Family outing

We had no guests at the inn last night or scheduled for tonight, so I took the day off work and we went on a day trip.


First, we went to the birthplace of Calvin Coolidge. We got to see the room (and the exact bed, in fact) where he was born, the room where he was sworn into office as president, and the room that functioned as the summer White House one summer.


Interesting facts I learned about Calvin Coolidge:

• He was visiting his parents to help with the haying when he learned in the middle of the night that President Harding had died.


• While he was president, his 16-year-old son died of complications resulting from an infection in a blister he received while playing tennis at the White House.


• His gravesite is very plain, in keeping with his quote that "in this country we elect our presidents from the people, and I want to return to the people." (Paraphrased because I can't find the brochure.)

While LW napped, we drove to a science museum, where we spent the afternoon. We got home just in time for NB and IM to eat a quick dinner before heading off to vacation bible school, which is in the evening this year. (Tonight was the last night.)

Here are all four kids in front of the house where Coolidge was born and lived until he was four:

Here they are at the science museum:

CSA Week 6

This week's loot:

• 1/2 pound of green beans
• two heads of lettuce
• three cucumbers
• three summer squash
• bunch of Swiss chard
• pound of ground beef
• package of pork ribs

Summer wedding

Sunday afternoon we attended my minister's wedding. She and her husband had both lost spouses to cancer and have grown children. The ceremony was beautiful. Simple, elegant, spiritual, and full of love.

Unfortunately, Michael and I were sitting nowhere near each other. He was sitting in the sanctuary translating the ceremony for some guests from Ecuador. Because I waited until the last possible minute to wake LW up from his nap, the kids and I were sitting in the overflow room, watching the ceremony on large-screen TV (although the bride and groom did walk through the room during the processional). LW talked non-stop, but at least he was whispering.

The reception was held at the small local airport. They had lots of balls, frisbees, and hula hoops for the kids to play with, and a magician/juggler/unicyclist who performed for half an hour. Dinner was served in an airplane hanger owned by a church member. We ducked out to get back to the inn after dinner, so we missed the dancing to the live steel drum band.

We've had lots of rain this month, but they were blessed with a glorious day.

LW, who adores the minister, has been talking about the party: "I saw Susan, I hugged her, and I said 'congratulations,' but I didn't marry her."

CSA Week 5

I should have posted this earlier in the week; I might leave out something.

Our haul this week:

• Two heads of lettuce
• Two garlic stalks (the whole thing--bulb, stalk, scape, and bud)
• One pound of broccoli
• Three pounds of summer squash
• One bunch of kale
• One head of cabbage (I picked red)
• One bunch of parsley
  

For the meat share, we got:

• One pound of ground beef
• One pound of sirloin

Jessica asked last week how we use the vegetables. We have lots of salads. This week, I made coleslaw (LW calls it "coldslop") to use up the cabbage. With broccoli, I can make cream of broccoli soup, or steam it, or chop it into a salad, or just serve it plain for a snack.

Summer squash are a problem. We allow each of the older kids to pick three foods they don't have to eat. Summer squash made all three lists. Michael and I eat it sauteed with parsley or cooked with tomatoes and herbs. Sometimes I can get the kids to eat a bit if I chop it raw into a salad. NB is not fooled by this, however, and carefully picks out each piece. Anyone have clever recipes that disguise summer squash? Can you substitute yellow squash for zucchini in zucchini bread?

Another problem food is kale. I'll be honest--we've never actually eaten the kale. All last year, each time we got kale, we brought it home, put it away, stared at it guiltily every time we opened the vegetable drawer, and finally composted it when it became too wilted. This year, I vowed to eat the kale, but we've composted two week's worth already.

But this week we were victorious. We ate some of the kale. I made Toscano Soup, with sausage, potatoes, a bit of cream, and kale. The good news is, everyone in the family ate it. (Well, except LW, but he never eats anything we serve for dinner.) In fact, I should have doubled the recipe. And Michael decided I could easily double the kale within the recipe. With those changes, I should be able to use up a full week's worth of kale with that one recipe! Can you feel the excitement?

Of course, I still have three-fourths of a bunch of kale left for this week. I found a recipe for roasted kale. Dare I try it?

Sunday morning comic relief

My contribution to my congregation is bringing the comic relief. Said relief comes in a blond-haired, blue-eyed, chubby-cheeked package.

Last week, he made the congregation laugh by clapping when it was announced that our minister would be back in the pulpit this Sunday. (She had emergency eye surgery and was out of commission for a week.)

Today, he cracked everyone up by earnestly nodding his head during the entire children's message, occasionally repeating the end of the minister's sentences. The children join the minister on the steps of the chancel for the children's message, and LW always insists on sitting front and center, right next to the minister, so everyone in the congregation has a great view of him.

There's no way to explain to a two-year-old that he is drawing attention to himself by being too interested in the church service, so I'll have to resign myself to my role as parent of the scene-stealer.

CSA Week 4

This week's allotment:

• One bunch of carrots
• One bunch of radishes
• Two pounds of cauliflower
• Two pounds of assorted squash (I chose zucchini and crookneck squash)
• One head of lettuce
• One pound of potatoes

I think I might be forgetting something, but I'm too lazy to go look in the fridge.

For the meat share, we got one pound of pork breakfast sausage and one pound of ground beef.

To the Writers of the Assembly Instructions for my New Desk

I offer up these thoughts on your instructions in the hope that they will help you improve the product for the next customer.

1. Providing a parts list is a great help. However, you might want to work with the person who packages the parts to ensure consistency. It would be much easier to verify that I do, in fact, have 26 10MM Euro screws if they were all in one parts package, instead of mixed in with other parts in three packages. If they need to be mixed up, perhaps you could just document the contents of each package, and allow me to verify them a package at a time.
2. While we're on the subject of part numbers, Cs and Gs look awfully similar when stamped onto the rough edge of particle board. And you had so many of them. C, C-1, C-2, C-3, C-4 and G, G-1, G-2, G-3, GG, and GG-3. And yet whole letters of the alphabet weren't used at all. It occurred to me that you might be trying to indicate something about the part by the letter used for it, but I couldn't find the pattern.
3. Thank you, thank you, for naming part 60 the "eccentric receptacle." I chuckled every time I saw it, and frankly, I needed a laugh or two during this process.
4. Now on to the actual assembly. Those drawings in step 1 make it really tough to tell which is the right drawer slider and which is the left. Since actually inserting the drawer into place doesn't come until step 27, I had a lot of time to wonder if I'd guessed correctly.
5. About step 2. Let me guess. When you did the test assembly to write the instructions, you were working in a warehouse or an empty conference room or something, right? So it made sense to spread 15 pieces out on the floor and insert all 50 15x12 MM Cam Klix at once. You probably didn't think about the fact that most of us are assembling these desks in too small living rooms, in the little bit of space not taken up by the TV, the couch, the toys, and the Golden Retriever. There's really no need to work with that many pieces at once. What you should have done (and what I did) is to have us assemble the frame of the desk first, then the hutch, then the drawers and doors. It saves a lot of space.
6. Following my advice in number 5 will also help you break up the instructions. I don't know how long it took you to assemble the desk, but it took me 3.5 hours last night, and another 3 this afternoon. If I hadn't broken it up, I would have been up all night, unable to go to bed because everything was spread out all over the living room. I live with a toddler. Anything not battened down will go missing. As it was, I was able to get the desk frame completed last night, and stack all the remaining pieces on top of it until nap time.
7. It is physically impossible to attach F-2 to both B and H. I dare you.

That said, the desk is up and not wobbling. I think all will be well.

Fun with growth plates

IM had her yearly appointment with her orthopedic surgeon on Monday. Because she did such a thorough job breaking her left arm two years ago, and involved the growth plates in her elbow, they like to keep an eye on her.

The good news is that her flexibility is still, to quote the surgeon, "Frickin' good."

The bad news is that it appears the growth plate in her left elbow is calcifying faster than the corresponding plate in her right arm. Worst case scenario, her left arm will be noticeably shorter than her right. The doctor asked me if her long-sleeve shirts hung differently on one arm than the other. Does it make me a bad parent if I have no clue? And to be honest, spending more time looking at my kids' wrists when they're wearing long-sleeve shirts is way down on my list of parenting goals.

I asked what we do if the arms grow differently. There are two options. One, they chip away the calcification on the growth plate to encourage the arm to keep growing. Two, IM has "bone elongation surgery." Sounds fun, doesn't it?

But, since there is absolutely nothing we can do to change the outcome at this point, I am putting this one firmly on the Things I Am Not Going to Worry About Yet pile. We'll see if I have to pick it back up next year.

Problems you didn't know you had

We received an email this week that began:

It is with a heavy heart that I write you this e-mail.

All sorts of scenarios went through my head, but the problem was something I had not even guessed at. It turns out our river has rock snot, an invasive form of algae. There are no known methods of eradicating it. The only thing we can do is prevent its spread upstream and into the tributaries, and hope our river will be one of the many in which the rock snot does not form mats.

We are downstream of the confirmed bloomed. This means we should shower before playing in another body of water after playing in the river. They have not yet determined whether or not it is present in the brook as well. Given that the brook joins the river on our property, I'm not sure if I need to prevent the kids from playing in the brook and the river on the same day.

I find myself strangely depressed about the whole thing.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Another great birthday read from my in-laws, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life chronicles a family's year of eating local food. Less than twenty pages into it, I scrounged up a notebook and pen and started copying passages. Luckily for you, I'm not going to reproduce all four plus pages.

But I will leave you with a few.

Food is the rare moral arena in which the ethical choice is generally the one more likely to make you groan with pleasure. page 22

History has regularly proven it drastically unwise for a population to depend on just a few varieties for the majority of its sustenance. The Irish once depended on a single potato, until the potato famine rewrote history and truncated many family trees. We now depend similarly on a few corn and soybean strains for the majority of calories (both animal and vegetable) eaten by U.S. citizens. Our addiction to just two crops has made us the fattest people who've ever lived, dining just a few pathogens away from famine. page 54

Concentrating on local foods means thinking of fruit invariably as the product of an orchard, and a winter squash as the fruit of an early-winter farm. It's a strategy that will keep grocery money in the neighborhood, where it gets recycled into your own school system and local businesses. The green spaces surrounding your town stay green, and farmers who live nearby get to grow more food next year, for you. But before any of that, it's a win-win strategy for anyone with taste buds. page 69

Most of us agree to put away our sandals and bikinis when the leaves start to turn, even if they're our favorite clothes. We can learn to apply similar practicality to our foods. page 311 Camille Kingsolver

CSA Week 3

Today we got:

• Garlic scapes
• One head of lettuce
• Bunch of carrots
• Bunch of salad turnips
• Bunch of kale
• Large (large!) head of Chinese cabbage
• One pound of ground beef
• One pound of top round steak.