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Decorating

Thursday 15 October 2015

They run downstairs to find our few Halloween decorations and begin!

In the Kitchen, In the Yard — Food

Sunday 11 October 2015

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

Friday 09 October 2015

Difficult

Tuesday 06 October 2015

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

Monday 05 October 2015

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.