy milk. Much negotiation ensued, but I held firm. The rice went down easy, but the one tiny slice of a single bean he was obligated to eat before he got his soy milk, that went a little like this:

He's goofing a bit in that last one. He is well aware that he is not only cute, but charming and hilarious, even when he's refusing to eat his dinner. In the end, the bean went down, the universe was saved, and he got his soy milk.

monday in pictures

re-entry

There was quite a lot of knitting time on that train, and very little time spent doing the normal things like dishes, laundry, vacuuming, cooking.... We did maintain some semblance of our usual school life, with daily sessions in the cafe car for math time, checking out the maps and how they squared with the view out the window. We told stories and read books. We visited the library in downtown LA (astonishing) and spent a few joyful hours as tourists in Chinatown.
This was blooming in a courtyard at Union Station, which was where we got back on the train. We grabbed tamales for dinner at Olvera Street, an open-air Mexican market very nearby.

Real life is different. For one thing, we can go to a grocery store right down the street and cook our own damn dinner, so things have gotten a lot cheaper very quickly. We were staying in an area of downtown LA particularly challenging for conducting any kind of practical life. Among the highlights: it took trips on two subway lines to get groceries, and I had to pay a service $2 a pound to do a load of laundry. (Trivia question: how much do you think an average load of laundry weighs? This was not a big one, just a few days' worth of relatively lightweight clothing for three people, two of them on the short side. Go ahead, guess. I was surprised.)

The other crushing reality I've had to deal with today is the return to my editing work, which is going slowly. What was supposed to be a ten-hour project, or a week's worth of work for me, is taking a lot more of my time. Fortunately this coincides with the return of spring-like weather, so the kids have been running around in the watery sunlight all day, in and out, around the house, jumping off the porch, digging in the old leaves. We did take a walk together, and read some books together.

I'm sure I'll get better at this work, and that the next project will go more smoothly. I'm sure I'll learn how to do it better. I am determined to keep at it.

the de rigeur 'spring is coming' post, and a truly brilliant dinner plan

All over the mama-blogosphere are images of flowers coming up. Mine are well behind most, because it's cold here, but my post has the added benefit of letting you feel good about your own gardening. You will see exactly how much of a slovenly gardener I was last fall, and how very much I have to do before spring gets going in earnest. The beds are a mess, but the bulbs are coming up anyway. Above are the daffodils.
Here are the tulips.
Irises.
Hyacinths.
Phlox, which seemed not to stop growing through the winter. Is this common? If it is, I'm going to be planting a lot of it. It's done very well here, in one of the hottest, dryest parts of my garden.
Crocuses.
And here is my dinner, prepared for me by my friend Sandy Davenport (go have a look, she's also over there in the sidebar) because I am so swamped this week. It's a shepherd's pie, with half white potato and half sweet potato, and it's in the oven right now. Amazing. Thank you.

And that's the good news. The bad news is that between a French lesson, a glorious spinning session, a recorder lesson, and a quick visit from my parents who have just returned from Hawaii, I got not a speck of that editing project done today. Which means that after dinner is eaten, books are read, and the kids are tucked in, I'm going to be tapping away at this here keyboard, until way past my bedtime.

great, just great

This is going to be an interesting week. Joe has just left on a five-day business trip to the West Coast, so I am the solo parent for a while. This won't change our day-to-day routine much, but it will mean that the boys and I will be having dinner alone, and that I'll be doing the bedtime routine alone. It also means I'll be washing the dinner dishes and changing the cat boxes myself. And that I'll be getting up for any night wakings. Yes, Joe usually does all those things, and yes, I'm aware that he's a saint.

It's also this week that my new job is finally going to start. I'm going to have to find two to three extra hours each day to do an editing project by the end of the week. It can't slide into the weekend, because at the end of the week, we're going on a trip.

Which means that somehow in the midst of all this other stuff, I also have to get the three of us packed and ready for a relatively complicated two-week trip, most of which I will be handling as a solo parent.

No, I'm not complaining. Of course not. All these things could be seen in a 'glass half full' sort of way. I'm delighted that Joe's job allows me to stay home with Big One and Little One, and I'm glad they trust him enough to send him across the country to talk about the company. I'm pleased that the editing opportunity came my way, and that I'm going to be able to contribute to the family budget. And I'm beside myself with excitement about that forthcoming trip.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's going to be very, very interesting, that's all.

Just don't expect much blogging.

time-consuming appliances

This is a legendary mixer post.

Sharp readers already will have zeroed in on the ambiguous adjectival construction in the previous sentence. Props to you.

Meet the Deluxe family's Hobart C-100 10 quart mixer. It does not have a pet name. It does have an exploded view. =>

Suitable pet names would include Bertha, Dreadnought, Neaddought, L'Utile, and GL'Utile.













I brought the mixer out its mixer kennel to meet you. I discovered that it weighs 96 lbs. All muscle.



















A big mixer [a small commercial mixer] has been an object of desire in the Deluxe household since way back when.








My potter friend Alex gave me the C-100 in June 2006. I was giddy. But my bride wasn't sure that a 100 lb vintage mixer from a friend's barn qualified as a dream come true.
It did have a few problems.

The lifter arm [25, above] had become welded by corrosion to the cast iron body. It would not lift.

Was the solution more force? Sometimes that's all that is needed. When forced, it indeed did move a bit, then more. Then, too much; it broke off flush with the frame. A degiddying setback.

Drilling and hammering were the bones and bowels of Plan B. And pondering and cussing. A heat gun perhaps. In time I made a new lifter arm and the rehabilitated C-100 moved into the pantry in the fall of 2006.

It may be 25 years or more since Hobart stopped making the C-100. It is hard to find good information on the model. I joined a newsgroup for a while called "We actually collect electric mixers." A jolly, privileged group, they actually didn't collect C-100s.

But I do see these machines purring away at fairs and boardwalks, making batter for fried dough sellers. Like all planetary gear Hobart motors, the C-100 is essentially bombproof, except for the Achillean lifter arm.

If you are looking for the C-100 diagrams featured in this post, try here: catserv1.itwfeg.com/Hobart-Root/cart.cfm

[Update from Joe: The above method to see the C-100 manuals is broken. Try this instead:
http://kitchen.manualsonline.com/mdownloads/dae76a95-8d9b-440f-b806-2b70b6ffc2a7.pdf]


Aftermarket bowls and beaters still are made but they are pricey. One interesting fact is that the hub for attachments that mount on the front is the same size as the common KitchenAid stand mixer. A No. 10 tapering hub. Named for the C-10, common ancestor of the C-100 and the KitchenAid. That wasn't interesting for you?

I use the mixer every week to make dough for bread and pizza. We use spelt flour. If you have come here to read about spelt flour, I'll tell you to order your flour from www.dakota-prairie.com 50 lb bags of flour via UPS. It's the way to do it.





So this weekend, as is typical, bread was made. A pleasant sourdough 80/20 spelt/rye.

With 20 oz. of extra dough Big One and Little One made some crackers. They shared the rolling and cutting and all the rest.

According to B.O. and L.O., this qualifies as homeschooling.









I concur.

happy friday

Here's a tiny corner of my house that doesn't require any work at the moment.

We're having a quiet day. Big One is working on the recorder composition he started yesterday. He's transcribing the notes he's playing onto a staff. Little One is lego-ing. I am about to cast on two new knitting projects.

It's cold, clear and snowing.

I have to go to the bank and the grocery store today, wish we could all just stay in.

deep-seated WHAT?

Yesterday at homeschool playgroup, I was chatting with two friends, when suddenly the topic veered to housekeeping (I'll spare you the details). It became clear that these two friends see my housekeeping as, um, good. Maybe even very good. They think my house is neat, and clean, and generally pleasant to be in.

(Let's all pause here so that my mother can go get my father, read this to him, and then give him some space so he can pass out in shock without hurting himself. I was a bit of a slob when I was a kid.)

Perhaps because I still believe those voices in my head that tell me I'm a slob, I immediately started to protest:

"My house isn't perfect!"

and

"I have piles of stuff on my piano!"

and

"There is often kid stuff strewn around my living room."

and my favorite

"I have deep-seated psychological issues that make it difficult for me to be comfortable in a messy house."

Now I ask you. Why, oh why, do I need to excuse myself? Why can't I really own this? When I look around, I see that my house is pretty good, most of the time. I try not to drive my kids crazy with this (I don't always succeed) and I often give myself a day or two off from my cleaning routines. I really work at finding the right balance between having a house that looks comfortably lived-in and actually being comfortable living in it.

The truth is, whether I am letting it slide or keeping up with it, it is important to me to live in a house that is reasonably well cared-for. And the fact that I can't seem to be gracious about this when other people notice is a red flag that I am still believing those voices in my head rather than looking around me in this moment and seeing that I have become competent about taking care of my house.

On the other hand, I'm no paragon. Know what I did today instead of track down and deal with the mildewy smell in my bathroom? I lit an essential oil burner in there, and now my bathroom smells of cedar and eucalyptus.

gender again, and dinner

Does this child look like a girl to you? Yes? No? Can't tell? It seems that when we are out and about, most people interpret Big One's long hair as a feminine feature. And by most, I mean 99% of the people we encounter who don't already know us think he is a girl. They're not even unsure of themselves. They freely, openly, and mistakenly refer to this child as a she, as her, as my daughter. Never mind the completely boyish clothes, never mind the absence of feminine embellishment, all they see is the hair. (As if I would allow my daughter to go around with such raggedy hair. The very idea.) His hair has caused some awkward moments in and around men's rooms, where he is often mistaken for a girl who has taken a wrong turn.

Big One is completely aware of this (it would be quite difficult to hide it from him, even if I wanted to) but it doesn't bother him a bit. He has been growing it out for the last several years, with a few minor detours when I prevailed on him to get it cut, but I must confess that these haircuts really only served to strengthen his resolve. He doesn't have a goal, he doesn't want it to get to his shoulders or his elbow (as a girl would) he just wants his hair to keep growing.

So be it. I can't stop him. I know, because I've tried. Anything I might possibly say about cultural norms and hair would ring false, because his father and I both have hair well past our shoulders. The only requirement I have is that he wash it once a week, and that he brush it every day.

dinner...

I need some help.

I have mentioned that I used to have a job, and that Joe used to do the cooking. When I say Joe did the cooking, I mean he did all the cooking. The last time I cooked for myself on a regular basis was circa 1990, which was the last time I was single. This is a little ironic, because Joe and I met working in restaurant kitchens, and between us we've done just about every job there is to do in a restaurant, back of the house. Line cook, prep cook, dish, you name it. I even did a stint in a natural foods grocery where my back-of-the-house jobs were baking bread, granola, and pastries. But for the last 18 years, pretty much since we've been together, I didn't cook in my house at all.

Fast forward to last fall. Suddenly Joe gets a full time job, suddenly I have no job, I decide to stay home with the kids, and now I am responsible for making dinner. Joe's hours are long, his commute makes them longer, and it would be pretty lame if I couldn't manage to make food. For the first few weeks, my attempts were pretty lame. I have burned frozen squash, I have served cheese and crackers for dinner, I have told the kids to look through the fridge and see what they can find. In the beginning, it was a challenge for me to get spaghetti on the table at a reasonable time.

But then, things started to get in to a sort of groove. I'm no savant, but I can sort of do it now. I've learned that it helps to plan ahead, I've learned that it's smart to shop for the kinds of foods you like to cook and eat (this eluded me in the beginning), and I've learned that there are a few meals I can make with very little planning and still work out okay.

So far my super-easy meals are:

beans and rice
(make brown rice in the pressure cooker, open a can of refried beans, warm some tortillas if I'm feeling really ambitious.)

randomness soup
(saute some onions with some dried herbs, add this to some beans cooking in vegetable stock, throw in some celery, carrots, potatoes, whatever I have around) This is not quick, because it requires that I be around to monitor the soup, add water, adjust the flame, etc., but it is very easy, because once it's cooking, it just cooks, and I can go back to whatever it was I was doing before the necessity of dinner came along and bonked me on the head.

But I really want some more of these sorts of meals, and that's where you come in. Some of you make dinner all the time. I want to know what your super-easy, no planning required meals are. Please put them in the comments if you want to share, or else email them to me (new email address in my profile!) if you don't. No recipes required (I have lots of cookbooks and can figure things out) I'm really just looking for menu ideas here.

Thanks! And thanks for reading my blog.

routines

WARNING: this is a post about housekeeping.

In my defense, I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that I would be utterly fascinated to read a similar post on someone else's blog, although that may not be sufficient reason to inflict this on others. Suffice it to say that keeping a house has not come naturally to me, but it has been, like Mr. Collins' compliments to Lady Catherine, a subject of much study. While I much prefer a tidy and clean house, it has taken me years of book-learning and practice to get to the point where my house is tolerable most of the time.

You have been warned. Please, look away if you can't stomach this sort of thing.

So here are my routines for maintaining a (mostly) clean and tidy house. Devotees of Flylady will discern her influence. I've also been influenced by Cheryl Mendelson, but I don't even aspire to anything approaching her level of excellence.

When I get up in the morning, the boys are still in bed, and Joe has been up for a while. This can be almost completely relied upon, unless I've really slept in. So after I:

1.make my bed,

I go downstairs and:

2. empty the washer

of the laundry I put in during my after-dinner tidying up. My washer has a timer, so the wash gets washed in the morning even though I load it in the evening.

The washer is in the kitchen, so I:

3. empty the dish drain

and put the clean dinner dishes away before I leave. I find that I am much more likely to actually wash dishes during the day if there's a place to put the clean ones. I also put the kettle on for a cup of tea (green, with caffeine).

I carry the wet laundry out to the living room, where I encounter a rack full of dry laundry from yesterday, so I:

4. fold yesterday's laundry

before I can start to:

5. hang today's laundry on wooden racks to dry.

Before you start thinking I'm some kind of eco-genius, I must confess that my motivation for air-drying our laundry is economical rather than ecological. We have a dryer, and I use it, but I really try not to very much. This is part of why laundry must be done every day, which is fine because I actually enjoy laundry.

That's the morning routine. After that, I sit down and knit or read, or do yoga until the boys wake up and come downstairs. They are both expected to:

1. get dressed

2. make their beds, and

3. put their clean and folded laundry away.

This happens more or less well, depending on the day. I find that Big One has internalized most of this routine, and will often do the first two without reminders. Little One struggles with this, but I have noticed that if I remind him and then turn away as if I have not the slightest doubt in the world that he will get these things done, he mostly does. We do have days when these jobs require seemingly endless reminding (ahem, nagging) and we even have days when I just do their jobs for them. Some days, it isn't worth a battle.

Then we have breakfast, tidy up a bit, and settle in to a morning of doing school at the dining room table. Then lunch, and then we are sometimes out and about in the afternoon, sometimes we have company, sometimes we go to a park. Sometime during the afternoon, I will be compelled to:

6: make some kind of dinner plan.

This can be anything from panicking at 6 p.m. and making eggs and toast, to making a soup starting at 3, to knowing ahead of time exactly what we're having and thawing the necessary ingredients and fussing for several hours in the kitchen. This remains the most challenging part of the routine for me.

After dinner, Joe washes the dishes, and we tidy up. I wipe off the dining room table, put in a load of laundry and set the timer, and remind/encourage/bug the children to tidy up any toys they've left in public areas of the house.

That's mostly it. Oh, one more thing. Each week day, I have one extra job in one area of the house. However, it must be noted that while the daily routine is pretty firm and I notice that things start to slide south pretty quickly after even a day or two of neglect, the weekly routine can be neglected for almost any number of days. The big role that the weekly routines play in my life are so that I don't panic and try to do everything all in one day, then get discouraged when things start to look messy and dirty again.

Here they are:

Monday: tidy the boys' rooms and vacuum upstairs
Tuesday: vacuum downstairs
Wednesday: clean the bathrooms
Thursday: vacuum downstairs
Friday: clean the kitchen

So this means that if I notice that the bathrooms need some attention on a Tuesday, I can ignore it and go back to whatever I was doing, because it's not the day to clean the bathrooms. This doesn't necessarily mean I actually clean the bathrooms on Wednesday, but it means that the anxiety that develops over a messy bathroom is contained and tamed and doesn't overwhelm me. This is absolutely essential.

When I was working, I did something very similar, except I had to get up earlier, and there was no sitting peacefully knitting in the mornings while the boys slept. I did most of these things, but I did them more quickly and they were crammed in before school and after school.

Which brings us to the names we use on the blog. When I was working and trying to maintain some semblance of order in the house, I crammed these very minimal routines in before and after school. I went through a very dark period in which I felt that all I did at home was tidy up, vacuum, fold laundry, wash dishes, on and on, in an endless cycle. I felt like a housekeeping robot, and I gave my droid alter-ego a name: LC DX

LC is my model number, and also the initials of my real life name. If you pronounce it quickly, it sounds like Elsie. DX, or deluxe, is my trim line, and let me tell you, I am not the fanciest model available.

When we started this blog, Joe needed a name too, and there were friends of my grandparents whose names were Elsie and Joe, so those names went together for me in a deep, childhood sort of way. I also thought Joe was a good all-around sort of guy name. The kids are Big and Little because, well, one is big and one is little.

So there you have it. The story of our names.

Trash to treasure #1

Elsie cringed when I brought home another piece of urban jetsam a few months back and I couldn't say I was surprised. Although it had nice form, the lamp was covered in thick bumpy dreck that kept the lamp's charms very hidden.

I was in the basement this weekend, just minding my own business, when this sideshow Elephant Lamp jumped out at me again.

We have a lot of love to go around at the Deluxe house. But we do have a few projects going and I shouldn't have started another. But I had an intuition - What if that alligatoring was shellac?

Shellac has been on my mind. I'm talking shellac to anybody who'll listen. Shellac is running for mayor of Deluxetown and shellac wants you to look into your heart and see if you are the kind of person you want to be and shellac laughs at all your old jokes. Elsie has been threatening to call me shellacboy and I cannot deny the name. Yes, you will be reading more about shellac in future posts.

I knew that If the alligatoring was shellac, I could simply wipe away that evil finish. I could wipe out evil, with an alcohol-soaked rag.

I did it and you can too.

Show and tell time!

Consider the original state of the lamp.

Note the pronounced bumps and darkness that envelops it.I understand why someone pitched it. It is a mess.

Here I have gently wiped the entire face a few times and then a small area with denatured alcohol for two or three minutes. Interesting!

Here's a look at a nearly finished face of the lamp base. After rubbing off the finish, I lightly sanded with 320 grit paper.

I really like it now. I'm glad it isn't in the landfill.

I wondered as I worked about the maker, some talented amateur I imagine. I wonder about the finishing disaster - did it happen slowly or soon after the piece was done?

The figuring of the veneer is quite charming and the workmanship is tasteful. What happened to the finish? When it all went wrong, was the lamp disowned and stuck in a corner out of shame?

It might not have happened this way, but I feel like I have unbroken a heart. And that is what I needed to feel today.

Our Time-Saving Appliances

Elsie and I both served honorably in the hellish kitchens of the late 20th c. and although we received minimal financial compensation, we maintain an interest in the tools and techniques of food preparation.

The way we make food for ourselves is influenced by our experience and we think it is good fun to make large quantities of food at high speeds with the benefit of hazardous machinery. We even enjoy the clean-up, mostly.

Our ideals guide us away from specialized devices, but ideals are terribly inconvenient in practice. I have made coffee in a saucepan and toast over an open flame, but I have grown to accept that I am a mere mortal, especially at 6 AM.

We do not have a vast assortment of curiosities, but we do have a few favorites. Below are ones that are mostly used on a daily basis.


The Tappan Deluxe

Oh baby, what a beauty. Where to start with this one? I often blow the tour right here. The Tappan has many quirks and qualities that appeal to me and I lose the sensitivity to my audience that is required of a gracious host.

The Tappan Deluxe came with the house and is the centerpiece of the vintage kitchen that caused Elsie and I to swoon our way into home ownership.

Without this stove, this blog might never have existed.









The Dualit

A legend in our time.

Back in the day we dreamed about the future. Our vision of the future included a Dualit toaster, a living fossil of machine age design that offers visual interest in many designer kitchens.

We suspected that we would be well on our way to retirement before we had the scratch for such a fancy wattage hog.

One day at Salvation Army, Elsie looked up and saw me coming closer and in my arms cradling a cherished new addition to our family. In matters of observation, chance indeed favors the prepared mind.

The Vesuviana

Back in service after a long time on the bench, the Vesuviana is an elegant piece of equipment, simple and functional.

Until this year, our Vesuviana never had the correct portafilter gasket. The inevitable results of incorrect gasketing of steam and finely ground coffee are remarkably untidy.

Finding correct gaskets ain't easy. I went to Coffee and Tea Ltd. and was treated very well.








The A-9

Ours came from a roadside benefit sale for a Boy Scout troop. I think I paid 4 dollars and replaced the brushes and that was about all it needed from me. It has a very sound design that produces superior results. The coffee is ground to a selected fineness without overheating.

I understand that reproduction models are available at a hefty price

The Breadboxes.

We veer dangerously close to collecting breadboxes. Cheaply made with chromed steel and naive optimism.





The [Now for sale! Contact us!] RYP Healthmaster juicer.

This resembles a dangerous device of late Victorian medical quackery but is actually a dangerous device of mid-century health-food quackery. On a rainy Fall morning I visited a tag sale the next block over. I gave the proprietor all the money in my pocket, 7 dollars, and took my prize home.

The Pantry

Is a pantry an architectural feature or a food-preparation tool? I prefer to remain agnostic on the question. A large and convenient pantry is another winning feature of our old kitchen, but it doesn't photograph well. It deserves a wood-block print or hand-painted lithograph. The spirit of the previous owner visits me here from time to time and I feel honored.

The kitchen - all this stuff - is a project in harmonizing values with the practical, I suppose. All I can say based on what we have done so far is that there is more to come and we will enjoy it.

Joe