A manly man

Got this email from a single friend today:

"Saw a psychic who told me I would know my future husband because he would somehow remind me of the Manwich guy. Every vegetarian's dream come true."

Anatomy lesson

Emerson is fascinated with the bathroom at the moment, probably because we don't let him in there to explore and play. But if you don't shut the door all the way he knows how to open it and he takes every chance he gets to do this.*

He let himself into the bathroom the other day after Eric had taken a shower. He stood there looking at Eric (who was naked) and then pointed at Eric's you-know-what and smiled and laughed.

Later that day after I had taken a shower and was in the bedroom getting dressed, Emerson comes in and sees me naked. He gets this look on his face like he has just figured out something really major. He points at my you-know-what and laughs. Then he looks out the bedroom door at Eric sitting on the couch and points at him, then looks back at me and points at me again, with a look of confused delight on his face.

So that's that milestone!


*We will be playing in the living room and suddenly he will just stand up and bolt out of the room down the hall on the off-chance that we have left the bathroom door ajar enough for him to get into.

There's always one

On my bike ride home from work I got stopped at a red light next to the Bay Quackers duck tour. For those who are unfamiliar, the "duck tour" is a tour done in an amphibious vehicle called a duck which drives all over the city checking out sites and then drives into the water and cruises around the bay. To make the experience more memorable the tour guide hands out little yellow quacker noisemakers at the beginning of the tour that you blow into to make a quacking sound.

So I'm at the red light and I hear the people in the duck chatting and quacking. And there's this one woman, maybe mid-thirties?, who is just quacking and quacking and quacking. It's like "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) and on and on and on. We're talking serious compulsive behavior here.

The red light is starting to feel a little long and I am admittedly often a little grouchy when riding home especially on really windy days which it was and I am started to get seriously irritated at this woman.

"quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaack" (quick inhale) "quaaaaaaaack" (quick inhale)....

Finally a seven year old boy on the duck shouts out "Aghhhh Mom can you please make that lady stop doing that!"

And the light turns green. I ride off with a smile.

Empanada update

I made empanadas for dinner last night. They turned out great! And I learned that the length of the recipe instructions is not a good indicator of how long it takes to make the recipe. One short paragraph can, quite deceptively, turn into several hours, especially when one is also feeding and caring for a one year old child.

I won a prize

I recently won another prize at work. An actual prize this time, not just a round of applause for being an unfortunate-looking child.

I won the prize for writing good marketing emails. "Good" in this case meant two things: they communicated the marketing message and they didn't actually sound like marketing, they sounded like actual, normal emails to people that I know (which is also what they were).

There were three prize-winners in this contest but I was the grand prize winner and the other two were the runners-up, which is a term that will always bring back memories of watching Miss America as a young girl.

My prize was called "I like the way you work it. No diggity, I got to bag it up." And the prize itself was reusable produce bags. This was, at first, kind of a let down because one of the runners-up had gotten chocolate and that just seemed kind of backwards and unfair.

But when I got home and opened them up I realized they are the perfect innovation for someone like me who simply refuses to use the plastic bags at the grocery store when buying produce. I hate those things. And rather than use them, I precariously pile my produce onto the little belt and try to prevent it all from rolling off when the belt moves. This works pretty well for most produce though I do actually recommend using a bag for mushrooms and green beans or else you get really dirty looks from the cashier.

And now I have bags I will actually use, thanks to my ability to sneak attack marketing on unsuspecting professional contacts.

New flavors

We've gotten a little stuck in a routine of eating the same five or ten meals again and again and this week we're trying to break out of it and eat some new stuff.

On Sunday we pulled two cookbooks down from their dusty, unvisited home: Rachel Ray's Big Orange Book (I swear I have no idea where this came from) and International Family Favorites, which features unique local dishes from each continent and full color photos of each recipe ornately staged in a culturally appropriate setting. I think these two just happened to be at the top of the stack.

As a result, our menu looks a bit different this week. It includes:

Sunday: RR's "Popeye" Risotto was aptly named as it was bright green and extremely spinach-y, mostly in a good way though it was one of those dishes that was so thick your mouth gets exhausted trying to move it around and swallow it. But all in all a pretty good new flavor (that spinach-nutmeg combo is not something we do often around here).

Monday: 11 Bean Soup. Eating this soup for dinner Monday and then lunch on Tuesday had Eric talking about his butt so much I suggested we should use a code word in from of Emerson, now that he is starting to really understand words. So now the word "jiminy" refers to all thing poo, butt and fart related. Because we then took this way too far, we now call the bathroom the "jiminy closet."

Special treat on Monday: Pecan Pie. We are still working our way through the huge sack of pecans we got from a Texas billionaire via my friend Sarah because he misspelled her name and sent her two by mistake, and I have gotten over my 'no corn syrup' reflex, so we made some pie. Yum!

Tuesday: "That's Shallota Flavor" Spaghetti (yes, from the orange book). Tasty enough but eh, not so special.

Still to come:
Wednesday: Handmade Salmon Burgers on Kaiser Rolls.

Thursday: Homemade empanadas!! (from IFF). We are going to do mushroom and potato & corn. I think if I was a different person the chances of these coming out looking very pretty and consistently shaped would be high. Being me, I am expecting a third-grader-playdoh aesthetic.

Music review: last Friday's symphony

Eric and I went on a date to the symphony last Friday night. Our favorite Chicago pizza spot is just a few blocks from the symphony hall and if you get there by about 6:20 you can get a free parking spot and a deep dish pizza and still have time to wait in the line for the women's bathroom before the show.

This past Friday the show was great for a lot of reasons. First, the conductor for the evening was named Osmo, which I spent the better portion of the performance thinking was the same name as that funny little floating guy in the He-Man cartoon from my childhood, but it turns out that was Orko.
Another great thing about the evening was that Alexander Barantschik, an SF symphony regular who Eric and I refer to affectionately as the "Russian bear," was playing a Mendelssohn violin concerto on the actual violin of the guy who is was written for all that time ago (it turns out that's the violin he plays all the time, on loan from a museum).

And a third neat thing about the evening was that one of the three performances was a world premiere of a work commissioned by the SF symphony. We couldn't help but giggle a little bit when we noticed on the list of instruments a few unexpected items: metal foil, sandpaper blocks, light paper, and "jingles." It immediately made me think that perhaps this was Iron Composer, the symphony equivalent of the Iron Chef in which a serious composer must write a brilliant piece of work using an orchestra plus some crazy random stuff someone picked up out of the dumpster down the block. In spite of rolling my eyes when I saw it had been written in 2010 (myself, I am not your biggest fan of the atonal cacophony car crash know as modern music) I actually quite enjoyed it.

One review of the piece commented: "The sound was never overpowering, even when two of the trombone players hit their instruments with sticks."

Eric and I exchanged a meaningful glance when the sandpaper blocks were employed to great effect during the piece.

The babysitter

Thinking about child care this morning, I remembered a woman, we'll call her Lisa because that was her name, who used to babysit my brother and me. The first thing you would notice about her when you met her was that she weighed 450 lbs, for real. And this was before one in three Americans was seriously obese, so it was still kind of novel. She was huge! I remember she had these tiny little feet and she always wore tiny little white Keds on them and you sort of wondered if any of this was really physically possible. But there she was.

There are so many stories about that time in our lives, but I only started telling them when I got older and realized that they were stories. Before then, it was just normal life.

For a while she babysat my brother and me in the mornings in the gap between my mother leaving for work and the two of us going to school. We learned later that in the not terribly large amount of time while my brother and I were still sleeping, she managed to eat her way through our basement freezer: a whole birthday cake, hundreds of Market Day frozen hors d'oeuvres, various other assorted frozen foods, though she would leave a teeny bit left and leave the whole package in the freezer so it wasn't until you actually needed something that you discovered it was all but gone. Most of it was our food, but there was one awkward incident in which the appetizers our next door neighbors were storing in our freezer for a party were reduced from over a hundred to a small handful rattling around in an empty box.

She got a German shepherd puppy at one point and rather than put it on a leash she would carry it around on the shelf created by her enormous bosom. For his part, the dog seemed quite happy to curl up there and be ferried around.

The other thing you should know about Lisa is that she always had a boyfriend. In fact, they weren't just boyfriends they were doting, adoring boyfriends who worshiped the ground she walked on. It truly puzzled my mother who, also dating at that time, I think seriously considered tripling her body weight to see if that would help her to meet men.

I wanted to end this post with a "where is show now" update so I took a peek on Facebook and here is what I can report: in her profile picture she is still huge, and she is cruising on a Harley behind a man I assume to be her husband. She looks quite happy.

Crazy person vs bad mother: a tale of two Ellies

Perhaps not surprisingly, my paranoia about environmental toxins has not gotten better with motherhood. My level of worry over my own and – more importantly, Emerson’s – exposure to pesticides, BPA, PVC, PBDE, phthlatates and other endocrine disruptors found in plastics, mercury, lead, electro-magnetic fields, pharmaceutical residue hormones and anti-depressants in water, etc etc has only increased. And while science has CLEARLY and REPEATEDLY shown how dangerous and damaging these chemicals are, I sometimes feel like the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD who is trying to protect myself and my young son from them.

As you can imagine, this is quite hard. Especially while I am also attempting to not seem like a maniac.

I will resist the temptation to tell you why I AM RIGHT, and to share my long list of feared substances and the ailments they have been shown to cause. And I will further attempt to keep this blog post from getting too angry at all of the people who have made all of the terrible, selfish, greedy, short-sighted, foolish choices that have led to our environment now being an unescapable toxic soup. We live here people! What’s wrong with you!?!

My generally quite sane husband brings me out of my paranoid fits by reminding me: having an insane person for a mother is probably worse for Emerson in the long run than drinking out of a plastic sippy cup. Let’s focus on the big stuff and try not to worry too much about everything else.

And he is completely right. Though sometimes it is hard to know what the big stuff is and which stuff is small enough not to worry about. Here’s my problem: I feel like my duty as a mother is to protect my son from things that I know could hurt him and I feel like I have good information about what some of those things are but it is actually really hard to get enough information about products to know which ones have the bad stuff in them and which don’t. It’s so insidious! Hence the hyper-vigilance and general suspicion of everything.

I am the opposite of the mothers you see wiping down their children and all of their belongings with anti-bacterial wipes every 20 min, but I can identify with the instinct that is making them do it (even though I think they are misinformed*). We both fear ‘invisible threats’ and are compelled to remove them from the vicinity of our children whatever it takes.

In my better moments, I am able to let go of the anger and be at peace with what it means to live in our world at this point in time. There is a also lot to be grateful for in this crazy modern world of ours.

*I personally think it is time to ban the use of “antibacterial” products except in health care facilities where they are really needed. I saw an ad for antibacterial undershirts recently. Clearly this has gotten out of hand. And there are real and serious consequences if science is to be believed.

Night skiing

Almost exactly two months ago now we were in Tahoe for the weekend to alternate skiing and babysitting. We went with other friends who have babies and we created a little rotation that gave everyone a chance to ski and a chance to babysit. On Saturday, Eric and I drew the skiing night shift, our only chance of the weekend to actually ski together. While we wanted to ski, we were both a little grumpy and tired and the required gondola ride to the night skiing area, though it sounds sort of whimsical and delight-inducing, was hot, noisy and crowded and just made us both even more crabby.

Once we got to the top, the lovely sunset lifted our spirits a bit. Perhaps this would be fun.

It turned out that a good portion of the night skiing area was a terrain park. We headed down one slope and quickly discovered that it was a series of small jumps. I was tentative at first, I don’t really fancy myself a terrain park skier*, but after taking a jump with more speed than I intended and getting a lot of air, I was hooked. And something about it being night time with almost no one else around made the whole scene quite unreal: like we were playing a video game of ourselves skiing in an alternate universe with dark skies. Reality took on a softer aspect and soon we were tearing up that terrain park. We were going off jumps we would never have attempted with the sun out. We went off them faster than we ever would have during the day. And we (well, I) hooted and squealed the whole way.

Then the finale: the half pipe.

We entered the half pipe guns blazing. Eric was determined to do the thing where you ski up the side of the half pipe, pause, and then ski back into it. He picked up some speed and went for it full force, but he picked a part of the half pipe where the wall becomes quite vertical and in spite of clawing at the top of the wall with his extended arms while, if memory serves, making a sort of kicking motion with his legs and skis, he ended up sliding backwards back to the bottom of the half pipe.

“I really went for it!” he shouted.

He made it look good, so I figured I would give it a try too. I gathered speed and launched myself toward the top of the side of the half pipe and, to my great surprise, popped right out on top. I was so startled I almost fell, but I kept it together, turned and jumped off the edge back into the half pipe, squealing loudly.

“Let’s do it again!” I exclaimed, exuberant with my success.

“I think we better not,” Eric cautioned. “We’ve got to head back before we realize we’re not actually this good.”

*I am a terrain park faller, primarily.

Le Chef

I’d like to thank the man who sat next to me on my flight to St Louis on Tuesday: because of him, I must blog.

It was clear immediately that he was French and that he was a talker. He was a large man, with big tree trunk legs and a larger tree trunk torso. Olive complexion and a shiny bald head and face with interested bulging eyes.

He started with the normal chit chat: do you live in St Louis or San Francisco? What do you do? How long is your trip?

He lives in San Francisco (but hates it), he is a chef and was going to St Louis to be a guest chef at a restaurant there the next day.

“Right above us,” he told me conspiratorially in a pretty thick French accent, “I have 300 Dungeness crab.”

“What, in the overhead compartment?” I asked incredulously.

“Yes yes!” He was emphatic. “On ice, of course. Gel packs. It is part of my special menu.” (It became clear later that he had 300 dollars worth of Dungeness crab, not 300 whole crabs. The crab was in a small cooler on ice packs, just like my breastmilk. We almost had something in common.)

It was just as well that I had forgotten to bring a magazine for the prohibited-electronics portions of the flight. I was up for an entertaining chat, and I had the time. So I asked him, the chef, if he had a favorite food.

“Ahh!” he cried. “All of it.”

Then he continued: “I love beans. Have you ever had a fresh garbanzo bean? They are green! And so delicious.” [smacking lips and a sort of cooing sound]

“It is all about what is in season,” he further confided in me. “Me, [gesturing towards himself] I L O V E… love love love love love tomatoes in season. In August, I give myself diarrhea eating so many tomatoes.”

“What about cheese?” I asked once I had recovered from almost choking when he said the “d” word.

“Ahh! Cheese!” he cried. “I recently lost 26 pounds just by eating less cheese.” (I could sort of relate: I gained 26 pounds just by eating cheese when I was pregnant with Emerson.)

The chime went off signalling I could get my laptop out so I told him it had been nice chatting and that now I had to work. He spent the remaining 3+ hours of the flight talking to every other person in earshot for as long as they would tolerate him. He disappeared for about 30 min at one point: I looked back and he was talking the ear off the flight attendant at the back of the plane.