Miser Family update toward the end of Black History Month

Life continues to be jam-packed full with richness in the Miser Family household!   Highlights of the week include

• the flu (N-son, and also my husband),
• recovery from the flu (both of the above),
• attending a dance and then unfortunately not sharing details with one's mother (N-son),
• studying the reproductive system as part of the Sports Therapy curriculum and then fortunately not sharing the details with ones mother (J-son), 
• shoveling snow (a bunch of us),
• giving an exam, grading an exam, and then holding office hours for all the students who thought they knew the material but discovered otherwise (erm, me, in case that wasn't obvious),  and
• taking a bunch of students to a local math conference (me again).

I attended an amazing talk by Daryl Davis, a Jazz and Blues musician, an author, actor and activist.  His musical career has been enough to be remarkable all by itself, playing with the likes of Chuck Barry, Bruce Hornsby, and more.  But his talk was about his 30-year endeavor to befriend people who want to kill people like him.  He's interviewed and befriended many leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, a number of whom eventually leave the KKK.  Davis is a black dude with a small museum of KKK robes and hoods!

This is a bit of a digression into his story, away from my family's, but this really stuck with me, so I figured I'd share it.  He showed a short video clip from the riots at Charlottesville -- a white guy (dressed in normal clothes, but who Davis told us he found out was a KKK member) firing gun shots at the feet of a black man with a flame thrower, and then walking past police who stood behind barriers, doing nothing at all.  Davis asked: "If you saw this, what would you do?  You could blame the white guy with the gun, blame the police, blame the black guy with the flame thrower . . . think about it.  This is your country.  What would you do?"    

Davis said, "I called the KKK guy up and met with him."  He let the guy talk and say anything he wanted.  Then he invited the guy to the Black History museum with him.  They spent two hours there, wandering through the place.  By the time they came out, they were buddies.  When the guy got married a few weeks later and his bride's dad couldn't attend because of health issues, they had Davis walk the bride down the aisle.  He's one of the many who know Davis who have quit the KKK now.   Davis urged us all to be brave enough to listen to people who disagree with us. "Establish dialogue. When two enemies are talking, they're not fighting."

Our giant living room mirror, decorated.

The week ended with our family's second ever Black History Month Dinner.  Our first one was two years ago.   Back then, I put up thirty pictures of notable African Americans so we could play a matching game together.  It was such a great evening that everyone there kept telling me, "next time, you should have this person!   and that person! and the other person!"   Let me tell you, it's a bit of work to compile all these photos . . . but this year, we had 45 faces decorating our walls.  N-son came back from school and helped me put them up. 

Then, everybody got pages of random sticky notes, which they worked together to put on the right pictures.  Every picture had a name (on a yellow sticky notes) and two facts (on a pink and a green sticky note).

My sons J-son and N-son and two friends working together. 

I-daughter's friend is thinking hard.

Getting close to being done.

Somehow, I missed pictures of the dinner itself.  We had three friends, plus four kids (I-daughter, K-daughter, J-son, and N-son) and a grandchild who was more interested in Prewash the Dog than in pictures on the wall.  We had fried chicken, mac-and-cheese, collard greens, and cornbread, and then after dinner I read a snippet from Richard Wright's Black Boy, a book that gripped me when I was a teenager.    It was a great evening, with lots of "how come I never knew this?" moments, and a lot of friendship and helping.

The view into the cleaned-up dining room,
the morning after the Black History Month Dinner.

And now that the dinner is over, for a little while longer, my walls are decorated with well-labeled pictures of people who shaped our world for the better.  So that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.  

Money Dinner: stopping on a dime game

The Miser Family annual Money Dinner (to celebrate Tax Day, naturally) took place Friday night.  Of course, the dinner included some now-familiar staples, such as Dollar pretzels . . . 

and lettuce and (bringin' home the) bacon, all of which was served on our home-drawn Dollar-themed tablecloth . . .

(I love the fact that our table just happens to be the right size
for a tablecloth made from a fitted twin sheet).

But in addition, we also had two new twists.  In particular, this year featured . . . The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs!

Or, perhaps, the wooden duck that laid the yellow eggs.  But, y'know, pretty close.  

Also, this year featured the first annual "Stop on A Dime" game.  The rules are that you are allowed to use anything that you find in the garage (a place full of random sports equipment) . . . 

 

. . . and try to be the person to land your object closest to the dime, which we'd taped to a piece of paper and placed in the yard.

We played several rounds, with each winner getting a gold (chocolate) coin.     

In this round, the player who tossed the tennis racket won.

Eventually, we realized the kids had been in and out of the garage, and decided they counted as "objects". The little ones turned out to be highly uncooperative with "sending" out to the dime, but  I-daughter won the championship round, beating out a tennis racket, several basketballs and frisbees, as well as a plastic wheelbarrow and a baseball mitt . . .

. . . by bribing her brother, N-son, to go stand on the dime.  Because, he'd been in the garage, y'know.  

Maybe next year we'll have to modify the rules to include only inanimate objects.  

Super Hero Dinner

A super family.

My family has special dinners about once a month. This month, we decided all of a sudden to have a "Super Hero" dinner, which mostly means dressing up in super hero costumes. We had a hard time thinking what super heroes eat, but we finally decided "Pizza and Beer"*, because they usually eat while assuming the identity of their alter egos. Plus, apparently Peter Parker was a pizza delivery guy when he wasn't a photographer. 

* Disclaimer: almost all of my kids are legally 

allowed to drink beer, and we also served root beer.

 A friend suggested "Kale/Quinoa salad", because those are super foods, so we added that in and thereby had something moderately healthy to eat, too. Except that this week we got a huge amount of beet greens and radish greens in our CSA box, and no kale, so we had a "root vegetable greens-and-quinoa" salad instead of a kale-and-quinoa salad, and we still called that super foods.

I also decided, since we were celebrating super heroes, to invite someone I know that I've admired for a while.  She dressed as "super professor", as you can see here in this photo. 

You might not think of a theater professor as being particularly heroic, but she's traveled much of the world on her own or with one or two other people.  A while back, she particularly fell in love with Nepal, and decided to do a twist on Tibetan monk performances by starting her own performing company there to wander up out into the hills surrounding Katmandu and do performances about health and hygiene.  Her local actors performed skits about the importance of washing hands and of building toilets and of feeding pregnant women.  Their troop reached something like a half a million people before the war broke out and it became too dangerous to hike into the mountains.   Now she maintains a smaller company (two people) who work with war orphans in the city of Katmandu to use theater as a way of dealing with tragedy and aiming for hope.  It was fabulous having her tell her story -- heck, her stories -- to my kids. 

Captain Adorable, trying on her costume.
She thinks capes are annoying.

If you ever have a Super Hero dinner of your own, I highly recommending someone you admire a lot but haven't ever had over to your house.  It's a fabulous way to make rich connections.

I also recommend making super hero costumes out of just about anything you have at hand.  Prewash (aka "Captain Adorable") would disagree with me and say that costumes are for biting at.  Dog costumes don't last very long, so definitely don't splurge on those.

But for people, t-shirt sleeves can be cut to make awesome masks.   The ends of socks make great wrist bands.  A pillowcase attached with binder clips is a great cape . . . good enough, in fact, that you can fly from one room of the house to another . . .

Look, up in the living room.  Is it a bird? Is it a plane?
No, it's the Masked Math Marvel!

. . . and then land bravely in a proper super hero pose. 

Feet in a strong stance,
shoulders back, hands on hips,
head held high.

Just like this.  It's good to be super!

dOnnOr 2017: food, funds, family, friends

Well, our dOnnOr last night was lOads of fun!

The dinner was traditional:  bOgOls, hOmbOrgOrs, Opples, and OniOn rOngs.  YOm!

Notice the money tablecloth under the plate?
I designed it for our tax-day dinner, but it's good to have another a use for this!

New this year to the menu: for dessert we had dOnOts, a rare treat indeed in his household!

We looked over an amazing picture book called "The Material World: A Global Family Portrait". Peter Menzel photographed families all over the world with their possessions. It's a beautiful and humbling book.   You can also see many of the photos at this web site, but the descriptions and stories that go with the photos make it worth borrowing the book from the library.

We had a robust crowd, with four of my kids -- including J-son, who brought a bike tire that needs repairing and that fortuitously provided additional O-shaped decOration for the dOnnOr!

We also had a good buddy of mine who works with non-profits, who told us about her experience raising money for charities.  She brought up some good points about donating to local versions of national charities (for example, "Small City Habitat for Humanity" as contrasted with "Habitat for Humanity").   She also was very much more in the know than we were about implications for charities that have -- or have not -- pulled their events from Mar-A-Lago.

My good buddy, my grandchild A, and J-son.

And why were my friend's observations so helpful to us?  Because money for charities was of course the other activity (entertainment?) for the dOnnOr.   The kids each got to pick envelopes from among the charities we support, and write the checks.

Choosing envelopes.  K-daughter (in the middle) gets the most excited about this.

This dinner is a great way to remind my kids how to write checks (which in our electronic age, is becoming a bit of a dying art), in addition of course to reminding the offspring that it's fun to practice generosity.

N-son's favorite charities were all scooped up by K-daughter,
but he still got to write checks to the NAACP and a local community action group.

I sign the checks, of course, and then enter them into the check register.  And that's the biggest clean-up aspect of this annual event.

I love that the dOnnOr has evolved over the years into a way to get everyone in the family involved in our charitable plans, and I especially love that for me (selfishly), this makes the act of giving an even more joyous one.

The 2017 Donor Dinner (aka, the "Donnor")

One of the golden rules of frugality is to use your money where it makes the most difference to you and yours.   For example, a box of store-bought cereal costs about a gazillion times what it costs to make my own granola, and it doesn't much alter my breakfast happiness quotient.  So I don't buy prepackaged cereals.   For another example, Giardia meds for my dog cost about a gazillion times what a box of store-bought cereal does, but having a diarrhea-free dog is sort-of a big deal to me and my kids, so this summer we forked over the money for Metronidazole and Panacur without complaint.  We spend our money only where it brings the most contentment or where it alleviates the most pain.  That's the frugal mantra.

Ergo (that's math-speak for "therefore"), it makes sense to practice giving our money away to other people.

The reason that it's frugal to give our money away is that there are other people in the world who can make much better use of it, at least in support of creating the world our family cares about.  I basically stink at feeding hungry children on the opposite side of the globe or even in my own community, but there are charitable organizations I give money to that have helped to raise entire families out of poverty by feeding and educating their children.   Likewise,  I am a total incompetent at curing even the most curable of common third-world diseases, so I'm grateful for organizations like Doctors without Borders who bravely go where I myself fear to tread.

My family gives our money away in a bunch of different modes.  Monthly, we have money taken out of my paycheck (United Way), my checking account (church), and my credit card (World Vision and my alma mater).  Annually, we've started transferring large amounts of money to a Donor Advised Fund, from which we'll eventually direct it to charities when we retire and when we've had even more practice at spending our charitable money wisely.  (Because figuring out how to give well does take practice, same as learning many other frugal skills like how to make a yummy no-sugar granola.)

At any rate, here's one thing I've practiced and I'm getting moderately good at.  All year long, I save the solicitation envelopes we get.  There are a heck of a lot of these solicitations.

Once a year, usually in the summer, I sort through the envelopes (below you see me sitting cross-legged in my 25¢ yard-sale purchased gold skirt, putting the envelopes into piles alphabetically around me).

I cull the duplicates.  I've started adding handwritten notes to the worst repeat-offenders, asking them to mail me one solicitation in June or July, and quit with the monthly harangues.  That actually seemed to help a lot. 

This year, my husband and I have refocused our areas where we want to donate money.  We've always tried to channel a bunch of it toward feeding hungry people; this year we're paying special attention to the global refugee crisis, affecting over one hundred million people this year.   Having a population larger than the size of Russia facing food, water, and health care shortages doesn't get as much media attention as does, say, one particular relative of Trump meeting with a few people from Russia, but the worldwide refugee epidemic is real and it's just going to get worse --- my husband and I want to contribute in our own small way to helping the NGO's that are on the front lines.

But speaking of media coverage, a new area for us this year is to support investigative news outlets.  For reasons that I don't need to elaborate on, we feel that these places need grass-roots support more than they have in the past. So there's a new pile of envelopes for us.

And growing in emphasis for us this year is caring for the environment.  We've long donated to local conservancy groups, but this year we've added the Environmental Defense Fund, in part because this group seems to have managed to partner with industry in ways that seem to mark it as pragmatic (in addition to being idealistic), which matters a lot to me.

And in the same way that Erika over at NW Edible has decided to start celebrating fall harvests (because that time of year means a lot to her and her family), our family has for several years celebrated the signing of the charity checks.  Our annual dOnnOr is tonight.  (Here's a post on a previous dOnnOr).

Perhaps I'll have pictures tomorrow.

Fourth of July Dinner

It's good to get to go on a parade on the Fourth of July, and fortunately my neighborhood has an excellent parade for kids (announced via NextDoor. com, which is how I discovered the parade last year).

This year, N-son, K-daughter, A-child (she's getting too big to be called "Baby-A" any more), and Prewash joined me and the neighbors.

Later, I-daughter joined us for dinner, also dressed festively with a very, very desirable headdress.  That got co-opted by someone's niece.  

The menu included a rice/tex-mex flag that worked well last year, and worked even better this year since I'd made a note to self to keep the tex-mex really runny.  It made the rice taste really good!

At a yard sale last summer, I'd snagged star-shaped votive candles that I'd stowed away . . . 

. . . and also star shaped ice-cube trays, that I filled with homemade cherry juice I'd canned a year or so ago.  

And of course dessert was a flag-themed cheese cake.  Of course.

I mean, cheese cake.  Strawberries.  Blueberries.

What was I talking about?  Oh yeah, the fourth of July.   We all sang the Star-spangled banner, except A-child, who stared in amazement at the adults.  I also read the beginning and the end of the Declaration of Independence, omitting the indictment of specific crimes that it charged to old King George.  

And then, when the table was cleared (A-child loves clearing the table, by the way, because she loves giving the plates to Prewash, who loves pre-washing them), we worked on another yard sale find:  a map of the U.S.  

Especially right now, there's something satisfying about working to put our country together again.  Independence from tyranny is crucial, but there's something good to be said for struggling in the pursuit of Unity, too.  

(Oh, and someone put a small dinosaur on Alaska.  I promised I'd include that in the photo).  

Black History Month Dinner

The first-annual Black History Month Dinner in the Miser Mom household was a resounding success.  Woo-hoo!  (In fact, as you can tell by the fact that I'm calling it "first annual", we're already looking forward to next year).

What made it a success?  People, for one thing.  I had my extended family here (dad, step-mom, sisters, large subset of my children), plus a friend and her friends -- all together, we had 14 people for dinner.  We had enough people, in fact, that we had to set up a "cool" table for the teenagers, 

and a geeky table for the rest of us.

(Wait: did N-son get dinner at both tables?)

The food was fabulous.  My sisters (one wearing her pussy hat) cooked up fried catfish and "hipster collard greens" (kale from her own garden, with bacon and other yummy stuff).  I added homemade cornbread and store-bought mac-n-cheese.  

Next year, though, per about a gazillion suggestions from students and friends, I'm doing fried chicken instead of fried catfish, plus collard greens that are actually collard greens. But this year, I couldn't pass up the offer from my sisters to cook my dinner for me!

I decorated the walls of my living room with photographs I'd gathered during the summer. I had about thirty of these photographs.   (The names of the people are mostly the names I came up with last April -- see this post -- with the added suggestions that people included in the comments of that post.  That was so helpful!).  

To get good quality photos, I consulted with my college librarians.  They recommended that when I search via google images, I use the "setting -- advanced search" option to filter by "image size, larger than 1024x768").  This meant that the pictures all came out looking pretty good.  I tried to use "action" photos wherever possible (Maya Angelou lying on her carpet, writing, or Sidney Poitier next to a movie camera) to add context.   

My sister hangs out with Shirley Chisholm, Muhammad Ali, and others.

On the back of each photo, I printed out an abbreviated biography.  I spread the pictures out all across the living room, even covering up Georgia O'Keefe, so people wouldn't have to stand in front of each other to see the photos.

My daughter sits between Oprah Winfrey and Alex Haley, among others.

After dinner, we matched up the photos with sticky-note clues, three clues per photo.  At first we thought 30 photos with 90 clues was going to be way too many for us to match up -- it would get tedious.  But working together, we had a great time figuring out who was who, and the activity was surprisingly peppy and fast.  In fact, my guests gave me lots of "next year, you ought to add this person" suggestions.

It helped that each photo had three colors of sticky notes:  a yellow name, a green accomplishment, and a pink accomplishment

So we had some great discussions when we saw, say, two green tags on one photo:  Was this really Oprah?

An entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a political and social activist who was the first female self-made millionaire in America, she became one of the wealthiest African American women in the country.

No, that was actually Madame C.J. Walker.

At the end, my friend Amanda led us through a "what surprising things did you learn?" exercise, to wrap it all up.  Amanda hadn't known about Major Marshall Walker; my sisters hadn't known that the first major-party black candidate for the President of the United States was a woman (Shirley Chisholm), and so on. The teenage boys, who had asked for this in the first place, and who in true teenage fashion alternated between enthusiasm and pretending to be too cool for the event, either actively or quietly soaked it all up.   (Heh-heh . . . I don't know whether having a pair of teenage girls at the dinner made the event more palatable, or whether it added to J-son's impulse to be a bit aloof from the activity.)  When I asked the boys about doing it again next year, they both gave an emphatic "yes".

In the meanwhile, my family is delightedly sending me more names to include in next year's profiles.  On her flight back home, my youngest sister snapped this photo of a statue in BWI airport:  Bessie Coleman, the first black woman to earn a pilot's license.  Uppity women unite!

Halloween Dinner

The table decorated with pumpkins
(which multiplied like rabbits in my yard this year)
and a lamp decorated with Halloween-themed scarves.

The highlight of the week in the Miser Mom Household was our annual "Halloween Dinner".  We had a bunch of current and former students join us, and we dressed in costumes (some of us dressed as "college students", but others dressed as boxers, or army guys, or math queens, or -- most creatively -- Ursula the Sea Witch!).   

I want to say, I love the fact that I get to have students join me for dinner, and that alumni of mine still come back to visit.  I like feeling like what I'm doing now is touching the future, and that what I did in the past still matters now . . . not to mention, I like eating!


And for dinner, we served

• Zombie Eyeballs,
• Salted Rat Brains,
• Mexican Monkey Skulls, and
• Great Green Globs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts.

(In more ordinary terms, these would be (a) deviled eggs, (b) steamed cauliflower, (c) stuffed peppers pre-carved like jack-o-lanterns, and (d) spaghetti and bok choy in a peanut/soy sauce).  Lots of fun was had by all.

***

In other news . . . 

N-son's big news of the week is that -- in addition to doing culinary arts in the mornings -- he has now been signed up for ROTC during 7th and sometimes 8th period.  So he has a very small window of pure academics in the middle of the day, but he is SO HAPPY with his schedule.  He loves-loves-loves dressing in his uniform and parading around the house and playing Toby Keith songs on his phone.  (If you aren't familiar with Toby Keith, he's a Country singer who is very pro-American-soldier-good-ole-boy).

J-son, in the meanwhile, continues to love his electronics class.  He's working hard at that, and is looking forward to having three periods of electronics in a row next year.  My husband, ever the gear-head, has a blast working on homework with J-son.  Somehow, they never had quite this much fun solving algebraic linear equations for his math class, but Ohm's Law apparently rocks.

Even as I write this, the men-folk are down in Richmond visiting my step-daughter and my son-in-law.  I'm at home with lots of time to do the committee work that's been piling up around me, but instead I spent two hours today cutting out monster masks for next year's Halloween dinner.  Which sounds to me like a good trade-off, really.