Any excuse to party

One of my favorite cookbooks that I used when I was growing up was a seriously socially dated 1960's book called, "To the Bride".  (I especially loved that my dad was the primary cook in the house and used its recipes more than I did).  It had advice on how to select tea towels (check the backstitching!) and how to make your home welcoming for your husband . . . and it also had this wonderful introduction to the desserts section:

A tiara to go with my purple dress.
Because I can.

The cookie jar is the most important part of a kitchen.  You can buy a cookie jar to match your kitchen, or plan your kitchen around the cookie jar.  

Do you see why I loved that cook book?

So,  we all know about people who go out and buy an outfit to wear to a party.   But me, I went out and found a party to go with my dress.  It's a purple dress, which I got for a dollar at a yard sale a few years ago.  I almost didn't buy it, because it goes with almost nothing else I own and I didn't have any good excuse to wear a formal-ish gown.  But my host daughter Y reminded me that I love making something out of nothing, and urged me to create the excuse. Hence, the Purple Dress Dinner.

Guests don't have to wear purple dresses, but they can if they want.
The can wear tiaras, too.

Any excuse to party, really.  Any excuse to bring friends and family together.  This year, I had the added excuse of vegetable extravaganza.  Please somebody, help me eat these vegetables before we move!!!!  My friends were super obliging.

Because I'm trying to empty out the fridge and freezer, we had a lot of odd concoctions that ended up working kind of surprisingly well.

For example:  frozen watermelon?  I sliced it into ice cube-sized pieces and we had watermelon water.  

And giant head of fennel?  I got the chance to try a recipe I'd been holding onto, awaiting the day that fennel would come my way.  I'd had some really yummy tandoori shrimp when I was at a math meeting, and so I'd looked up a recipe on the internet (I'm guessing the recipe is not in my dad's copy of  To the Bride), and saw that one of the ingredients was fennel.  Hence my waiting for my CSA to gift me.  Alas, the recipe was a tad short on measurements and proportions:

What is tandoori paste made of?
Mix together salt, cayenne, coriander, chili powder, garlic powder, dry mustard, ginger, turmeric, fennel, cumin, and paprika in a food processor. Add lime juice and yogurt when ready to make a paste; store in refrigerator. You can use it as a rub or marinade.

After dinner, we took a stroll through a nearby park
that has a lovely rose garden.  

My version came out !exciting!tangy!wow!   But what the heck, I added it to the mix of things my friends might want to nibble on . . . and it turned out to be a good nibble.  Also a good nibble: swiss chard salad.  Also, massaged kale salad.  Also, garlic scape pesto.  Also, quiche with escarole.  Also, deviled eggs (okay, so those weren't vegetables, but they were in my fridge).  Also, chocolate rhubarb cupcakes . . . which I totally recommend, by the way.  Oh, and naked cherry juice (left over from canning sweet cherries, no sugar added).

Roses are kind of over-rated in my opinion.
They're really pretty, but they don't all smell as sweet as
other roses (by any name).

That list does sound kind of fancy.  But my dress looks kind of fancy, too, and it was what I happened to have.  

Even more fun was the friends I brought together.  I've been trying to . . . how do I say this?  Diversify my portfolio of social capital.  That is, I've been trying to connect to my community in a lot of different ways.  And somehow this party reminded me of how I'm slowly succeeding.  I had a friend from my garden group, from my neighborhood, from the blogosphere, from my college, from my family, from a completely different part of the college . . . and I didn't even include the running/biking peeps, or my church-mates.  (Maybe next year).   Man, this party made me feel like I'm one of the luckiest people alive.

On the other hand, roses are photogenic.
And they happen to be around.  

One of the best things about our family starting the Special Dinner tradition  a bunch of years back is that it's freed us up to turn almost anything into a party.   Super heroes?  check.  Tax Day?  check.  Zoos?  party like an animal! 

So huzzah for my $1 purple dress.  And for living near a park that has roses bursting from the ground, and for vegetables that overflow my fridge, and for a bunch of fancy friends to celebrate all of the above with me.

Making David a napkin ring

A pair of my husband's old suspenders, about to be
reincarnated as napkin rings.

A few weeks ago, I went to visit my best friend from childhood.  We live very different lives now, despite our growing up so close.  (And still being close when we see each other, even after all these years, I should add).  One of the big differences is our relationship to money: it's tight for her, and is going to continue to be tight for a while.

Beginning the transition:  draw a name
on the future napkin ring.

My friend and her husband both have relatively lower-middle class jobs.   And my friend's income hasn't been constant the way mine has:  she took a couple of years off of work to care for a child with special needs.  That child is now starting college, and my friend is back at work as a secretary at a nearby university.  But the lost years of income are going to continue to be a big deal for my friend and her family.  Paying for college for both of her kids (even with the help of being employed by a university) will be tough, and she's looking at working for many years -- retirement is far in the future.  In contrast, my husband and I both over-saved for our two sons' educations; my husband is retired now and I'm financially able to retire today if I wanted to -- there are social and other aspects keeping me at my job now.

I don't want to minimize these huge life aspects.  I know they're massive.

Stitch over the ink using a button-hole stitch

At the same time, when I was visiting my friend, I kept noticing ways in which the spending between us was also hugely different. One of the most noticeable was that my friend had three cars for four people.  She lives in a suburban area designed for easy driving and hard walking, and so learning to drive is a crucial rite-of-passage for kids.  Her daughter really didn't want to drive, but she made her daughter learn anyway.  This is a huge contrast with my own beaten-up, 2001 Prius that my husband and I share; it's still the case that of the four of my children who've stayed local, only one drives and/or owns a car.  That's a big difference in expenses right there.

But also, there were many little expenses that were different.  Like, my friend uses paper napkins.  I haven't used those in forEVER, and I was struck by how flimsy and insubstantial they can be.  It gave me another reason to love my full-sized, thick cloth napkins at home.   And that isn't even about cost -- cloth napkins are just nice.  (My daughter -- the one who hangs out with friends who give her Tiffany bracelets because she was the only one in the clique who didn't have one, poor girl -- once observed, "The people who have cloth napkins are either rich people or frugal people".   yeah, that,)

Turn a strip into a ring.

There's something wonderfully hospitable and welcoming about named napkins, too.  My sister has a set of "family napkins" --- she's stitched the names of family members onto the napkins themselves.  She hosts week-long reunions for 30+ people at her place, and everyone gets their own napkin.   She's had her young nieces gaze at the well-worn napkins of older relatives, and remark in awe that "ooh, maybe someday I'll be here often enough that my napkin looks like that."   Having your own napkin, in the culture of my sister's reunions, is a mark of belonging.

In our family, it's not the napkins but the rings that get labelled. My kids do, every once in a while pull out the rings and reminisce over past visitors.  "Remember when Beth was in the house?  Oooh, I miss Ian!  Oh, that's right, the dog chewed J-son's napkin ring up!  I saw Y just the other day; she's taken her first set of boards".  The box of napkin rings is almost like a photo album, without the photos.

And getting a napkin ring of your own . . . well, that's a sign of welcome and acceptance into our clan.  It means you've broken bread with us often, and that we expect you're going to do it again and again.  When K-daughter saw that her friend David had gotten a napkin ring, she was so excited she whipped out her phone, took a picture, and texted him immediately.

So welcome to the Miser clan, David. It's good to have you at the table.

Miser Family update: Beauty and the Bug version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Family household.  This past week has showered us all with beauty and bugs.

The weather has given us hot, clear days that fade into crispy coolness after the sun sets, so that it's almost Byronesque:  We walk in beauty, like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all the aspect of delight meet in our aspect and our wanderings.  The sun is so hot of days that my solar dehydrator (a pile of screens and storm windows, carefully separated by scrap wood) had gone into overdrive.  I dried three gallons of cherries (which then fit into two quart jars), and then two quarts of cherry pits, and then four zucchini (a pint). 

And we baked ourselves, too.  The week started with a fun concert in our local park.  I-daughter got to sing at it, while K-daughter and friends and I provided living arches for A-child to run through: a human obstacle course set to music.  

There weren't many bugs out at the park, but Prewash is beset by bugs at home.  She's on her third round of antibiotics for a UTI, but even more, she's obsessed with flies that appear in our home this time of year.   What a laser pointer is to cats, flies are to Prewash.  Except that the flies provide a 3-D chase experience, which is highly entertaining for Prewash and for all the humans present.  As far as I can see, the flies are still perfectly safe, though.

But my husband, fortunately, seems to be un-beset.  He graduated from physical therapy!  They didn't give him a cap and gown, but they did give him a t-shirt.  So, good for him.  The rest of the week, he's traveled here and there.  For example, last night, he went to a Pete Buttigieg rally in New York City, that doubled (tripled?) as a birthday celebration for Buttigieg's husband and a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. 

Not that a four-year-old kid could ever bug a parent, but . . . I ended the week getting to spend extra time with my granddaughter. On Friday evening, I tossed her in the bike trailer and we did my city's Slow Ride, which is always a lot of fun.  And today she came over so she could get the heck out of her mom's hair help me take apart some bunkbeds with a ratchet wrench.  I always love a good session of wenches with wrenches!  And she's surprisingly effective with that tool.  Beautiful. I have to keep that one in mind!

Well, that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

A 10-minute app and an hour of power

Aside from the camera on my phone and the alarm clock, the app I use the most -- by far -- is my timer.  I have it set for 10 minutes, and I use that baby almost every day during the school year.

I use the timer as a calm-down-and-transition timer.   Often, just before I leave the office to head for home, I'll do a quick clean up of the office and then do a 10-minute mediation.  This little package of time, wrapped up with a bow, helps a lot with getting my head from spinning around with all the seemingly urgent things.  It gives me a way to appreciate the here-and-now of the outdoors, and to appreciate the coziness of my house once I get there.

I also use the timer to motivate me to start those dreaded tasks.  A referee report?  A memo?  There are big, nebulous tasks that I know will take a bunch of work and time, and just getting started on them is tricky.   So I break these up into nibble-sized chunks.  I write in my to-do list, "Ref report; 10 min & pf" (the "& pf" is short-hand for "and plan forward").   When I get to that item in my to-do list, I pull out my timer and start it.

Not my phone's timer.
I can't use my phone to take a picture
of my phone, apparently.

Then I start working on refereeing.  Maybe I need to read the paper.  Maybe I need to locate a related article.  Maybe I need to take notes, or start a LaTeX file.  Whatever it is, I spend ten minutes doing just that, and nothing else.   Usually by the time the timer beeps at me, I'm on a roll and have found something that makes me want to keep going . . . and that's exactly why I quit, right then.

Even though it's tempting to keep going until I hit a snag, stopping while I'm excited means that starting the project the next day is something I'm going to look forward to:  "oh, right, I just had to fix those spelling mistakes and point out the references to Smith's work!".  (Or whatever).  So, when the timer beeps, I stop working on that project.   I write "Ref report; 10 min & pf" on tomorrow's to-do list, and check it off of today's list.   The next day, I'm all ready to jump in to the spelling/Smith references.  Eventually, I get to the point where I don't need to limit myself to 10 minutes, and then the report is done.  Joy!

This summer, I've started something new that I'm kind of loving.  There's this long list of "someday" goals I've been carting around in my planner:  I really ought to get back to playing banjo.  I really should spend more time training Prewash, because she loves learning new tricks. I really should do more upper-body work.  I really should spend more time with friends, instead of futzing around by myself. Etc, etc, etc.

Well, with the kids out of the house and my summer schedule relatively wide open, I theoretically have time to tackle each one of these "should"s.   And at some point in early May, I had an inspiration:  Why not just bundle them all together, and spend 10 minutes on each?  So I decided on an order that made sense to me: starting with dog training is an easy, fun way to get started; doing a workout right before a stint of meditation is friggin' awesome, . . . that kind of thinking.  And so here's what my Hour of Power has looked like this summer.

• Take my evening meds (which I'm supposed to take about an hour before dinner)
• Training and treats with Prewash (this lasts 10 treats, not 10 minutes)
• Write to/invite a friend to something, spending 10 minutes max
• Ten minutes of cleaning something in the house
• Ten minutes of playing banjo
• Ten minutes of strength/stretching workout
• Ten minutes of mediation
• One piece of chocolate:  the reward.

I put the "invite a friend" thing in the middle because it's psychologically the hardest thing for me.  I really like the idea of reaching out to people, but the combination of thinking about my schedule and reaching out to a, y'know, person is a bit daunting.  I think that's the thing that's made the biggest happiness difference from this Hour of Power, though.  

I also want to say that a single piece of chocolate after ten minutes of meditation is intense.  It's so annoyingly sweet and filling.  Eating this one piece has helped me reduce the amount of sugar that I mindlessly eat at other times of day, paradoxically.

There's part of me that wants to say, "I wish I'd started doing this long ago", but I think that really the only reason I can do it now is lack of distractions during the rest of the day.  This is the first summer in a long time when I don't have to think about taking care of my kids or grading papers or responding to urgent deadlines.   The once or twice I've had a loaner kid this summer (that is, when I babysat for a friend), I reverted to sitting in a corner and reading a book in the evening, and didn't bother powering for an hour.  

Having said that, I am really appreciating this routine as a way to kick-start a whole bunch of healthy habits all at once.  

A-child uses a cordless drill for her first time

A-child holding a pair of bee condos

My next house has a paved patio out back, but no grass.  There is no yard at all.  I'm both dreading and eager for the challenge of figuring out how to compost my food waste when I can't just dump in on the ground outside my back door.  I'm also thinking a lot about my future role regarding flora and fauna . . . a native garden group that I've gotten heavily involved with has me rethinking a bunch of things about the birds and the bees and their connections (or not) to what sits around our homes.

A-child looks at a pair of wooden blocks.  

For example: honey bees.  I know they're having all kinds of problems; this year had a huge kill-off, unfortunately.  Several friends of mine keep honey bees -- one of my friends used to, until the township she lived in started spraying trees near her home with pesticides, and then her bees died off . . . sigh.

But I did not know until recently that honey bees are foreigners:  they're not at all native to the U.S.  And our domestic bees of many sizes and shapes, who serve important roles in our ecology, are also struggling.   In fact, they're struggling even more than they might have, because they have to compete with all the bossy honey bees that people keep introducing into various areas.

Apparently, native bees don't make honey, so that's why Winnie the Pooh lives in Europe and only visits America when we read books.  Also, native bees don't sting, and they don't live in hives.

Pilot holes where I wanted them.  

The best thing people can do for native bees is probably something like plant flowers or stop spraying poisons on the plants they visit.   But since I can't do the best thing in my new neighborhood, I did a tiny little thing that I was able to:  I taught my grand-daughter to use a cordless drill.

We used this drill, together with some old spare blocks of wood, to make bee condos.  (See this website for the official directions:
https://www.pollinator.org/pollinator.org/assets/generalFiles/Build-Bee-Condo.pdf )

Holding the drill with two hands. 

I drilled tiny pilot holes in the right places, and then switched to a larger drill bit so I could get that tutu-ed four-year-old doing her stuff.  She learned how to hold the drill -- yes, you have to put down the flower you picked, so you can hold the drill with both hands.  You also have to keep squeezing the trigger after the drill is all the way down, so that you can pull the drill out.

For the first few holes, I held the drill from the top and guided her, but by the end she could operate the drill on her own once we got it aligned, she could drill the entire hole herself and then pull the drill out.   Awesome.

Now A-child is super-excited; she's taking one of the bee condos to her own home.  She's convinced she's going to have honey in there despite my explanations.   Maybe she's got a little Winnie-the-Pooh inside her.

Miser Family Update: work and play edition

Life is hoppin' with richness and fullness here in the Miser family household, with work and play ka-ching-ing into our lives this week.

The week began with a fun birthday dinner for my youngest daughter, K-daughter.   Instead of making chocolate cake, I made chocolate cupcakes in some cast-iron muffin tins that I-daughter had scored for me for my birthday (from a yard sale, no less!).  We topped these with a candle holder that I made from a plastic cow that I'd been gifted at Christmas, together with a cordless drill my daughters had given me.  (I'm talented like that, y'know).  So this was a birthday of many past presents.



Speaking of being talented with tools, N-son texted me from school, where he's very much enjoying learning building maintenance.  He wrote:


I just made an N for my name.

Can you put it in the family letter?


I love that my kids like my mentioning them.  And I love his N!  This is a great way to play at work; it's fun to see N-son carrying on the great family woodworking traditions that my dad passed along to his three daughters.   Someday we'll see what N-son can do with a plastic cow and a candle.

J-son has just finished his first full week as a camp counsellor.  By Friday evening he was exhausted, and slept like a log.  When I talked to him on Saturday, I asked how he liked his job, and he immediately answered that he loves it!  I asked what it was he loves; he said, "The campers!"  He's in charge of a bunch of younger kids.  I said, "I bet they climb all over you and use you as a jungle gym", and he said, "all the time."  I repeat: it's so nice to see my sons enjoying their work.

Even my husband, who technically is retired, had a week of fun work.  He spent much of it up in Boston at a Chemical Engineering conference with his former coworkers, schmoozing and catching up on all the good gossip.

And me, I got the page proofs for our book, and my coauthors and I are diving deep into it, hoping to get feedback back to our publishers quickly so the book can keep moving forward.

I got to hang out with my daughters again later in the week; we went with a friend to see Mamma Mia, and at intermission we took awesome pictures that my daughter promised to send me BUT DIDN'T.   HEY, I-DAUGHTER, STEP IT UP!   Ooh, and then today K-daughter, A-child and I went to a local orchard and picked 30 pounds of cherries, while A-child sang happy cherry-picking songs that she invented as she sang.  Later today, I managed to get the cherries all pitted and either in the dehydrator or canned up . . . but now my fingers are all black from cherry juice.  Good thing we're not taking pictures now!  But life will be delicious in the months to come, thanks to the fact that sometimes you really can pull food right out of the air and put it into buckets.  Wow.

And in a truly delightful evening, we had the family that will be buying our house come over for dinner; we also invited the neighbors on either side of us.  So they all got to meet each other, exchange email and phone numbers, and discover that one neighbor makes the best vanilla cake ever.  It was a sweet get-together, really.

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our work/play adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.

Celebrate Juneteenth! (Black History Month pictures and sticky notes)

When I was growing up, I'd never heard of "Juneteenth".  That says a lot about my education -- how lacking and skewed it was.  Because Juneteenth is the "oldest known celebration of the ending of slavery in the United States".  Kind of a big deal, don't you think?



I don't know the best way to celebrate the day, except to be super glad that I live in a country where slavery is illegal, and to continue to speak against oppression, and to hug my kids.


A few years ago, my sons teased me into starting a "Black History Month" dinner (in February, not on Juneteenth).   Since printing out stuff and preparing for the dinner is something that takes a bit of lead time, I usually do it during the summer.    So here's an extra bit of Juneteenth celebration this summer: I'm sharing with you my Black History Month pictures, in case you want to do something similar yourself in February.

What follows below are documents that my family has used for a Black History Month themed dinner activity. It consists of photographs of notable African Americans, which we taped up all over our living room and dining room walls, and a set of sticky notes in random order, which we worked together to match with the corresponding person. Each photograph gets exactly three sticky notes: a name, and two interesting facts.

The files are large enough that I couldn’t upload them all at once, so there are five different files of photographs; each file has about 11 photographs interspersed with biographies, so if you print these out double-sided, the biography will be on the back of the photograph for your reference.




There are two sets of documents with clues that are supposed to go on sticky notes. To get the clues onto the sticky notes, I suggest

1. Print out the pages on regular 8.5x11” paper,
2. Attach 2x2” sticky notes over the clues, trimming the sticky notes on the top row to about 2 x 1.25” as appropriate,
3. Run the paper back through the printer, so the clues will print on top of the sticky notes.
4. If you use different colors for the top row, the middle row, and the bottom row, then each photograph will get one sticky note of each color.

Here are links to the files:

First set of photographs:  

Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Colin Powell, Katherine Johnson, Condoleeza Rice, Tracy Chapman, Scott Joplin, Charles R. Drew, Judith Jamison, Misty Copeland, John Hope Franklin

Second set of photographs:

Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Oprah Winfrey, Marshal “Major” Taylor, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Madame C.J. Walker, Bessie Coleman, Lewis Hamilton, LeVar Burton

Third set of photographs:

Duke Ellington, Maggie Walker, Martin Luther King, Leontyne Price, Dred Scott, Jessie Owens, Mae Jemison, Ida B. Wells, Spike Lee, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall

Fourth set of photographs:

Frederick Douglass, Jackie Robinson, Arthur Ashe, Booker T. Washington, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright, Barack Obama, Audre Lorde, Percy Julian, Etta Falconer

Fifth set of photographs:

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Florence Griffths Joyner, Alex Haley, Zora Neale Hurston, George Washington Carver, Ella Fitzgerald, Sidney Poitier, Muhammed Ali, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisolm

And here is a set of sticky note clues (all mixed up), and the rest of the sticky note clues.

And here are the answers to the first set of sticky note clues.