Good Eatin', Local Style

Even before T's diagnosis, our family was conscious of the kinds of foods we ate. Back then, though, we ate a vegetarian diet, with occasional lapses for Jack Stack BBQ and meals at friends' homes. But when we had to eliminate most forms of grain and gluten from T's diet, we went back to meat in our meals and joined the Oklahoma Food Co-op. I had read Fast Food Nation, and no way was I gonna eat just any meat! Besides, since we'd moved to a moderately rural area, we had become more aware of the struggles of small ranchers and farmers, and felt it was our reasonable duty to support local, small growers.

This past week our favorite farm was featured on the local news in a spot about buying local food as a hedge against bio-terrorism. (!) I gotta admit, bio-terrorism is really the last thing on my mind when I choose to buy local, but hey, if that's your issue, then fine. Mine is agri-bid-ness and the health costs we'll have to pay for things like FDA approved viral sprays for processed meats.

Do we buy any commercial, agri-bid-ness food? Yeah, sure. Everytime we eat out we do because there isn't a restaurant in this town that specializes in local food. And yes, we still buy many things, like frozen vegetables or my experiment with assembled food dinners, for convenience. I really tried the 100% alternative food scene, but with two very persnickity eaters in my home, I decided that a 50/50 split would save my sanity and preserve their lives. Besides, I'm really not into canning.

So check out the spot. David Lewis and his Goose Island Farm family are lovely, and it was fun to see them get a little publicity.

If this idea appeals, find yourself a farmer and pre-order that holiday turkey now. I'll bet you'll be impressed with the difference. But don't wait--someone may tag your turkey today!

Gobble-gobble!

spinning around, one foot nailed to the floor

I'm always like this while I'm waiting for something I know is coming my way. I flip and flop and can't seem to settle into a particular routine. I can't get productive. Maybe I've been thrown by the change in my routine. Last weekend was so strange. I was gone at crazy hours, we didn't go to church (gasp! I know...), we didn't eat together. I was exhausted, strung out on caffeine and antihistimines, and my feet screamed at me for three days. Sometime soon I expect I'll get my 'retail legs' back and we will become accustomed to this new routine, but until then I'll continue to feel as if I'm between places, lost somewhere between here and there, spinning round and round...there I was...here I go...there I was...here I go...

Maybe if I'm concrete about it, I'll feel like I'm actually doing something. Let's begin with a list, shall we? Here's what I did in the last 24 hours:

1. watched a little Battlestar Galactica to catch up on the last season
2. cooked/washed/put up (always)
3. laundry (catching up from my Lost Weekend)
4. did a panicked and dirty housecleaning after Randy tells me assessor will visit the house in three hours(!)
5. took old career clothes to consignment store (who am I kidding? I haven't been a size 10 in five years, and I'm not going to return to teaching soon) This eliminated about 50lbs of clothing I've continued to haul out of storage with the ridiculous hope that I'll drop 20lbs and become stylish again.
6. bought a goody for a friend
7. read all my regular blogs...and then some.
8. posted about five blogs entries
9. found my sage and citrus candle, and the candle warmer
10. let my daughter decimate my sticker stock so she could decorate the ba-hooey out of my wall calendar
11. decided that Franklin Covey is not going to get my money this year and that I need a different planner next year
12. decided that the new Gymboree line is far too boring to invest one penny into
13. decided that my life is superficial and boring and self-involved
14. decided that I am superficial and boring and self-involved
15. visited Hobby Lobby to complete Randy's Christmas gift
16. slowly, slowly stitched together some more squares for T's quilt
17. oh...and did a little bible study. I'm on day 3; I'm supposed to have day 6 done today.

Guess I better go, huh?

Entre Acte

This intermission is provided to you by the resigned and bemused rants of a woman submerged in 66K of words without a thought in her head...

Stuck In The Middle With You

Blessing

"Thank you, God, for Chicka-Chicka-Boom-Boom, and nature, and Daddy and Mommy and Tesla. The en--Amen."

100% Cheez Whiz

For the authentic, packaged in a pressurized tin can experience, I highly recommend That's Entertainment--the first movie. The subsequent 'movies' dug a little deeper and featured some more obscure and fascinating performances. But the first film--especially the Esther Williams segment--will blow the plastic cap off your processed cheez-whiz-o-meter!

My four year old is lovin' it.

Lisa Does a McSweeney

My blog friend, Lisa Samson, has decided to take on the Advanced Placement Reading List--she just doesn't know it as such. Instead she's called it "The Year of Reading Dangerously." And it's been great to hear the thoughts of an intelligent and fun grown woman give her take on all kinds of books many of us slogged through (or have forced others to slog through) in advanced high school or regular college lit courses.

But not only is Lisa a grown-up, she's a writer. And the point of her dangerous reading has been to (re)discover what makes the great writers great. Certainly, she's decided, those qualities are not what many editors would be looking for these days.

I recommend visiting her take on Heart of Darkness--which could have been given a McSweeney title, "A CBA Editor Responds to Mr. Conrad."

Happy Reading, folks.

Head Shoulders Knees and Toes

Went to the first employee crop this weekend. What fun. Once a month the new yob place locks its doors on a weekend night and lets its employees break loose. Ok, it's not like we get to roll around in the papers, but we do get to listen to our own music and get loud and eat! And oh yeah... get a little artsy-craftsy stuff done.

Here's something I did. I really wanted to celebrate my little girl. Still have to write my bit for it, but that's coming!

Freaky Friday

What can I say but ya gotta see this video. It's from the same guys who brought you the treadmill artistry of "Here It Goes Again."

Ok Go.

New Stuff

Since this is a blog (in part) about my artsy-fartsy ways, and you're reading it, you might be interested in some new stuff I put up at intertextual me.

Have fun. Or whatever.

Procrastinating

I'm supposed to be updating my Intertextual Me blog with a book review, but I just don't wanna. (Yes, I must be at least seven years old.)

Instead I began trolling all my craft blogs and thinking about sewing projects...which lead me to thinking how my sewing machine suddenly began snapping my thread every fifteen stitches. It's mighty annoying, let me tell ya. I was in the middle of a sudden burst of energy and enthusiasm for T's quilt, when whamm-o! snap! snap! snap! the thread kept bustin'. I'll give it another go tomorrow and fiddle around some more to see if I can fix it, but frankly, the machine hasn't been serviced since 1992, so I think it's due for a little TLC. And I think it's telling me so in no uncertain terms.

Meanwhile, I have some fabric cut from an old flannel sheet of ours that bit the dust last year. It's in pieces now waiting to be transformed into a winter nightie for the girl. And then there's the denim I bought to make an A-line, all purpose skirt for the fall/winter...and then there's also the assorted, with-the-Lord-there's-always-hope-they'll-get-done Christmas projects.

And meanwhile I'm coveting angry chicken's new machine. Just look at the cool little jacket she made for her little one! She's got a link to some seriously cool patterns for kids, too. Makes me wish I could forgo eating and sleeping for about 72 hours and whip some of these babies up!

Makes me wish I had a functional machine, too...

Ah well, with the scads of money I'll be raking in at my swanky new retail job, I'll soon be able to rehabilitate my rebellious Pfaff and maybe finish the jobs I've already started.

Adventures in Missing the Point

Usually this sort of title is followed by a snarky little rant on someone (else)'s cluelessness. However, today I realised that this phrase best explains my daughter's type of neuro-immune dysfunction.

Now, sequencing is hard for most of these kids. They miss out on all the typical temporal clues that other kids usually cotton on to by age four. For this reason, they also struggle with verb tense expressions. Action is usually expressed in present tense, even if it was well over two hours ago. eg: "I'm playing the computer!" spoken while she's jumping on the bed in our room. It's a little Dada-esque at our house.

As you can imagine, getting a story, even a simple explaination of what happened even two minutes ago, is not going to happen. You might get something out of her, but unless you were at the scene you couldn't say for sure when the described activity happened or in what order it happened--or (in my daughter's case) if it happened at all. I'm always amazed when I hear stories about a young child who helps the police by describing some event or person that passed, and think it's a wonder than any child can do that at all.

So this morning I got out a box of four step sequencing cards. The box says, "For ages 3 and up," so I figured we're in the right range. 4.75 years is the right time to begin for us. The cards are simple illustrations of everyday activities that require multiple steps, eg: dressing to walk in the rain, blowing out candles at a birthday party and sharing cake, making a card, etc. There are no words, but there are lots of visual clues about what happens first, second, third, fourth.

I made a poor choice with my first 'story,' but it did show me, quite obviously, T's deficit. I picked a set of pictures that show three girls taking turns crawling into a play tunnel and out the other side (see my picture, above). First of all, it was too complicated. Too many variables with the three girls, and object permanance challenges--it was just too much. But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was the tunnel. It was a rainbow of colors, but it was missing the red band where a red band ought to be in the color spectrum. Actually, it's there; it just looks very dark orange on the cards. So while I'm trying to get T to pick the first picture, she's protesting over and over, "The red! It's gone! The red! It's gone!" She could not have cared less about those girls, or which end of the tunnel they went into. They could have crawled to China for all she cared. The red band, where red ought to be, was gone.

And this, folks, is my life. Adventures in missing the point.

Imagine trying to teach your child to fold a t-shirt, and he only wants to poke his fingers through the hold he found in the hem. Or telling your daughter to pack away the stryofoam peanuts, but she's too hung up on the fascinating shapes to even begin the task.

People think it's amazing that my girl can read, or spell, or that she knows the color spectrum by heart and the names of all of the planets. But she can't figure out what's most important in a situation when presented with visual clues. So while she's supposed to be telling me if the boy blowing out the candles or the mommy lighting the candles comes first, she's fixated on the boy in the picture who looks happy. Or his stripey socks...or whatever catches her fancy.

So sit back, close your eyes, and recall a recent situation--perhaps one with your own child--where you were trying to explain a story that illustrated a principle or a feeling or an idea, and your own beloved kept harping back on the shoes you were wearing or the earring in the other guy's ear or the fact that it happened before lunch...until you finally blow. "THAT'S NOT THE POINT!!!"

Yup. That's my life.

We're gonna work on this.

Yob

I gotta yob.

I needed one, as I do not see any publishers breaking down my front door for a writing contract yet. So yeah, I'm back in the workforce, official-like. It's a part-time yob and I don't have any take-home work, so hooray for me! Don't know when I'll see my hubby much, as I will be alternately childcare hours with him. At least we'll be able to afford a babysitter when we do have an evening together.

And I'm so excited to get out and do something. Maybe I'll lose a little weight while I'm at it. {Ha!}

Wanna know where I'm working? Check out their website.

Come on by and see me if you can!

(By the way, that's Ali Edwards' great studio in the shot above. I only wish I had all that cool stuff!)

Material Comforts #1 and #2

Gelato. Before I tried gelato, Ben and Jerry's SuperFudge Chunk was a close to ice cream heaven as I got. But gelato takes me thiiiiiis much closer to a divine encounter.

Had chocolate today. Ate it with a couple of dear girl friends I don't see often anymore. It was lovely. They were lovely. We nibbled away our tiny cups of heaven with our bitty pink spoons, and when we finished, we declared that it was 'good.'

The funny little girl behind the counter tried to convince us that there was no dairy in gelato. Huh? No dairy in chocolate gelato? I don't think so. (But, according to Wikipedia, this may be true with some fruit flavors.)

So often I've heard or over-heard employees/waiters/'help' earnestly and insistently tell me or someone else something that's patently false. Or at the very least, a misinformed half-truth, like the gelato claim. I think folks feel they can say whatever they want, and who's to contradict them? Certainly not me. I'm a mouse, really. But my sweet friend, with her supersweet girly voice spoke up: "I can't believe there's no dairy in there. No dairy in chocolate?!" She's the best, my supersweet friend. Why could I not have said as much? Because if I'd have said it the way I was thinking it, my thought would have snapped out of my mouth and bit the little girl on the nose. So I keep my mouth closed and no one gets hurt.

Material Comfort #1: gelato.
Material Comfort #2: an honest girl friend who speaks as if she possesses all innocence.

What was your material comfort of the day?

With the time you have...

What will you do with it?

Like you, probably, I get too caught up in my "wants" and the distractions of our very affluent, consumer-driven American lifestyle. I don't have much money to do anything about it. And thank God I've got a husband who has a visceral horror of carrying debit on credit cards, or I might have indulged my micro-obsessions too often.

So each year when September 11th comes around again on the calendar, I find myself asking the question, "What's really important? What will I do with the time that's left to me on this earth?" I actually think of this often throughout the year, but the questions become more powerful, more present on this date.

As a Christian, I found Will Samson's Amos For Our Times convicting. It's easy for me to see that the poor and the marginalized need my attention and care. And too often I feel our care of these people is relagated to those in the church who 'take care of that stuff'--the semi- and believers who take on charities and missions, and leave the rest of us untouched by the ugliness often inherent in that work. It's not right to be a checkbook Christian.

But, coming back to September 11th and rereading the accounts of people who were in New York, I also wonder about my response to the wealthy. What of the rich man who died that day in the World Trade Towers? Would I, if I were a rescue worker, have thought twice about rushing in to aid him? Sure he's had his days of martini and scotch power lunches on the corporate account, his padded income that thinks nothing of the costs of everyday dry cleaning, and gym and country club memberships, of his driver and his doorman, and the two week vacation in Belize that his wife begged him for after years of deferred vacation days...so maybe he's had his fun already, got his share of the goodies already.

Would I run to rescue of the rich man in the ditch? In the burning building?

Looking up, from my little middle-class life, I see so much self-absorbtion, so much excess and yes, decadence, among the very monied class that disgusts me. And I realise that my prejudices against the wealthy are as powerfully destructive as the presumptions others have about the poor.

The government's assumption that, statistically speaking, we're among the "wealthiest" Americans makes me wonder where these feelings come from--if I'm so "wealthy" then why am I so hung up the wealthy? This game, this quasi-Marxist game of Rich Americans vs. Poor Americans, sickens me and leads others down paths of divisive obsessions about the redistribution of wealth. While I completely believe Will's take on Amos and feel that the contemporary American church will have much to answer for the questions it asks, I also think we can unwittingly nurture a contempt for "our enemy" the wealthy. And you know what scripture says about loving your enemy.

My challenge is always not to look up to wealthy and wish I were them, or to look down at the overwhelming needs of the poor and feel helpless to help them--but to eliminate my vision of the abstract and arbitrary spectrum we've created, the little spaces we occupy on the money chain. Instead I must think simply of how I must lay down my agenda and obsessions, my prejudices and preferences, so I can hear what Jesus has to say to me. I know He's trying to get through to me, but I shy away too often, say I'm busy, say I'll be right back and then He'll have my full attention.

But maybe I won't get back. Maybe I need to stop right now and listen. I don't know if this is my last day or last hour. And it is important, this time I have now, this little moment cupped in my hand. Rich man or poor woman...in small ways or large, I owe it to you to give you my best.

(photo courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Company)

Borekh ha-shem

It's Yiddish for "Blessed be The Name."

I'm thinking about the many beautiful things in my life, things I don't take for granted, but neither do I speak about them often. I don't want to sound superstitious, but I do think I've done myself a disservice for remaining silent. I'm not a naturally bouyant person, but neither am I a total drudge. Unfortunately, I think I come off that way too often and I become the kind of person people don't warm to quickly, don't think of when they want a chat.

So I think I'll be ac-cent-u-ate the positive, at least once a week. I need to name my blessings.

Flush it away!

Have I told how crazy the girl's been lately? Screaming, kicking, slamming of doors...you name it, it's been happening here.

It started badly when were were watching some video of T's colicky crying days from ever so long ago, and the four year old T began crying, too. No, I don't have a social story for that one, but I guess one will be in the wings soon. But until then, that video's out. Soon after this episode T ran outside to play and then somehow ripped some skin from her finger...

As you parents of spectrum kids know, most of our kids would promise to sit motionless (no stimming allowed!) in Grand Central Station at rush hour than perform the simple act of showing a boo-boo to Mommy. Oh yes, we had the screaming terrors which only escalated when I tried too see said boo-boo. And a band-aid wouldn't do. We had to have painter's tape wrapped around the thing because it was obviously an '11' on a 1-10 Likert scale of trauma. So I taped her hand, and gave her tissues, and re-taped her hand, and washed her face with a washcloth...and about an hour later we were both a little more sane. I still don't know what the supposedly horrific gash looks like.

The rest of the day wasn't much better...until the BMs. Yes, the BMs. Two giant poops and a night's sleep later, she was a reformed child. Mostly.

Tomorrow: T's first 'story'. Hurray!!!

September Blues

September Song

September is a phantom month, incorporeal--not quite summer and not quite fall--just passing through the way a ghost does. I shiver and feel anxious. Something is there, but I can't say what. It makes me ambivalent about my time, my plans.

I'm uppity, lost. Want to drive around, want to go somewhere, do something--inaugurate my two-hours of freedom with an event of significance--but I'm not inspired by a destination. I'm just waiting. I'd only drive around in circles.

The fall clothes catalogues that arrive in my mail don't help settle me, either. The long cable-knit cardigans and the leather skirts and boots seem absurd, a vicious taunt to those of us watching thermometers that still register solidly in the high eighties. I want the summer to pack up and leave so I can clean the house (and my head), replace the sheets, and get ready for the next guests who come this time with their hats and their coats and their corduroy zip-zip-zip pants.

Even my daughter feels the slow turning and begins to anticipate what isn't here. She finds all the scarves in the closet and talks about snowball fights. Yes, honey, I would love to have a snowball fight with you. But disembowelling the living room pillows for their stuffing is as close to snow as we'll get for awhile. It's fun, but it won't make winter arrive any faster.

So I'm finishing this and returning to my other ghost, my story. That, too, seems to have lost its direction, so I've printed it up and am re-reading it straight through for some clues to its shape. Somehow, I'll get through it, or it will get through to me, and we'll step out together into October.