Need help with a special dinner!!!

I've had a lot of people tell me that my descriptions of our family's "Special Dinners" are some of their favorite posts.  My students and friends all seem intrigued and love getting invitations.  I'm so glad about this enthusiasm; I'm gratified to know people outside our family enjoy this peek into our dining room.  It's even more fun to know that this effort to build family traditions among my ecclectically gathered children seems to be working -- after the Zoo dinner in March, K-daughter texted me to say she was "bragbooking":

 I had a super fun time last night!!!! Do you mind sending me the pictures we took?! :)))) I want to brag on Facebook about how my family is cooler than everyone else's.

And the boys, although they're not quite as over-the-top excited as K-daughter, they get into it, too.  In fact, at that same Zoo Dinner, J-son looked at me and said, "Mom, last month was Black History month and we didn't have a Black History special dinner!"  My husband thought this comment was so astute that he burst out laughing and saying,  "yeah, way to go J-son!".  And pretty soon, N-son and J-son were both chiming in with a chorus of needing to have this dinner.

I need help.

Because, while I *totally* agree that this is a great idea in principle, I also think the BHSD (Black History Special Dinner) has gotta be done well.  For one thing, I really don't want this to turn into stereotype.  Our other special dinners are fun in part because they're so silly.  In my nightmares, the BHSD becomes a black-face, watermelon-eating embarrassment.  I want this dinner to have real substance and dignity.

But for another thing, almost all of our other special dinners have been exciting and memorable.  (The Green Dinner has gone down in family lore as being the Most-Awful-Dinner-Ever, but all the other special dinners were memorable in the good way).  So I don't want to have a dinner that celebrates my sons' heritage come out to be meh.

I'm a little nervous about reconciling these two goals.  So I'm asking for suggestions from my blog friends.  I've made some progress in my head, and I'll share some of my ideas below -- but I am very much open to further ideas.

Food:
The menus for our other Special Dinners aren't super extravagant, but I try to make the food interesting.   Food can be simple (the No-Hands dinner features cut-up hot dogs, pasta, and peas) or specially bought (the Pirate Dinner features giant Turkey Legs).  In all cases, ease and simplicity of preparation is a significant factor.   No 5-hour preparation times!

I think I'm going to buy a copy of a cookbook by Terry Bryant: an African American cook who has been an advocate for social justice issues (the specific book I'm eyeing is Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine). I'm hoping to mine this for some fun, non-time-intensive recipes.

Clothing:

Sometimes we dress up.  For the backwards dinner, some people wore their clothes inside out; the Zoo dinner brings out the beast in our costumes; the Pirate Dinner just invites costuming, really.  But special clothes aren't a requirement . . . I'm not sure what's going to happen with dressing for the BHSD.

Decorations.

For the money dinner, we strew coins from around the world all over the table.  For the Pirate Dinner, we hang the Jolly Roger and have a pirate-themed table cloth.  This is all stuff we gathered ourselves, or possibly spent a pittance on at yard sales -- I don't want to accumulate kitsch, especially expensive kitsch.  For some dinners (the No-Hands dinner and the Backwards dinner), we don't bother decorating at all.  Aside from the activity (see below), I don't have ideas yet for setting the table or decorating the dining room.  

Song.

For the Cinco de Mayo we play "La Bamba"; for the Money Dinner we play money songs; at the Pirate Dinner we sing "What'll you do with a drunken sailor?".  I might ask N-son and my daughter (who are in a chorus together) to come up with a good song to sing or listen to.  Or maybe they'll perform for us?

Activity.

The activity can be as simple as a way of talking (at the "Donnor", we say everything with "O", so "Plose poss tho solt" instead of "please pass the salt").  The activity can be an unusual way of eating--two examples are the No-Hands dinner where we eat, as advertised, with no hands,  and the the Zoo Dinner, where we turn chairs around and eat through the bars).  Or the activity can be an add-on, like the Cinco de Mayo (where we dance to Yuri) or the Pirate Dinner (treasure hunt).  

My idea of an activity for the BHSD is two-fold.  I'd like to end the dinner with a reading from Richard Wright's "Black Boy"---a book that influenced me a lot when I was in high school.  We've got a favorite story from the book that would make a good family read because it's full of energy.   And fighting.  yeah.

But during/after dinner, I'd like to do a matching activity.  I'm going to work with our campus librarians to gather a set of photographs of famous people (see the list below), and I'm going to put these photos up on the walls all around.  And then, at the table, the diners will get sets of sticky notes that I've pre-printed with names and facts (same as I do with our advent calendar).  The people at the table will have to match the sticky notes with the photos.  Each photo will eventually have three sticky notes -- a name, and then two facts about that person.  

For example, the sticky notes that would go with this picture would say

• Ida B. Wells
• In 1884, refused to give up her seat in the first-class ladies car and was dragged out; later sued the Memphis and Charleston Railroad.
• journalist who documented that lynching was used as a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites.

I think this activity (cross fingers) would be fun, especially if people help each other with this.  And it'll also be a good way to pay tribute to the accomplishments of black Americans who have made important contributions to our country. 

But I'm not great with history; I'm weak on politics and social sciences; and I'm just about totally ignorant of pop culture and sports.  So I'd be grateful for advice on who ought to be on this list.  Obviously this list can't be comprehensive -- if only because people at dinner would die if they had to match up 100 people with their names.  I think I've got a good start, and I don't think I have room for a lot more names.  But if I've missed some big names -- government? literary?  women athletes?  scientists? -- I'd be grateful for input.   

Rosa Parks
Harriet Tubman
Angela Davis
Ida B. Wells
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Malcolm X
Frederick Douglass
Booker T. Washington
Dred Scott

Lena Horne
Oprah Winfrey
Ella Fitzgerald
Louie Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Sidney Poitier
Spike Lee

Shirley Chisholm
Barack Obama
Thurgood Marshall

Maya Angelou
Zora Neale Hurston
Audre Lorde
Langston Hughes
Alex Haley
Richard Wright

Etta Zuber Falconer
George Washington Carver
Percy Lavon Julian
Neil deGrasse Tyson

Muhammad Ali
Jackie Robinson
Jesse Owens
Florence Griffith Joyner
Serena Williams

Squirt bottle -- from plastic to glass

For years now, I've used a tip I read about long ago in the terrific Tightwad Gazette:  a teaspoon or so of dish soap and a bunch of water, mixed together in a squirt bottle, make for quick clean-ups of the random pot or sink mess.  I re-purposed an squirt bottle that came, I think, from some bathroom cleaner.  Not elegant, but serviceable.

For years, I've sort of had it in the back of my mind that it'd be nice to have a squirt bottle not made of plastic, but of course I never let the thought get to the point where I'd actually go out and pay MONEY for something like that.  Because.  Well, because something else always seems to come along.

And then my plastic bottle cracked, meaning that now it was both not elegant AND not serviceable.  Would I finally be tempted to go to the store?

Well, yes, I would be tempted.  For about 8 seconds, I was tempted.  And then I thought . . . the heck?  What if---by some miracle---one of the glass bottles already on my shelf just happens to match the screw-lid-part of the squeeze bottle?  If that worked, I'd be set!

So I started looking to cannibalize bottles: Worcestershire sauce.  Rice vinegar.  Hot sauce.  I tested these to see if there was a match between food bottle and bathroom cleaner bottle (size wise, not content-wise, of course).  And when I got to Soy Sauce, I struck oil (so to speak).  Voila my new glass spray bottle, with a plastic squirt attachment.

(Note: instead of trying the squirt attachment on all those glass bottles, it's a lot easier and more sanitary to try the *lids* of those glass bottles on the old broken plastic bottle *bottom*.  Don't ask me how long it took me to realize that).

Also, we happened to have several opened bottles of soy sauce, so combining these into one bottle and cannibalizing the remaining bottle turned out to reduce cupboard clutter.  Bonus points!

A half century of me

So, two Saturdays back was the half-century mark of being me.  This past week has been a wonderful swirl of activity.  It began the night before my birthday with a rare trip to an all-you-can eat restaurant.  The next morning I had a great run with my girl friends, all the way down Duke Street to a park that has a river running through it.  When we ran back up the giant Duke Street hill (have I ever mentioned that I stink at running up hill?), I was so proud of myself that I bragged, "Now I'm over the hill!"

(Get it?  I thought it was hilarious).

(Wanna hear it again?)

Okay, so the birthday fun continued with an awesome post-run waffle breakfast that I cooked up for friends and family. From there, my family went to Gettysburg National Park, where N-son and I got to pose with one of my heroes.

Meanwhile, that same day, J-son had his first real boxing match.  He went three rounds with some other guy, and he won the match.  He's working so hard at this -- I'm really proud of the focus that he's found.

On Easter Sunday, our church had a big breakfast, and so I spent much of the day leisurely washing the 100 plates and tableware sets that I'd bought earlier this year.  Miser Dog helped by pre-washing the plates for me.  Washing dishes doesn't sound like much fun, but it actually was -- I just get this sense of happiness that there are 100 people eating differently because of something that I did more-or-less on a whim.

On Monday, I did another fairly unusual thing for me -- I went to the grocery store.  (According to my credit card records, I went to a grocery store only 12 times last year, and four of those twelve times were while I was traveling, so local grocery store visits really are rare for me).  I bought three large lasagnas and four loaves of commercial bread, and then I "made" dinner for my student advisees.  Actually, these students were my advisees when they were freshmen; now that they're juniors they've got new academic advisors, but I like to keep in touch with them still.  I've discovered that they're sort of picky about food, which is why I stick with store-bought stuff that they're more familiar with.   We had a great dinner, talking about life and finances and traveling and bad jokes.

Tuesday, I got to go back to the Rescue Mission where I've been volunteering (it had been under construction for a few weeks, and it finally reopened).  It was awesome to get there and have people be really happy to see me again -- and the feeling was mutual.

And then the math bug kicked in again.  Doing research goes in waves for me -- sometimes I'm really lukewarm:  staring at a project that I know I'm supposed to start, but feeling fairly ambivalent about jumping in.  Tuesday afternoon I started slogging my way up the mountain of numerical projective invariants, only to discover that the view from the top of that mountain was a valley of delight and discovery.  And so for the past several days, I've been using just about every spare moment I can find to run around in these meadows of mathematics, gathering in all the luscious growth that springs up under my feet.  You could say I'm over the hill again.

There's been more.  Finding time to do my own math has been difficult, ironically, because I've been going to math conferences -- I gave a colloquium talk down in D.C. on Friday, and did some official stuff at a local-ish conference on Saturday.  Sometime in this week, also, my provost called me in to tell me that something really nice is going to happen that I'm not supposed to actually talk about until the official announcement comes out.  So more happiness, but it's still secret happiness for now.

Oooh, and we had a "Backwards Dinner" the night before April Fools -- the gals came home and we said "good-bye".  Then I declared I was full.  We had cake and ice cream, and then we had sausage and bread and salad and soup.  And then we said grace.  We hung out together a bit, and then said "hello", and the girls went home.  And it was great getting to see my daughters again, especially because it's not just my birthday week, but also the week when my granddaughter turned one year old.

All of which explains why things have been silent on the Miser Mom blog recently.  Too much good stuff happening. 

Beautiful on the inside

About two dozen years ago, my youngest sister came up to me while I was working, and said,

"[Big Sister], I just want you to know that I think you're beautiful on the inside."

Um, thanks.

She'd actually intended that comment to come out in an encouraging way.  I'd been dating a guy who I knew wasn't great for me, and she knew it too, and she figured I was only dating him because I thought I wasn't worth much.  Or something.  I assured her that, actually, this particular guy was on the way out and that my self-esteem was, if anything, over- rather than under-developed.  Since then, we've often joke-lovingly told each other that we're beautiful on the inside.

And now I have pictures to prove (?) it.  Yesterday I treated myself to an endoscopy and manicure, but without the manicure.  The anxiety stuff that I wrote about earlier has been long gone (yay), but the chest pain/weirdness persists, so I got assigned to a gastro guy who decided to take a peek inside.  Are there ulcers lurking about within me?  Or is it merely heartburn?

I have to say, that one of the weirdly reassuring events in this long series of health-and-medicine adventures was going to my dad's birthday party in February.  While I was there, my sister reminded me that Dad had a prolapsed esophageal valve, and he'd suffered heartburn basically all his life.  When he was about my current age, he had his own endoscopy (also no manicure) that discovered an ulcer lurking inside of him.  And yet, here he was, celebrating 80 years, still going to the gym, and just getting ready to head for a month-long overseas trip just so he could see the solar eclipse from off the coast of Indonesia.

So I figure, I'm not really in mortal danger either.

At any rate, yesterday I had my own upper endoscopy.  I got my beautiful new blue gown, I got the monogrammed bracelet, I got the IV.  My GI doc peeked around inside of me, and when I woke up, he told me words to the effect that I'm beautiful on the inside.  No ulcers.

Wanna see?

Duodenum, midway, and esophagus.  

So it looks like I just get to keep taking heartburn meds and hope that this chest-burn goes away.  

Financial parenting

I finally read The Millionaire Next Door, a standard inclusion on the bookshelf of any personal finance library.  The main message in that book is that true millionaires don't "look" like millionaires; they live more frugally than their neighbors.  Not necessarily as frugally as me, mind you, but definitely not drawn to flashy cars, giant houses, fancy clothes, etc.

Two things I hadn't expected from the book from what I've heard about it elsewhere were

1. sexism.  I mean, what the heck is up with the authors' repeated assertion that "the average millionaire is a man married to the same (frugal) woman for many years."  Um, doesn't that mean the woman is a millionaire, too?  Hello?
2. parenting lessons.

The parenting lessons are basically these:  the more that parents "help" their adult children financially, the worse off those adult children are at accumulating wealth.  In fact, financial assistance to adult children seems to lead to more financial unhappiness than it does to stability.  For example (the authors note), parents who help their kids buy a home in a nice neighborhood are inadvertently setting their offspring up for a lifestyle where they have to "keep up" materially with higher income neighbors.  Grandparents who pay for their grandchildren's private schooling implicitly require that the parents then feel pressured to pay for clothing, sports teams, technology (etc) to match the other children whose parents can more easily afford kid bling.  And adult children who start receiving financial gifts from their parents come to expect, rely upon, and feel entitled to continuing installments of that income.  

All of this makes me feel better that I don't regularly channel money to my grown kids.  (By "all of this", I mean "all of the financial parenting lessons"; I don't mean the absurd notion that stay-at-home wives aren't also millionaires.  I mean, geez, the authors' whole contention is that it's saving money, not earning money, that makes a millionaire.  So the whole ignore-the-wives aspect of this book really irked me.  Can you tell?)

Okay, so I don't shovel money in the direction of my kids.  But that doesn't mean I'm totally hands-off, either.  Here are some things that I give my adult children in the hopes that they can become financially stable and comfortable on their own.

1. A good example.  Or, possibly, an extreme example that they can gently draw back from in their own lives.  I love that my oldest daughter is gardening, that several of my daughters use canning jars, that all of my offspring like walking places. 
2. Lessons in filling out stupid (but important) paperwork.  All of my kids started filling out their own school info forms when they turned about 8 years old, at first with lots of guidance from me, and later increasingly on their own.  I had my young kids "help" me fill out my tax forms by reading me W2 form numbers.  I sat near K-daughter while she filled out FAFSA forms the first time, and helped her create a file of important paperwork.  
3. Gifts that are investments in the future, not lifestyle enhancers.  We've never given a kid a car, but we've given most of them bicycles.  We've never given a kid a computer, but we've given all the adults sewing machines.  Our most recent big gift was setting up a 529 plan for my granddaughter. . . that's as close as I've gotten to giving a child of mine actual money.  
4. A calm, non-anxious presence.  Yes, I'll go with you when you visit houses you might want to buy.  Yes, I'll walk into the bank with you as we set up your checking account. Yes, I'll sit with you while you navigate the HealthCare Marketplace.   You'd be fine on your own, but I'll be there anyway. 
5. Suggesting advice, and then backing off if the kids aren't ready.  Even when I want to scream "GAAAH!!! SELL THE HOUSE NOW!" or "FINISH COLLEGE!!!", I try my best to remain neutral.  ("Darling, if you need help contacting a realtor, just let me know."  "So, have you looked into applying to colleges next year?  No?  Okay, well, if you do and you need help, just ask.") Butting out is seriously hard.   
6. Occasional unsolicited advice that actually goes somewhere.  I've been talking with K-daughter recently about myRAs and IRAs, which are things she's interested in but not actively pursuing.  I've had similar conversations with our host daughter, Y, who I've begun to realize has had not-a-lot of practical wisdom passed along from her own parents.  (That's another story.)  Every once in a while, it seems, I say something that my kids actually decide makes sense.  It's okay with me that it's only every once in a while.
7. Advice when asked.  I tell my colleagues, "When it comes to advice, I'm full of it".  I try hard (and probably don't entirely succeed) in not being pushy with my kids, so that they can feel free to come ask me questions.   I think two of the biggest compliments I've gotten were (1) when my homemade daughter told me, "Mom, you're so . . . useful", and (2) this texting exchange between me and K-daughter:

Me: Oh, good! Glad it worked! I love it when you ask for advice, even when I don't have a good answer! Love. 

K-daughter: Haha thanks :) I love when you do have answers but I love it more when you make me figure it out myself. 

Canned dirt

The first time of doing anything new can be exciting, but it can also be darned intimidating.  I'm thinking, for example, of a student who came to my home for lunch last month and who said, sort of wistfully, "Yeah, someday I'd like to learn to bake bread."  Even after I wrote down a recipe, she kept saying, "Someday I'll learn . . . "  so I walked her into my kitchen and handed her a bowl.

"Here, put the water in the bowl. Okay, now add the yeast.  Now the flour . . . "  Five minutes later, she had a dough ready to rise.  And she was floored: "You mean that's it?  That's all you do?"

And that's what I mean.  Doing something for the first time is hard because of the chasm of the unknown, more than it's hard because of the task itself.

And in the same way, doing something for a second, third, or nth time becomes a snap.  For example, this weekend I spent a half hour getting my tomatoes and peppers started.  I knew from past experience that the part I dislike most about seed-starting is gathering supplies from the basement and garage, so I tasked N-son with carrying things while I finished up some dishes.  From the basement: two-dozen pint jars and one-dozen cup jars, plus the shoe box of seeds.  From the garage: the potting soil and the tarp to keep the table clean. (It's so nice to know what I'm doing now well enough that I can delegate to others!  I can't delegate well when I'm still making stuff up as I'm going along.)  I got the ladle and funnel myself.  And, voila!  I was ready to start my seeds.

Keeping the bag of potting soil in a bucket makes for easy carrying
and also for less spilling while I'm potting up plants.

I already had potting soil and seeds from a previous year.  I already had canning jars from . . . well, from being a little nutso about loving canning jars.  This year the one new thing I'm trying new is to use canning jar lids instead of a dry cleaner bag or clear plastic tarp to keep moisture in until things start sprouting.  I'm crossing my fingers that the glass on the side of the jars lets enough light in to tell the seeds to wake up.  If this doesn't work, I'll cry for my dead seeds, and then go back to plastic tarp next year.

And, half-an-hour later, all the seeds were in jars, the tarp had been shaken out outside, the supplies were put away, and any mess was cleaned up.  All that was left on the table was a set of flowers I'd planted years ago.  More past-me making the life of now-me a little easier and prettier.

Sunscreen pump

It's been so long since I got to indulge myself in a good Canning Jar Lust post.  This topic has been long overdue in this neck of the blog-o-sphere, hasn't it?

I've often looked sort of longingly at people who make canning jars into pump dispensers.  But I didn't do it myself because, (a) really, we already have soap dispensers galore here in Chez MiserMom, and (b) I hadn't figured out a super-frugal way to do it myself.   Truly, if I don't need something, why should I pay good money to make it?

So I didn't make myself a canning jar pump.  But, as so always happens, procrastination and/or patience paid off.  Because for Christmas, K-daughter happened to give me a canning jar pump dispenser.  Apparently, she knows me well enough to know that is exactly the kind of thing I would like!

Okay, except that--now that I finally had this long-desired object of canning-jar-joy-dom--I kept it empty on a shelf for a long time, contemplating.  As I mentioned already, we already have more than enough soap dispensers sitting around our sinks and cluttering up our closets.  Also, the jar she got me is a small (one-cup) canning jar, so it doesn't hold as much soap as some of the dispensers we already have in place.  So here I was, having gotten as a gift something I'd really wanted, but now I wasn't really sure what to do with it.

And then the sun came out.  And with the sun, inspiration broke.

The inspiration is:  sunscreen!  Yes, here, next to my canned pennies (destined for the credit union soon) and the canned washable crayons (for writing on my bulk-shopping cloth bags), sits my pump bottle of SPF30 sunscreen.

I have rosacea (side effect: could be detrimental to my self-esteem, although I haven't noticed problems in that area myself).  Because of this rosacea, I'm supposed to take extra care of covering my face with sunscreen and shade-providing hats.  With spring peeking around the corner, I'm soon going to be doing much more daytime running and biking and such, and now my sunscreen is conveniently right there on my dresser, a quick pump away from decorating the old schnoz and cheeks.  

And so, this canning jar pump is really the MiserMom version of Eeyore's birthday present:  a solution in search of a problem.   

"I'm very glad," said Pooh happily, "that I thought of giving you a Useful Pot to put things in."
"I'm very glad," said Piglet happily, "that thought of giving you something to put in a Useful Pot."
But Eeyore wasn't listening. He was taking the balloon out, and putting it back again, as happy as could be....