It’s to the hospital with us!!
Month: December 2006
“A New Way Forward”
Geoff Nunberg, at Language Log, describes Bush’s new slogan “A new way forward” thusly: “it sounds like a tagline an ad agency would come up with for a railroad trying to emerge from Chapter 11.”
Short, and worth a read.
This Side of Tradition
Being pregnant — nay, expecting — in the Christmas season is about the most wonderful gift I can imagine.
Yesterday evening, K and I put on a CD of peaceful Polish carols, turned off all the lights, and sat in the glow of the Christmas tree, talking about the future.
A pregnant Christmas, like the first Christmas, is a Christmas of promise. It’s the thought of a whole series of Christmases stretching into the future, including toddlers, children, teens, adults, grandchildren — it’s sitting at the beginning of a new tradition. As the generations repeat, so too Christmas, each one following the previous, each different, each connected.
That’s perhaps one of the nicest things about Christmas. It’s a tradition that invites new traditions. It’s a tradition about birth, about humility, about peace, and those are things that are eternal and yet ever-new. They’re things that surprise us and comfort us, like a good Christmas.
Amoco “Adventure”
The other day (Tuesday, to be exact), I stopped at one of the few places in town that sells diesel to fill up the Jetta. Most diesel pumps are not equipped with a credit card payment unit, and so you have to pay inside. This particular place has a sign on the pump that reads, “Pay before pumping.” These places are always frustrating because if I’m filling up, I can’t be sure how much I’m actually going to put in. I have a pretty good guess, but still it’s the principle.
I go inside and tell the attendant that I’m going to fill up on pump nine, but I don’t know how much it will take. Usually, the attendants at this particular place are okay with that, but this guy is new, it appears. “Well, you’ve got to give me something,” he says. I sigh in frustration and roll my eyes not the most polite thing, but it’s been a long day. I give him my debit card and go out to fill up the car. The pump doesn’t properly shut off when it’s full and I get a fair amount of smelly diesel fuel on my shoes as a result. I’m in an even worse mood.
I go in, pay, and the guy apologizes for the inconvenience. We make some small talk turns out, lots of people have been stealing gas from this place. With gas prices higher than most Americans are used to, I’m not surprised.
Last night, I’m checking our bank account online when I see this.
Or it could be a mistake. The optimist in me hopes it is, but I just don’t know. It was run earlier than my real, authorized payment.
If it was intentional, what was this idiot thinking? That I wouldn’t check my account? That I couldn’t prove I didn’t authorize this payment?
What a pain…
Biltmore
After having lived 20 of my 33 years less than a hundred miles from the Biltmore Estate and a year and a half less than ten miles from it, I finally went for a visit with K and the Folks this Sunday.
Much to my disappointment, though not surprising, the current owners have enacted a strict prohibition of all photography within the house itself — if such a structure can be called a “house.” At 175,000 square feet (16,258 square meters), it’s probably larger than many palaces.
Wandering through the house, the notion of such living is so completely foreign as to be unimaginable, even when you’re literally standing in the proof.
To think of living without having to give a single thought to money, to physical needs — indeed, even to dressing yourself — is for us probably what the majority of the world feels when they think of those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the developed world.
L Minus 14
K’s due date is two weeks from tomorrow. Which means, for the last week, we’ve both been thinking, “Any day now…” True, few first-time pregnancies are early, but last week’s ultrasound (confirming a weight of about seven pounds) has led us to hope more fervently that L will be here by Christmas.
And so soon, all the questions will be answered.
Some already are. The ultrasound technician was shocked at how much hair our daughter already has — and its length: about 1.4 cm (a little over half an inch). We could see the hair, waving about in the amniotic fluid, like some small detail from a painting.
In the meantime, every time the phone rings at work and I see it’s K calling, everything in me jumps just a little.
Christmas Dumplings
Boyhowdy, at “Not All Who Wander are Lost,” has a wonderful post about the Christmas season. He writes,
Somewhere in those years I fell in love with someone who loves Christmas, and ceremony, and peace on earth. Christmas came into my house, and nestled in me. (Source)
It’s something I can really relate to. Having grown up in a church that didn’t acknowledge, let alone celebrate, Christmas, it wasn’t until I was in my twenties, in Poland, that I first celebrated Christmas.
That first Christmas was a little odd. I returned to my host family in Radom, Poland, and since I was always at odds with the family’s son’s passive aggression, it was only mildly enjoyable.
I didn’t realize it then, but what was missing was simply the key element of Christmas: family. Subsequent Christmases in Poland I spent with those nearest and dearest to me in the area where I lived, and it only took about fifteen minutes of the real thing for me to fall in love with it.
Essential to the Polish Christmas is food. Huge amounts of it. Food that is time consuming to make, both due to its character and quantity. Dumplings and soups; salads and sides; deserts, deserts, and deserts.
It’s best to get started early.
Hosting our second Christmas dinner, K and I began the cooking this weekend, making 100+ kraut and mushroom dumplings and around 80 mushroom dumplings (“ears” they’re called for barszca, the amazing Eastern European beet soup). All told, almost 200 dumplings.
That calls for cooking many, many mushrooms, cooking much kraut, and squeezing the excess water out of it,making a lot of dough, and finally, making the dumplings.
It’s a time-consuming process, but it’s more than labor. It’s an investment, for the food serves as both the centerpiece of a traditional Christmas Eve and the backdrop for the talking and laughing that fills the evening.
Gates Hearings
I think many of us are fairly impressed with Robert Gates’ confirmation hearings yesterday, but I think Slate summed it up best with their headline: Enter the Grown-Up.
Wedding Vodka
I’ve been going through old photos, occasionally putting some up on our Flickr account.
I discovered a batch taken when my father-in-law and I were testing some Ukrainian spirit (something like 90% alcohol) for possible use in making the wedding vodka.
In the end, we decided that the quality was just not up to par. We compared it to “good old Polish spirit,” and it just tasted like it would produce a cheap hangover. (One of the things I learned in Poland: to avoid a hangover if you’re going to be drinking excessive amounts, one step is to go ahead and spend a little more money to buy quality vodka. If you drink enough water before going to bed, you can, in theory, wake up with a mildly sloshing head and little more. Drink cheap vodka and collapse into bed on returning home, and you might not get out of bed until late the next afternoon. Or so I’ve heard…)
What an odd habit, making wedding vodka. It involves taking virtually pure grain alcohol, diluting it and simultaneously flavoring it. The flavoring added by introducing lemons, honey, or caramelized sugar to the mixture. (There are certainly other flavors, but those were the three we experimented with.)
In the end, we went with caramelized sugar and Polish spirit. The recipe is here. Let it sit for a few months and it’s actually pretty smooth and tasty.
Condi’s Coffee Pot
When K and I moved to America, one of the things we would have lacked, were it not for the ingenuity of American capitalism and a heads-up play by my mother, would have been a coffee maker. That would have been a disaster. Yet it was a disaster averted, because my mother had signed up for a Gevalia coffee trial offer and had a coffee maker waiting for us.
Since my mother doesn’t drink so much coffee these days and my father is not so picky, we said we’d make the necessary purchases to fulfill the trial agreement. The coffee we got from Gevalia was actually pretty decent.
As time passed and K and I started feeling less fiscally uncertain, we began really living the American dream: we began spending more money. And one thing we started spending more money on was music. In order to get a lot of new music quick, we did old join/drop-Columbia-House- in-one-month thing that my best friend and I did in high school so many time.
I’ve often wondered what that says about the actual cost of a CD when a company can essentially sell you a significant number of them for about $2.30 a piece. I guess the inflated prices of the regularly priced CDs is supposed to make up for that, else they wouldn’t be in business.
Eventually, we were “settled” enough that we decided to buy another car. We went out one Sunday and began looking at what was out there. At the Kia dealer, we were bamboozled into a test drive, even though we said we were only interested in talking about prices, features, warranties and such. Taking a test drive, though, indicated that we were a step closer to buying than we actually were.
Looking back on it, K and I were furious that we’d allowed ourselves to be manipulated as we had, for the whole awful adventure ended with us sitting with a salesman trying to be firm and yet polite in telling him, “No, we are not going to buy a new car today. We just came to look.”
I guess trial memberships and test drives are as American as any cliche about American-ness you can think of. In an age of a million choices, we consumers don’t want to make a fiscal commitment to something unless we can help it. And this has evolved into a country where we can get trial sizes and sample packs of even pharmaceuticals.
And that’s why Donald Rumsfeld’s suggestion that we should “Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis.” It’s not a commitment, and we can easily change our minds.
This letters shows that such a the Bush administration had a pathological reluctance to change its mind on Iraq policy because it would say to the world that we might have lost. Changing your strategy is the same as admitting, “If we had not changed strategy and tactics, we would have lost this war.”
America doesn’t change its mind! In its march for freedom, America is the only country seeking the pure good indeed, the philosophical “Good” for all humankind. Our goals are just, and so our methods must also be just and efficient.
Put simply, the Bush administration was so scared of the “L” word having to cross its collective lips that it was barreling ahead on its original plan, not looking left, not looking right, because “to move to another course” is the same as “losing”: “This [labeling our new strategy a “trial’] will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”
We don’t lose if we don’t say the L word. We’re changing tactics not because we’re losing using these present tactics, but because we want that nice new coffee pot for Condi’s office.
We will leave Iraq on our terms as victors, as liberators! no matter how many linguistic contortions we have to go through to do so.