Halloween 2015
Month: October 2015
Preparation
The Girl decided that she wanted to help K make barszcz, that most perfect of all uses of the beet. We’re meeting friends for a post-trick-or-treating party tomorrow night, and the hosts asked K to bring barszcz. What can I say — she’s a master. Everyone loves her barszcz — both varieties.
The Girl peeled some of the beets before heading off for a bath then peeled some of the carrots afterward. They all simmered with parsnip, garlic, onions, and some herbs to make the stock that will form the basis of the soup.
“Since it’s not a postny soup,” she said, “I also threw in some smoked ribs.” Which is to say, because it didn’t have to be vegetarian because of Lent or Advent, she used a few of the ribs I smoked a few weeks ago.
The other request was for smalec. In a word, smalec means lard, but to call the dish that shares the same name simply “lard” is a gross injustice. “Lard” is for frying donuts and cutlets. Smalec is a little slice of heaven — or perhaps a little glob of heaven, for it is essentially fat.
Fat with bacon bits, finely sliced (and sauteed in butter) onions, and slivers of apple (fried in the bacon drippings). At least that’s the way K’s mom taught her to make it. There are probably a thousand and one varieties, and truth be told, we’ve already begun experimenting: we took some of the meat from the ribs used in the barszcz stock and chopped it finely to mix in with the other ingredients for the smalec.
“Why not?” K shrugged when I suggested it. “It’s all pork.”
The Two Extremes
It’s third period — my first academic period this year, as my two planning periods are at the start of the day. (Why? Not so important, but it’s a nice schedule: I have plenty of time to get ready for classes, then the classes themselves just fly by. Suddenly I hear the afternoon announcements and think, “Already?!”) The first student comes in well before any other student.
“Whew! I missed the hall-pocalypse!”
Clever kid, that boy. Makes me laugh quite often.
Fourth period. Kids are starting The Diary of Anne Frank. I have them exploring the Anne Frank museum’s interactive tour of the Secret Annex. Kids who might otherwise be distracted and distracting are silent, looking at the last place Anne Frank was physically free.
Fifth period — also Anne Frank, but a little ahead of the other class. They’re acting out the first scene in preparation for mini-projects that involve staging select scenes from the play. A student who can be disruptive and disrespectful turns out to be a masterful actor.
Sixth and seventh periods — English I Honors. We’re finishing up a unit on poetry, looking at Shakespeare’s sonnets in preparation for the upcoming unit on Romeo and Juliet. I have them look at sonnet 130:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
We go over unknown vocabulary.
The school day’s over then, but not really — there’s always hall monitoring to get through as the kids head home. Ten minutes after the first students are dismissed, I see her. She stops dead in her stride and half glares at me.
“Why did you write that on my report card?” She pulls it out to show me, but I know what I wrote. She was one of several students for whom I left extensive comments in the grading system, comments that get included on the report card.
The comment was an honest assessment of how this young lady has been doing in my class. I pointed out that she has “demonstrated some very disruptive behavior this quarter” but that recently has shown improvement. I explained that she needs to improve her ability to “reply disrespectfully to teacher redirection” and mentioned her “problems staying focused and refraining from disruptive side-conversations.”
“Why’d you write that?”
“Because I need your folks to know what’s going on in the classroom. I haven’t been able to get in touch with them.”
“But now I’m gonna get cussed out!”
And suddenly everything becomes a little clearer.
Autumn Leaves
We always have leaves in the trampoline when we head down to do some jumping. Even in the summer, there’s a smattering of leaves that we have always swept away before we begin jumping. There are always just enough to be a bother. The sweeping process, in fact, has been quite beneficial: it’s motivated L to learn how to be a more efficient sweeper.
Today, when we made it down to the trampoline, it occurred to us that, with so very many leaves on the jumping surface, it might be fun just to leave them.
We were right.
Cooking over Fire
Except for organized, group events, I don’t remember really having any kind of bonfire growing up. It just wasn’t something we did. Part of it was likely where I grew up, for certainly kids who grew up in the country must have had bonfires. But for those of us who grew up in developments planned right down to the arrangement of identical-floor-plan houses, it probably never happened. At least it never happened in my universe.
For K, on the other hand, growing up in Poland, they were like baseball games or tailgating in the south: just something one did. Go for a walk in any of the woods that surround K’s home village and you’ll eventually find a spot where some group or other threw some rocks in a circle and lit a fire. And many houses have a fire pit somewhere on the property.
Since Nana and Papa gave us a fire ring that someone gave them — it’s Christmas all year round in our backyard — we’ve been having bonfires fairly reguarly as the weather permits, which means generally spring and fall. Open fires in 90 degree heat and pea-soup humidity are not very pleasant, but now that things have cooled down and the humidity has dropped to normal level, we try to have a little fire every now and then. The kids adore it, and we find it’s an almost magical family time. But there was always something missing: food. We roasted weenies on sticks sometimes and made s’mores every now and then, but that’s nothing compared to the feasts Poles prepare on their bonfires. This week, though, we bought a cheap kit to suspend a grill over the flames, and tonight, it was like being back in Lipnica again.
Playing in the Backyard
Autumn Tomatoes
Even though it’s nearly November, we still had tomatoes in the small raised beds we accuse of being a garden. For the last several weeks, though, the ripening process has all but stopped, and so ahead of tonight’s possible freeze, K sent the kids out to pick the remaining tomatoes.
They were to segregate them into red and green, with the plan being to eat some of the green later this week in the form of fried green tomatoes and putting the rest in paper bags to ripen slowly.
Given the color distinctions, everyone felt it was best if E just held the bowl.
Autumn Sunday
It’s during this time of year that the early morning sun is so spectacular. It’s not that the leaves are kaleidoscopic for they’re all still green here in the South. It’s the angle of the sun at this time of year.
“It’s the best time of the year in South Carolina,” K always says. Sunny cool days that invite backyard play.
And it’s time to begin decorating — first Halloween. Pumpkin ghosts to hang on our Crepe Myrtles in the front yard.
Of course, there’s always time for the sandbox.
Disaster Lurking
Saturday in the fall means a day in the yard more often than not. We have neglected our yard, however, and so we had quite a bit to get caught up. Rain for several Saturdays didn’t help much either, other than encourage growth of our lawn, which amounted to more work.
With a batch of pumpkins for fall decoration, the kids had a bit of work as well. They each got a small, personal pumpkin but had to share a large one. On his half, E elected for an all black pumpkin, then decided that he might like to have an entirely black pumpkin and began slowly taking over the whole pumpkin. Much to L’s frustration.
While they were painting, I was trimming all the hedges when I discovered the fourth nest of yellow jackets since we moved here. Or rather, they found me, with one giving me a welcome present just below my left eye.
Two catastrophes in one day. If only we could keep all catastrophes at this level.
Daddy Day
“Daddy, there’s no working today.”
They’d been talking about it all week, the coming Daddy Day as they called it. Friday was an optional work day at school, so I availed myself of the opportunity to be off work and spend the day with the kids. And the kids were ready for it, complete with a plan. First we had to have pizza for lunch. “It’s been so long since we’ve had pizza,” L begged. Then we were to go to the Denver Downs, a local farm that turns into an autumnal playground every September. That was the plan. The actual day fell out a little differently.
By Thursday, a little television time was in the morning mix: L has been getting disks of the old 80’s show Full House, and the latest DVD arrived Thursday. “Can we watch an episode or two in the morning?” So we did.
It was then that the no working comment came up, for during the second episode — I try not to let on, but I don’t find Full House fully engaging — I’d gotten the laptop and began fiddling with this site, trying to get rid of a graphical element that has annoyed me for ages. L thought I was grading papers, though. Showing the PHP and HTML that I was wading through to try to find where the element is inserted in the code so I can take it out didn’t convince her. “Looks like student work to me!”
Another change: everyone needed a library book refresh. The Girl scored exceptionally well on her fall MAP reading scores, which showed that she’s reading four or so grade-levels higher than her actual grade (as opposed to some of my students, but that’s a gripe for another post, one I’ve made several times). It was time to get her out of some of her favorites — Cam Jansen and the Magic Treehouse series — and into something a little more challenging. Since she’s developing an affinity to mysteries, we ended up walking out with a Nancy Drew book, a Hardy Boys adventure, and a couple of Encyclopedia Browns.
After pizza for lunch at a local establishment that has fantastic pizza but looks like it hasn’t had a renovation since its establishment just a few years before the debut of Full House, the Boy took his nap, and L and I played school. I got to be Frankie, the bad student. And having had plenty of experience from the teacher’s side of the desk, I knew just what to do. L, having no personal experience with such things other than watching her teacher deal with the one or two behavior issues in her class, struggled a bit. I tried to give her some classroom management tips, but it was hard switching roles, so I just let her struggle and tried to make it amusing for her. For example, when it was time for writing, I wrote my composition about — oh, let’s just change the topic.
The after-nap plan, by this time, had changed as well, after having already changed. Denver Downs got bumped the night before because of a little bit of hoarseness on the Boy’s part. “He’ll need to have a nap,” K explained, which meant no chance of going to Denver Downs. Too far, too tiring, too everything. So we settled on the zoo. But by the time we got to the zoo, there was only a bit of time remaining before they kicked everyone out for Boo in the Zoo, the annual waste of time and money, rather the trick-or-treating in the zoo after hours when all the animals are stashed away for the night and great herds of children rush through the zoo collecting small portions of sugary treats from various stations in the zoo, all for a ridiculously expensive price. I guess it’s fundraising for the zoo, but K and I decided long ago it’s not worth our time or money.
Instead, we played at the playground across from zoo, hiding, climbing, running, and being just generally silly.
After dinner, a little trampoline time before I packed both the kids off to bed as K was at choir practice.
Decorating
They run downstairs to find our few Halloween decorations and begin!
In the Kitchen, In the Yard — Food
A friend invited me to join a social media group he’s set up that focuses on food. His friends — and he’s got many — have been posting the most amazing pictures of the most incredible things they’ve been cooking. It got me thinking today about what and how we eat.
I had a colleague who admitted to me that she and her husband almost never eat at home. “We go out every night because no one feels like cooking,” she laughed. And I recall reading an article somewhere some ten or so years ago about apartments built without a kitchen with the assumption that the owner/renter would eat out every day. Such eating misses out on what’s truly amazing about food, the creation process behind it. Often, for me, the preparation is just as enjoyable as the meal itself: having taken over Thanksgiving dinner for our family, I’m already beginning to think about what to cook. At the same time, though, I understand that that’s probably the case only because I cook so infrequently.
For K, who does most of the cooking, I think it’s not always quite as enjoyable, all the chopping and cutting and slicing and stirring. She often begins the cooking at night, after the kids have gone to bed, getting as much of it done before going to bed. Soups, for instance, are almost always completely done before she goes to bed. And while she does truly enjoy cooking (though perhaps baking a little more, I suspect), sometimes it can be just a drudgery for her.
That leads to the second half of my thoughts: the what. We rarely eat anything that could be called “processed.” Sure, we use canned beans in chili most of the time, and we sometimes cheat with this or that, but it’s usually what folks here in the south would call scratch cooking. K’s soups always begin with a pot full of vegetables and a couple of pieces of meat. And in recent years, we haven’t even bought sandwich meats all that much, preferring our own smoked meats to anything you can get in the store.
There’s a joy in that as well — the cutting of the wood, the preparation of the brine solution for marinating, the tending of the fire. It’s another case of the process being as enjoyable as the product. It all takes time, a finite resource that’s even scarcer when one figures the children into the equation. Yet what else is one going to spend the time doing? And besides, few things bring together a family as effectively as a good meal.
Perhaps a bonfire, with s’mores.
Bash
Difficult
Dear Terrence,
It’s difficult to respect you sometimes because you so disrespect yourself by disrespecting everyone around you. It’s hard to be pleasant with you because your attitude and demeanor so often are so very unpleasant that I quite frankly would rather not even see you during the day. It’s difficult to care about you because no one, it seems, has really cared about you, and you have internalized all that and decided that you’re going to make sure that no one cares about you by being so terribly disrespectful and rude to everyone around you.
I can handle your daily disrespect of me: you’re just a child, and quite honestly, what you say to me has come to mean nothing because you never say anything that’s not disrespectful. You’re just like a toddler, forever pitching a fit. The problem is, when you do that, you do it in front of others, thereby challenging my authority, and that forces me to do something. I know, I know, you don’t care about referrals. You don’t care about suspension. You don’t care. But your apathy now affects the rest of the class, and by being so disrespectful and disruptive, you simply take away from them their opportunity to get the education I am offering. That is why, even though your words mean little to nothing to me already (Isn’t that sad? It only took seven weeks for you to completely alienate yourself and turn any potential adult allies against you, or at the very least make them apathetic to your obvious plight — tragic.), I will write those referrals and pursue those suspensions because we do better without you in the room.
I would hate if someone who was trying to help me said that about me. I would feel utterly miserable about myself. But if I were to say this to you, I know your shoulders would shrug, your lip would curl into its customary sneer, and you’d suck your teeth.
I can see your future, Terrence. And unless you change 180 degrees, it’s difficult.
Exhausted and sadly somewhat apathetic to your problems anymore,
Your Teacher Babysitter
Water
The key is to keep things in the proper perspective, as it is with most things in life. We just came out of a mini-drought, with very little rain at all for weeks, and the rain of the last week has replenished our water supply.
As the forecast worsened, I was confident. I’d just redone our basement work space that had flooded twice before, putting heavy-duty waterproof paint on the floor and up to the ground line and sealing the previously-unsealed holes in the concrete that were evidence of some previous owner’s battle with termites. We were ready with a pump in case it did flood. I’d redone the draining system, the failure of which had caused the first two floods. We were ready.
Sunday morning, though, we found water in the basement. Not much, but a bit. By the time I had gone back upstairs to change into more appropriate attire and had returned, there was noticeably more water. Significantly more water. I scanned for the source, but it didn’t seem to be coming from corner that was the usual source. I soon discovered the breach: one of the termite-poison-injection points had been compromised: water was literally bubbling out of the small hole as if it were a spring. I plugged it with a wine cork and set up the pump, only to discover that the two or so inches of water was not enough to trigger the pump. No fear: we had plenty more water in the crawl space and a shop vac. In the end, I pumped probably seven or eighth hundred or so gallons out of the crawl space at about two hundred gallons out of the work room.
The nicely-painted floor, though, was a wreck. But the overall damage was minimal, and the situation could have been much worse:
- We had power.
- We had a working pump to empty the crawl space.
- We had a working shop vac to suck up the water that’s too shallow for the pump to draw up, which was basically all the water in the basement — but still.
- Even if it totally flooded the basement, nothing down there was critical to daily living or irreplaceable.
- The living area living of our house was highly unlikely ever to flood at all.
By the time we got the basement situation under control, the only real concern was the forest in the backyard. With such saturated ground and such relatively strong winds, everyone was saying that the compromised root systems of trees wouldn’t hold indefinitely. But they all held, and we escaped with no damage to speak of.
Throughout the day, the routine was the same:
- Grade some papers.
- Check the water level in the basement.
- Hang out with the kids a while.
- Repeat.
We all knew that the situation was worse the closer one got to the shore. When the pictures of the damage started appearing on the Internet, though, it was far beyond anything we’d expected.
So today, we went about our normal routines, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thankful for the ability to go to work this Monday morning.
Last Night
Performance
After Dinner
If you get enough Poles together to fill a private room in a restaurant, there will surely be some after-dinner activities.
And if you get enough of those Poles to congregate in one home afterward, there will surely be some singing.
Nuclear Guests
