Some Pig

Domesticity and Other Urban Myths

Having spent the weekend thus far cleaning and tidying and laundering and drying and folding and cooking and washing, how is it that my house is now messier than it was at the beginning of the day on Saturday? How does that happen?

***

I know a great deal of the blame lies squarely at the feet of those ingrates known collectively as my loving family.  Even the damn cats are incapable of eating their damn kibble without having half of it wind up outside the bowl.  If I could just somehow prevent all these creatures from existing and doing things and needing stuff, stuff like food and sleep and regular entertainment, then this housekeeping gig would be a breeze!

***

I tried to make baked beans this weekend, and they have been singularly uncooperative about this whole venture.  There is nothing quite like a pot of homemade baked beans, slow-cooked until they are juuuust on the edge of falling to pieces into a delicious, molasses-tinged mush.  Except that, even after twelve hours of boiling and simmering and slow-roasting them yesterday, the little beany bastards just Would. Not. Bake.  I cooked them for another two hours today, and they are grudgingly entering the neighborhood of edible.  Now, if I were trying to cook some kind of complicated souffle-cum-terrine thingie requiring eighteen separate stages and fifty-two ingredients, I would chalk it up to experience and be over it.  But this is baked beans we're talking here - the most complicated element of the whole recipe involves boiling.  How the effity eff did I manage to eff up BOILING?  That's discouraging.

***

There's a woman in the community with whom I have struck up a mom's friendship.  She is one of those multiply-talented, uber-organized sorts who do all the things I think I should do but can't be arsed to get off the internet long enough to do - volunteer, garden, make crafts, practice her conversational French and so on.  Add to that the fact that she has three girls, the younger of which are twins, and she does all of this with THREE sets of hands to occupy and observations to listen to, and, well, you can see why I am simultaneously in awe of her and embarrassed to let her know how poorly run and shoddily raised my family is.

Today I took the girls to church for the annual gathering-in service (We're Unitarians.  We take the summers off.).  Unfortunately for all Some Pig family members involved, it was an intergenerational service and I was outnumbered, since Warren was at home on an unavoidable conference call.  If there is one thing I have learned over the past six and one-quarter years, it's that my elder daughter does not handle forced stillness and compliance well, whether it be at grocery store or house of worship, particularly when low blood sugar is involved.  Worse yet, I had to cope with being man down in the situation, which meant that the usual divide-and-conquer tactic was unavailable.  I took the girls to a space in the back of the church where they could sulk, whine, or run about at will and proceeded to hiss at both of them to BEHAVE or we were leaving RIGHT NOW, and no, I didn't care if there was cake for social hour, JUST TRY ME; all of which was about as effective as you might imagine.  About ten minutes later, my friend plopped down on the adjacent couch with one of her younger girls, a tense expression on her face, and proceeded to inform said child that "I am THIS CLOSE to taking you home RIGHT NOW.  Is that what you want?!?" I have never seen her even come close to losing her cool ever, but her voice at that moment conveyed the exact same note of frustration and impatience that I was feeling.

I found this immeasurably cheering.

***

In one of my passages through the house, I saw that the cat's scratching post has been turned into an impromptu tiara stand without my knowledge.  Some of my puzzlement about how my house can remain so cluttered despite 24 hours of effort has been clarified.

How About an End-of-Celebrations Celebration?

You will have to excuse me if I'm a little out of sorts.  Starting this evening, I am going to two end-of-school-year functions, two birthday parties, a dance recital, a moving-up ceremony, and a strawberry festival, all taking place in four different towns spread between two different states. In related news, this is going to be a damn short post.

Naturally, all this has to take place during what is always a busy and stressful time for me professionally, as well.  I have a zillion kids breathing down my neck wanting to know what their grade is after not doing a damn thing about it for the past nine weeks.  After multiple warnings that today was the last day I would accept makeup work, I nearly went postal on the kid who came to me WITH HALF AN HOUR LEFT IN THE DAY and asked, "Is there anything I can do to bring my grade up to a B?"  FROM A D MINUS, MIND YOU.  [Note to the Increase Teacher Accountability lobby:  If *I'm* being held more accountable for how my students perform, do I get to hold the KIDS more accountable as well?  As in, can I point out to kids like the young scholar described above that HE HAS HAD A D MINUS ALL FRIGGIN' YEAR and waiting until 1:30 on the last makeup day of the quarter to ASK me what he needs to do is WHEN IT'S CLEARLY LISTED ON OUR HANDY GRADE REPORTING PROGRAM is a little IRRESPONSIBLE, not to mention TOTALLY DISRESPECTFUL OF MY TIME? Thanks!]

But I digress.  Where was I? Oh yes, time, comma, complete lack thereof.  Let me say, as a woman who works full-time outside the home and then has all the usual mom-and-wife duties, I am not equipped to handle all these outside social responsibilities.  I will freely admit I am not one of those women who can hold down a job, maintain a lovely home, keep the kids entertained with enriching and stimulating activities, nurture a social life and take classes on the side for a second master's degree.  In fact, if the kids get some kind of food items in their lunchboxes and we all leave the house wearing clothes, that day counts as a win in my book. Adding all this end-of-year hoopla to the daily routine just tips the scales from "barely getting by" to "epic fail".  Oh, sure, the end-of-kindergarten potluck sounded like a good idea back in April, but it SUCKED when I was standing in the grocery store today at late-oh-five trying desperately to think of something to make for said potluck (green salad, if you care).  Aaaand for the cherry on the cake, the girls' preschool tends toward the hoity-toity side, which means that at least half of the mothers in attendance at any school event are part of the Pilates-and-lattes crowd, which means I'll get to sit with all these impeccably groomed and effortlessly stylish moms as we eat their elaborate, 100% homemade gourmet creations and listen to them talk what a GREAT time they had in Mexico, the kids just LOVED it, while I nod and smile and have nothing in common with them. [Another aside: I have noticed that the Pilates moms are all frighteningly happy and smiley ALL THE FRIGGING TIME.  This only stands to reason.  I'd be ECSTATIC, too, if I could outsource pretty much everything about my life except for getting my kid to school in time to meet my other mom friends at the gym and then go out for coffee.] And what the hell is up with all the end-of-year events, anyway?  I don't remember ANYONE getting all bent out of shape about the last day of school when I was a kid; on the last day of school, the teacher handed you your report card and your eight million worksheets and potato-stamp art projects and you vamoosed.  Now we have to go watch our kids mumble through a bunch of songs and get a certificate for existing for the year and act like that's a major accomplishment! Gah!

All right. I just spent the last free half-hour I'll have for the next couple of days venting so I won't actually up and strangle the first nicely groomed and well-organized mother who crosses my sight tonight.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a salad to assemble, along with some teeth to gnash.

Is This Why My House Looks the Way It Does? Naah. Couldn't Be!

Right now I am avoiding doing what I should be doing, which is picking up around here.  I do not know why every room in my house needs picking up all the time.  Buddha knows I shouldn't NEED to go work out with a trainer, given the fact that I can't walk through the house without bending down to pick things up that have been left on the floor, or reaching up to get the broom or the dustpan, or twisting at the waist to gather up random small objects that have been scattered hither and yon.  Sheesh, I should be Jillian friggin' Michaels her own shredded self!  And yet my house STILL looks as though it's been trashed by Visigoths on their way to the gates of Rome in 476 AD - SHORT Visigoths, that is; Visigoths who stand about yea high and have a distinct predilection for items that are purple and pink, plus a possible unhealthy obsession with catnip toys.  Come to think of it, they do seem to have a penchant for undoing everything I've done, or even undoing it as I'm in the process of getting it done.  Here I'm thinking about how they come screaming into my room as soon as they sense I'm actually making my bed properly for the first time this week, instead of just hauling the sheets and blankets up tight and calling it good.  For some reason, they interpret "making the bed" to mean "having Mommy fling the covers back so we can jump up and down on the mattress, followed by having her cover us with the sheets so we can roll around yelling, 'I can't see! I can't see!  Mommy, lie down on me and pretend to go to sleep!  I'm a giggling bed, Mommy, lie down on the giggling bed!', thus completely disheveling the whole bed so it looks worse than when she started." 

I don't know where they picked up THAT habit.

I also don't know why things don't get put away when they should.  After all, it's not like I saw the cat curl up on the clean laundry and thought to myself, I should put away those folded towels.  But the cat's sleeping on them!  How can I disturb the cat when she looks so nice and comfy?  Plus she's had it rough lately with the kitten constantly jumping on her head and chasing her around.  Poor old Molly.  I'll put the towels away later.

But look at her!  How could I disrupt her day when she looks like this:

And this:

The day is yet young.  I can put the towels away later and sweep now.  But why sweep up the crumbs when the girls are just going to want a snack soon anyway and then I'll just have to do it all over again?  Might as well wait til after they've eaten, and meanwhile, I'll just put away all the loose magazines that are lying on the coffee table, but, oops, there's this article I want to read in this one, so I'll just give it a quick scan, and then I can put all the magazines away at once, oh, hey, wait, here's that old copy of Cooks Illustrated with the recipe I wanted to try in it, so I have to leave that magazine out so I can make a shopping list, which means I need a pen, and where is the notepad I had out?  I should go find that now while I'm thinking of it and, whaddya know!  Here's where I left my coffee mug!  I'm going to go heat up my coffee and... now, what was I doing again?

Could that be why my house looks the way it does?  

I think I like the Visigoths theory better.

PS Why yes, I folded those towels on Thursday, as a matter of fact, and I took the pictures of the cat just now on Saturday.  What are you implying?

Practically Perfect In Every Way

Happy 2010!  The noughts are now all for naught (hee!) and it's time for the annual exercise in futility known as making New Year's resolutions, which is a fancy way of saying "sh!t you think you're going to do but you really won't".  I don't usually make resolutions since I am so fully self-actualized that I don't need to change much (HAH), but this year there are a few, minor things about me that could bear just the slightest amount of tweaking to bring me closer to perfection.  Here forthwith are my - let's not call them "resolutions," let's call them "focus areas."

I thought about sharing my resolve to continue not giving a tinker's damn about BlogHer, for one, but that seemed like picking the low-hanging fruit. So my first focus area isn't a resolution as much as a reluctant acknowledgment of the obvious, to wit, I have got to stop indiscriminately shoving foodstuffs in my gob just because they're right in front of me.  Yeah.  The recent holidays did not see me exercising much self-control in the gullet department.  My students are of an age where their parents no longer manage the teacher thank-you gift selection, but some of them still feel compelled to give their hardworking pedagogues something... which usually translates to homemade treats, most of which are made according to the philosophy that sweeter is better.  Most of the goodies are so sweet that they're capable of causing Type II diabetes by skin contact, to the point where even a dedicated sweetivore like yours truly gets sick of them.  However, I will make an exception in the case of something a student of mine calls "Mom's White Chocolate Crunch," or as I've renamed it, "snackin' crack".  UH.  MAH.  GAWWD.  Seriously.  I will give you the recipe at the end of this post, and then I am going to have to password protect it from myself because I CANNOT. STOP. EATING IT.

While we're on the topic of general health and well-being, I hereby resolve to deal with getting new contact lenses, and this time I swear on a stack of - whatever atheists swear on, copies of Atlas Shrugged? - that I will actually dispose of the disposable contact lenses when they are supposed to be discarded, instead of doing what I usually do, which is to wear one pair for the better part of a month or until everything has a halo of blur around it and I can't open my eyes completely, whichever comes last.  Really, giving a stingy Yankee an object that is supposed to be thrown away when it is still perfectly good is just too much to expect, yanno?  But before I can follow through on this resolution, I am going to have to make an actual appointment with the actual optometrist to get an actual checkup, which is going to suck because I have to squish in all my appointments in the forty-five minutes I have between the end of the school day and pick-up time at preschool.  However, I am determined that this shall not deter me from protecting my ocular health!  Plus I have only one and a half pairs left of the year's supply of contacts I bought eighteen months ago, and no one will sell me lenses without a valid prescription. 

Next up!  I hereby resolve to do a better job of maintaining my friendships.  Here I'mma lookin' at YOU, Toasty.  As an introvert, I tend to crawl into my shell on weekends after a long week of working, coaching, and child rearing. The weekends are also my only block of concentrated time when I can do the weekly five loads of laundry, ignore the huge pile of correcting I've lugged home, cook an actual meal or two and maybe pick up in the aftermath of Hurricanes India and Celeste.  But no more shillyshallying!  I promise to make plans with other humans beings to whom I am not related by blood or marriage and, like, do stuff-type things with them.  Like... things.  I'm not sure what.  But it will be fun!

On a related note, I plan to have much more sex with Warren - not because I love him dearly and he is a wonderful person who wants me to be happy, but because by doing so, I will have a lot more success sweet-talking him into letting me out on my own recognizance once in awhile to fulfill the vow made above.  Remember, ladies (and men too), an orgasmic husband is a happy husband, and a happy husband is a more easily manipulated husband!!

I was going to make some boringly predictable resolutions about my professional life along the lines of being more organized, challenging my students' intellects, keeping up with paperwork and on-line grading more consistently and all that arglebargle, but, screw it.  Instead I plan to cultivate the persona of the brilliant-but-daffy, lovably-absentminded professor who can't possibly be expected to bother with record keeping and gradebook updating and all that administrivia.  After all, it's far easier to set the bar low and then exceed expectations than it is to set the bar high and then continue to live up to them!

... and on that note, I went to post that recipe and I realize that it's not where I thought it was.  Or anywhere else, for that matter.  So you will have to ring in the new year white-chocolate-crunchless.  But no matter; in my improvement-free world, no one cares!  Welcome to the new decade!

It's Worth The Trip*

Today at the playground, Celeste invented a role-playing game.  Under her direction, I would "drive" up to the imaginary take-out window where she would ask me, "Do you want coffee and Munchkins, Mommy?"  Then she would hand me my order and say, "There you go!" after which I would "drive" away, before starting the whole routine over again.

This brings several thoughts to mind:
1) What does this say about my parenting?
2) What does this say about Ceecee's future career aspirations?

I'm going to gloss over the other role-playing game, where we "drove" to the grocery store to buy dinner, which consisted of macaroni and cheese and hotdogs, and nothing else.

* Extra credit to those of you who get the reference

Everything I Need To Know I Learned From "The Brady Bunch"

Once again, I tried to half-ass my way through life and got totally caught out.  Take this as a cautionary tale:

So you know that episode of The Brady Bunch where one of the kids puts the wrong soap in one of the appliances and it spews suds all over the kitchen? 

Well, we had a dishwasher full of dishes that we couldn't wash because we're out of dish detergent.  It's ninety degrees and ninety percent humidity around here, and anything food-related left out for any length of time starts to smell, even just the rinsed dishes in the dishwasher.  So to heck with it, I figured.  I squirted in just the teeniest-tiniest dollop of regular dish soap, turned the dishwasher on, and took India to swim lessons.

Then I came home and found a huge puddle of suds on the floor, dangerously close to the computer tower that sits under the desk in the kitchen.  I opened the dishwasher to find it FULL of suds.  Ran the dishwasher through the second half of the cycle - still sudsy.  Ran it through the short wash - still sudsy.  Finally I just opened the door and dumped a couple mixing bowls of water over the remaining suds, which seems to have done the trick. 

I always thought that overflowing-suds thing was just a plot device.  Serves me right for ever doubting the wisdom imparted by The Brady Bunch.  On the other hand, our dishes are really, really clean... as is the floor right in front of the dishwasher. 

Let's not tell Warren about this, mmmkay?

ALREADY EDITED TO ADD:  I take that back about the dishes being really clean.  The plates and big, flat items are fine, but I've had to handwash most of the flatware and a bunch of the glasses.  Turns out that yogurt spreads all over anything it's near, and then the high heat of the drying cycle bakes it right on.  NICE.

That Takes the Cake, Second Serving

"I don't see what you're complaining about," Warren commented, holding aloft a slice of the cake that had gone so terribly wrong. 

I shot my hubs a sharp look, convinced that he was taking the mickey at my expense.  But no, he and his partners in crime, my father and our mutual friend Adrian, had sliced their wedge of doorstop cake into thin slivers are were happily munching away - after having dipped said slivers into their evening tipple of rye, I need to add.

"You know what you did, don't you?"  My father asked me later.  "You invented a gateau!  It's a cake that you soak in something," he added helpfully.  I believe I pointed out that HE had decided to do the soaking, but no matter.  For the whole cake-soaked-in-booze idea is my segue into...

Cake Tale #2

Many moons ago, when I was but a slip of a girl making my way in the cold cruel world of social services (snort), a college chum hauled off and decided to get married.  She had been a bosom buddy during my junior year abroad in Merrie Olde England, and being young and dumb and possessed of a credit card, I decided to hie myself across the pond.  A. had fortuitously timed the nuptials to coincide with Thanksgiving, and thanks to the services of Messrs. Master and Card I could go ruin my credit rating without losing vacation days!  A.'s intended (whose name escapes me now, so I am arbitrarily calling him B.) was one of those middle-class Britons who are defined by their quintessential Britishness.  There is a subculture of Britons who are secretly convinced that the Empire will cease to exist without their manning the bulwark against Americanization from without and boorishness from within.  I'm talking about the green wellies and tattersall shirts on balmy summer days, referring to oneself in the third person as 'one', come round for drinks in the garden type of Briton.  In short, B. was a pompous bore - but a NICE pompous bore, as opposed to a mean or petty pompous bore.

The impending match between A. and B. was an odd bit of matchmaking, given B.'s love of propriety and A.'s past love of - well, non-propriety, but that is another story.  Let's just say that with B. as the affianced, it is no suprise that the wedding plans simply reeked of decorum and rectitude.  In order not to be the ugly American, I had to buy myself a fancy hat to clap on my head for the service, and I must say it was smashing. (If I can find the picture I'll scan it in.)  After we dispensed with the Anglican ritual of up down turn around, pick a bale of cotton, lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up sit down fight fight fight, or whatever it is the non-heathens do at their weddings, we toddled off to Claridge's for a champagne reception.  At this point I was all a-flutter with anticipation.  A champagne reception?  At the world-renowned Claridge's Hotel???  I could only imagine what a sublime spread awaited us under the moniker of 'champagne reception'.

As it turns out, I could NOT imagine what awaited us, never in my wildest dreams.  For when A. told me it was a champagne reception, she forgot to add, "and damn-all else besides."  It was the most bizarre reception I had ever been to before or since, AND I went to the wedding of the near-vegan and the crazy lady.  Basically we all stood around the reception room, as there was very little seating if memory serves, while waiters passed around the allotted two glasses of champagne per person AND NO MORE.  They had gimlet eyes, those servitors, and they could sense a goldbricker when they saw one.  Hungry and footsore and increasingly lightheaded, we searched around for something resembling sustenance.  Every once in awhile the swinging doors to the kitchen would burst open, bam!  Then a skittish waiter bearing a tray of pigs-in-a-blanket would dash across the floor with a pack of famished receptiongoers hard at his heels, much like the rabbit in front of the pack of greyhounds.  And that, my friends, was the famed Claridge's champagne reception.

What the -?  I hear you think.  I thought she said this had something to do with cake. Keep your hair on, people, I'm getting there!  You needed the back story to appreciate this all the more.  Two days before the Big Event, A. had filled me in on the all the details - most of which, as you can guess, centered around tradition! protocol! social conventions! the done thing! up to and including the wedding cake. For in addition to promising to love, honor, and obey, A. had agreed to have a traditional British wedding cake.  She went on at length about how this cake was made a month in advance, then turned daily and sprayed down with some kind of hard liquor (rum or brandy or whiskey, I don't remember which), and so on and so forth etc. etc. etc. Basically I expected this cake to be nothing short of ambrosial, given the buildup. 

So picture me, jetlagged, buzzed, sore of foot and back, and most of all, HUNGRY.  The speeches have been speechified, the telegrams read aloud (because this WAS in the days before text messaging, folks; I imagine nowadays no one bothers to send telegrams when they can type out "Herd u got mried 2day! Congrats!" with their thumbs while driving 75 mph down the freeway), and the bride and groom toasted from here to next Tuesday.  The new spouses have lovingly, if boringly, fed each other decorous nibbles of cake, and the remainder of the truly massive specimen of the baker's art has disappeared behind the aforementioned swinging doors to be chopped into what I hope are substantial pieces.  The now gun-shy waiters return wheeling carts of plates, each bedecked with a slice of cake about the size and dimension of your middle finger. 

That was the first disappointment.

Then the trolleys come closer, and I notice the cake is... well, it's brown.  Not the glossy near-black of a nice chocolate cake, but the plain Crayola-crayon brown of an applesauce cake, or a spice cake.

Things are not looking up at this point.

Then I notice the cake has - well, it has chunks in it.  Chunks of something squarish and shiny and chewy-looking.

The realization breaks over me like the cold sun on a bleak midwinter's day.

It's a fruitcake.  A FRUITCAKE.  This highly anticipated, time-honored, tradition-laden piece of British wedding custom is the exact same beast as Grammy's annual unwelcome contribution to the holiday larder.  And that, my friends, was the wedding supper:  Champagne, pigs in a blanket, and fruitcake.  No wonder the marriage didn't last out the first year.  You know the groom insisted on saving the top tier of the cake for the first anniversary dinner, and weren't NO ONE willing to choke more of that sucker down, wedded bliss be damned!

That Takes the Cake, Part I

I have two tales of confectionery to share with you, one from my recent past and one from the archives of the Caroline files.  The only thing the two share in common is that they both involve cake, but as far as I'm concerned, that's as good a leitmotif as any, don't you think?  So without further ado...

Cake Tale #1

I made the mistake this past Easter of trying to make like a domestic goddess with the dessert plans for Easter dinner.  I know, I know!  Everyone knows that trying to overreach yourself when you're having four additional people for dinner is just daring the gods to hit you with a thunderbolt, but o, what fools these mortals be and all that.  I had it in my mind that I wanted to make this Easter bunny cake because Warren's cousin Kate, who IS a domestic goddess (as well as being wildly successful professionally and charming and down to earth and happily married and stylish to boot; and yes, if she weren't so friendly and caring and overall nice I would be green with envy) made one some years ago when we spent Easter at her house.  So some hubris is involved, because, hey!  If Kate could take time out of her crazily hectic life to make a delectable homemade dessert with the help of her small children, well, then, dammit, I could too!  I was, of course, ignoring all evidence to the contrary that I can barely get through the week in my usual near-dysfunctional state, never mind adding pastry chef duties to the list.  But I digress.  I emailed Kate for instructions, which she speedily mailed back. 

Gone Native

It's finally happened.

Despite having the poor fortune to have been born outside the six New England states, I've lived in New England for the past 38'ish of my 41'ish years on this planet.  It's only taken the better part of four decades, but at last I've gone native.

How can I tell?

When I look outside the window at the driveway, here's what I see:  Cars, comma, lots of, including one with a significant ding in the front quarter-panel.  Big, lunky kids' toys made of plastic.  A pile of firewood, covered with tarps and awaiting a sunny day (or even a not-sunny-but-at-least-not-raining day) to be stacked. (And by way of an aside, do you know how lucky we were to find a firewood dealer who would give us the time of day this year?  Jeezum crow, it was like a bad relationship!  I'd practically beg these guys to please sell us some wood and they'd be all, "Sure, I'll deliver to Town With An Elite Private School!  I'll call you."  Um, yeah - because I didn't date for most of the Pleistocene era, I have NO idea that "I'll call you" is code for "when hell freezes over or I damn well feel like it." Jerks.)

Yep, we New Englanders love our lawns and driveways - love putting things in them, that is. I'm not talking about blue-blooded Mayflower-descended Colby-College-graduated house-in-Cape-Something New Englanders here, either.  Show real, honest-to-God, salt-of-the-earth New Englanders an empty driveway and an untrammeled lawn and watch them start to twitch.  There's something downright unnatural about a front yard devoid of large broken objects in their book.  Oh, sure, they may have a garage attached to the house, but the garage is for the higher class of broken stuff (e.g., stuff that may actually work someday, provided you can find that missing part down to the dump store or in Uncle Henry's). Here's a true story:  The realtor's aide who helped us buy our first house came by to drop off a Christmas calendar the year we moved to The State Formerly Known As Home.  Actually, she came by several times.  Why?  Because every time she came by, there seemed to be no one home - at least, there weren't any cars in the driveway.  After awhile, she got nervous.  Had something happened to us?  Was something wrong?  Why wasn't anyone ever home?  So she called to see what was up.  Where were we?  Was everything all right?  

Answers:  We were right there the whole time.  Everything was fine.  Our cars weren't out because we - check this out for freaky behavior - parked them in the garage when we were home.  

Here's how you know the girl was a true local:  That possibility had never occurred to her.  "We're in New England!" she replied, "We put our stuff in our garage and our cars in the driveway!"

"I'm from New Jersey," Warren snapped (and you know it's bad if he's willing to fess up to that), "I put my stuff in my house and my car in my garage."

Lest you think I'm slipping from the pinnacle of class and grace where I usually reside, this situation is temporary (I hope).  The wood will be stacked out of sight (if it ever stops raining).  The toy slide is going back in the garage.  We are attempting to whittle down the number of excess cars we have from four to two (Don't ask - it's a long and very dull story, but we have twice as many cars as licensed drivers in our family for reasons we hope to remediate soon.).  Then I can go back to being the arbiter of gracious living you've come to know and love.  Snort. I'll pretend I didn't choose to spend half an hour of my life watching Pamela Anderson's reality show last night so I can keep a straight face!

Take THAT, Madge!

We cleaned our basement.

Some clarification is in order.  "We" means "Mostly Warren but I helped out when no one was screaming or breastfeeding".  "Cleaned" is not a strong enough verb for what we have gone through.  "Purged" is more like it.  Boy, have we purged.  Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao - they got nuttin' on us.  We could teach them a thing or two about purging.  We got rid of things that have followed us through three moves, many of which followed me through four or five or more.  I threw out notebooks from grad school for courses I don'[t remember taking.  I threw out candles - scented, pillared, half melted, even one shaped like a kitty cat.  I threw out student journals from 1998.  Why do I keep stuff so long?  I don't know.  That's what happens when you grow up in a very large house with a very big attic.  There's never a compelling reason to get rid of anything, so you might as well keep everything. 

Nothing makes my husband happier than a thorough purge, unless it's a thorough purge of my stuff.  Even though I would far rather have been watching a "Flip This House" marathon instead of inventorying my excess worldly possessions, I had to keep my eye on him lest he chuck out the wedding photos. ("What?  You were there.  Don't you remember?  Besides, you see me every day, you already know what I look like.  Whaddya need those photos for?") To my credit, I got rid of all kinds of things, including a box of assorted fabric that has followed me through at least six moves through three states without ever being used.  I even - deep breath here - culled my very large book collection from eight large moving boxes down to four. I have to admit I did so with one eye toward posterity.  I kept the more highbrow offerings, the classics and whatnot, and got rid of a lot of the pulpy stuff.  Should I fall down dead tomorrow, people will think I actually spent my free time browsing through the Nicomachean Ethics, not reading Janet Evanovich novels.  The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves, I know, but I choose to prolong that delusion anyway.

After several frantic days of moving, lugging, mopping, dusting, sorting, tossing, recycling, and shuffling, we are rewarded with a lovely new office space in the basement, a lovely reclaimed guest bedroom upstairs, a lovely new play space for India in our never-used formal living room, and a lovely TV room restored to its original purpose.  We are feeling very virtuous and proud of ourselves, having sworn - sworn! - we will NOT let our newly spanking clean and organized common spaces get that cluttered and chaotic ever again.  Now stop laughing.  No, really, I mean it.

In the Total Non-Sequitur Department:  Warren and I checked out Rome on HBO recently.  Verdict:  Don't bother.  Go watch I, Claudius over again - it's so clearly what Rome tries (yet fails) to be.  Rome has the desperate air of working too hard about it.  Look!  Ancient Rome was full of gore!  Blood!  Grafitti of penises!  Bare boobies!  Perversion!  Why, it's practically like modern times, only without the internet, coffee, or road rage.  The sets are elaborate, the costuming detailed, and I'm sure the whole shebang was exhaustively researched for versimilitude, but I, Claudius was much more compelling. In fact, Rome strikes me as a more telling commentary on America than it is on ancient history. We always think that bigger is better, that redoing something that was already done well, only a grander scale and with more frills and fancywork, will automatically mean it's better. Feh.  I think we'll Netflix the first season of 24 instead.