Still Pretty Good

For all the wonderful things that happened in 2014, there was a hint of mourning over the end of our beloved book sale as we once knew it.  The massive once a year weekend event was split into four smaller quarterly book sales without a bag day.  After attending the book sale together for seven consecutive years, Kellaura, Amber and I refrained from participating in any of the book sales last year in silent protest.  Friday night, we were back.  We tried out one of the lesser book sales and it was still pretty good.  

There’s a certain joy in spending the evening in a room of strangers who also decided that the best way to spend a Friday night was at a library book sale in a church gymnasium.  We weren’t in a cavernous convention center, but the eighties music blasted by the high schoolers getting their service hours created a cozy, festive atmosphere.  It was still possible to find things like a fat, old French-English dictionary and a book of French poetry and decide, yeah, this is totally worth $4.  For all the things we thought we lost when they changed the book sale last year, we were able to keep the best part:

The big reveal is always the very best moment of a book sale.  Margaritas, Mexican food and taking turns showing all our finds rounded out a near perfect evening.  Two car windows getting smashed while we were in the restaurant was a far from ideal ending, but as Kellaura pointed out, it is a book sale.  Anything can happen. 

Here at St. Cloud’s

Trent recently heard a story on NPR about the overly sterile environment in which “we” live and the resulting surge of allergies.  Hands are washed, floors are mopped with Lysol.  Dishwashers sterilize dishes every night. 

I’m rereading The Cider House Rules.  In the book, Dr. Larch, head of the St. Cloud’s orphanage, spends his nights writing A Brief History of St. Cloud’s.  Every entry begins either “Here at St. Cloud’s…” or “In other parts of the world…”

In other parts of the world, people develop allergies because their immune systems don’t know how to deal with a lack of germs to fight.  Here at our house, there is zero chance of that happening.

Garden Party Time

When we had our Christmas lights strung throughout our house for Tate’s Frozen party, we brought all our potted plants inside for an expected freeze.  The droopy lights and greenery made Trent and I realize that we largely want to live in a sidewalk café.  Within a few weeks, we removed part of the railing of our porch and added a path.  Trent picked up the flagstones about a year ago from a house in our neighborhood that was getting rid of them; they’ve been in the garage waiting for something ever since. 

The final touch (for now) was adding the lights.

It has opened up a previously underutilized section of yard to a multitude of outdoor dining and party possibilities.

17 Highbrow Street

In our daily life, we only use cloth napkins.  The reason is that we are super fancy.  The ultimate goal is to become the couple who live on Highbrow Street in The Great Muppet Caper.*  Weeknight dinner are strictly black tie and we always have sorbet to cleanse our palates between our soup course and our…?

Yeah, actually we had soup every night last week, and not because Lent was starting.  We’ve just been eating an excessive amount of soup, and not necessarily decadent soup.  It’s a lot of the same vegetable soup repeated weekly.  The post-service “simple soup dinner” at church on Wednesday was about ten clicks above the lentil soup awaiting us on Thursday night.

But we do use cloth napkins because I *hate* buying things for the purpose of throwing them away.  It’s environmental, but also strongly driven by one of my most influential shopping trips.  I once went to Target and purchased diapers, wipes, toilet paper, and cat litter:  The bill was $100.  That’s the limit.  I don’t care if napkins are a thousand for a penny; I don’t want to dump one more penny in the garbage.

Back when school started I realized that I really needed to put napkins in lunches, but didn’t want to start buying napkins just so they could travel to the school trash can.  Kindergarten and preschool boys do not use napkins.  If they’re not going to use them anyway, they might as well be cloth napkins.

So I made lunchbox napkins.  I’ll admit, I did ponder over how weird that was.  But I quickly realized that if the boys had seen Captain America napkins in a store, they would have begged for them.  Put Captain America on anything and they will ask for it.  And really, sometimes you just have to stick your head up and say, this is how we do it in our family.

The only way one gets unfolded at school is if I wrap it around a cookie. 

Tate, with his glimmery-laughy-sneaky look, informed me that he never uses his napkin at school.  Of course not!  Wonderful!  Success!  I will use the money I would have spent on them not using napkins and use it to buy cheese or quail’s eggs.  Or more soup.

 

*Holy cow, watching that scene from The Muppet Movie makes me realize that Holly totally reminds me of Miss Piggy right now.  I’ll bet the Fabulous Baseball Diamond that she shimmies up a drainpipe by the time she’s two.

Too Quick to Judge

One day you’re at the gym, laughing about the signs posted around the track:

Two days later you realize you’re on a walk with a diet coke and a handful of Girl Scout cookies. 

Strawbs

We recently had our first strawberry picking event of the spring.

We went with our friends who moved to Houston last summer from Minnesota, so picking strawberries in February was a novelty for all of us.  They’re accustomed to snow in February, we’re accustomed to waiting to pick berries until March. 

Holly completely understood what was happening.  She carried her bucket, did her best to pick the red strawberries, and as expected, shoved a fair amount into her mouth in the fields.

That was the moment when it went from fun! to heavy bucket, let’s eat lunch.

Strawberry (the beloved bear) did get momentarily discarded in favor of the real thing.

Every year, I imagine what we will do with all the strawberries; his year, I could almost taste a fat pink wedge of strawberry cake.  Then I tried to go to the bathroom by myself, which is code for locking myself in the bathroom for five seconds in order to check my email in peace.  When I returned to the children, I found this:

I think we ate 9 lbs of strawberries in three days.

Atlas

If you are a book preservationist, please close your ears.

Years ago I purchased an old atlas from a thrift store.  It totally falling apart and held together with rubber bands, so I bought it for a few dollars because I knew I could use it for something.  Over the years the covers became advent calendars and various pages were turned into cards.  Last week I decided to really get down to business and cut apart most of it to make a garland.

Holly, surveying the destruction

When I got to the page for Arctic and Antarctic regions, I noticed that Antarctica was not so much a charted continent as a white blob.  Upon further inspection, I noticed that Shackleton’s furthest south coordinates were marked near the pole which means that the atlas was published prior to Amundsen and Scott reaching the pole in 1911 and 1912, respectively.  I feel pretty sick about cutting apart the atlas now, but at least I saved that page to frame. 

I think the maps got Holly into exploration mode.  To infinity and beyond!

Yard Work

The best part of last Saturday was all of it.

Sunshine, beautiful weather, the family all together cleaning up the yard-

and getting blackberries into the ground-

and driving to Starbucks to get used coffee grounds for our compost pile and using the phrase “black gold” over and over as we spread compost around the plants.

Tate found this in the grass-

a piece of the hardtack Trent made a few weeks ago.  It tasted pretty much the way you would expect a fifteenth century sailor’s rations to taste, excluding the lack of saltwater pollution.  I think the squirrels are eating it; we did not.

A few years ago Trent and I found out a life changing fact from a neighbor:  you can make popcorn in the microwave by putting popcorn kernels into a brown bag and stapling the top.  We are both still amazed by this fabulous knowledge, but when we try to share it with other people, no one is interested.  Then there’s our collective favorite movie, The Prestige.  No one else wants to rave about The Prestige on a weekly basis?   Really?  Well, want to hear about us working in the yard?  Ha, you just did.

Doing the Impossible

Last weekend, I got in the car by myself on Saturday morning, drove to Austin, and went to Kate’s.

Is Kate’s THE place to be, the hottest spot in Austin, Texas, the entire USA, the world, the universe?  Possibly.  It was for me last weekend.  Pedicures, fancy coffee, talking books and games with her family, cheese trays, petting the sheep and chickens and dogs in her backyard, and meeting her friends for drinks AT EIGHT O’CLOCK AT NIGHT!  As in, it was 8 *PM* and we were wearing lipstick and drinking cocktails.  Looking around in amazement, anyone?  Yeah, we did that. 

  

Veering into sorority t-shirt friend quotes here, but my bff might know me better than I know myself in order to plan the perfect weekend to give us time together and to remind me that I’m still a person, however smudged the line between person and mother has become.

And next we all need to visit because it’s only fair that the rest of the family get the full experience.  Austin 2015!