Thanksgiving went okay today. I took the easy way out and just did a turkey breast rather than the whole bird. Figured Kayleigh was a good excuse. Unfortunately I threw my timeline off when I sliced off a bit of the 3rd finger on my left hand when chopping onion for dressing. It doesn't actually hurt, but it sure has bled a lot--boo! Thus there shall be no more blog entries from me until the finger can go unbandaged and I can properly type.
I hope everyone had a lovely meal today and enjoyed being with friends & family. Happy Thanksgiving Day!
Today Kayleigh is six months old. How did that happen so fast??? She visited the doctor this morning for her checkup, and he pronounced her--again--the perfect baby. (I bet he says that to all the parents
Kayleigh's latest trick is snorting. Not very ladylike, but she sure thinks it's funny. Just before Joy & Brian arrived a couple of weeks ago, she mastered blowing raspberries, and last night she was combining blowing raspberries with her snorts--she wrinkles up her nose, grins, and then snorts at you. It's really most amusing.
It's been busy since Brian & Joy arrived at the beginning of last week, but in a very good way. With someone to help out with Jonathan and Kayleigh, I have actually been enjoying cooking things for the first time in a long time. Last week I made a tasty Pasta Rustica recipe that I had clipped out of a Williams-Sonoma catalog; last night I made margarita salmon, and tonight I hosted bookgroup so had to prepare food for that. It was fun! We had read a book set in China, so I thought it would be fun to serve some "Chinese" food (quotes there because I wasn't going for a lot of authenticity)--we had chicken potstickers from Whole Foods with my homemade dipping sauce (Benihana's recipe for soy ginger sauce) along with my special chicken and shrimp fried rice. I added some things (shrimp, bean sprouts) to my normal recipe and was most gratified by the results. For dessert we had coffee along with chocolate and cappucino truffles and homemade mini-Bundt hazelnut poppy seed cakes similar to this recipe, although with fewer poppy seeds and the addition of some Frangelico (I made them specially to go along with the truffles). All the plates came back clean, and nearly everyone went back for seconds on the fried rice, which is the best approval a cook could hope for. And lucky me, when I went into the kitchen after everyone had gone home, Brian had finished all the washing up! It's so nice not to have to deal with the consequences of a party. Now all I have to do is put away the clean dishes.
Last Wednesday was a fun day--Jessica came over with Eamon & Jackson (her nephew whom she looks after four days a week), and Jennifer also came over with Magda. A house full of babies and toddlers! I'm not sure we've ever had so many under our roof. Everyone seemed to have a good time. It was fun to see Jessica in the back garden covered with leaves, Jfer nursing Magda on the loveseat, and Joy & Brian playing with Kayleigh on the deck. (I was cooking--one of the things I made was homemade applesauce for Kayleigh, but I used Granny Smith apples and they were too tart. My daughter pulled quite a face! Just to check, I tried a couple of more times, but sure enough each time produced the same expression. This week I'm trying again with different apples. Kayleigh has also had some broccoli and salmon, both of which she seemed to like.)
This afternoon Jessica and I (and Kayleigh) went to the Texas Union Ballroom to hear post-election analysis by Hendrik Hertzberg, one of my favorite New Yorker writers. I would like to quote a bit from his column in this week's magazine. He writes, "The moral values that stirred them seem not to encompass botched wars or economic injustices or environmental depredations; rather, moral values are about sexual behavior and its various manifestations and outcomes, about family structures, and about a particularly demonstrative brand of religious piety. What was important to these voters, it appears, was not Bush’s public record but what they conceived to be his private soul. He is a good Christian, so his policy failures are forgivable. He is a saved sinner, so the dissipations of his early and middle years are not tokens of a weak character but testaments to the transformative power of his faith. He relies on God for guidance, so his intellectual laziness is not a danger." All the evidence available seems to point to his description of most Bush voters as accurate, and I find that nearly inconceivable, that a thinking person could be so intellectually lazy. And, of course, he points out the hypocrisy that a party self-described as being for getting government out of people's lives is so concerned about what people do in their bedrooms. Somewhere (perhaps in this week's newspaper column by Leonard Pitts, Jr.?) I read the obvious argument that if Republicans are so concerned about the state of marriage in this country, they should be making divorces harder to get, not preventing people from making commitments to each other. I would really like to see how many of those who so revoltingly ooze talk about "family values" in their election material have had divorces themselves. Just as though who are so concerned about the rate of abortion in this country would be spending their time much more effectively by making sure that accurate contraceptive/STD information is available and by promoting adoption as a viable alternative. How can they possibly be so naive as to think that criminalizing abortion means it's going to stop? Women have always sought to end unwanted pregnancies, always. The thing to do is to help them not get pregnant in the first place--treat the cause, not the symptom.
But I digress--back to the talk. Actually, I didn't actually get to hear all that much of the talk as Kayleigh was delighted to be awake, so she and I spent much of the time examining the New Yorker political cartoons on display in the hallway outside the Ballroom. I did get to try out a new hold in the sling, though--the kangaroo carry. She likes it a lot.
While waiting for Jessica to get her copy of last week's New Yorker signed (the first time in their history that they endorsed a presidential candidate), I noticed that a professor of mine was there. He taught the best writing class I've ever had (Rhetoric 325M), and he was also the second reader for my Plan II thesis. Unfortunately we had a strong disagreement over the content of it, and we ended up not speaking to each other. Too bad. I didn't go say hi.
Afterwards we went down to the Cactus Cafe to have a chat while waiting for Jessica's husband Archie to come pick her up. We even talked about non-baby things, like communal living arrangements and . . . well, I can't remember what else, but I'm sure it was good.
I wouldn't have been able to go to the event if Joy & Brian hadn't arrived yesterday; they stayed with Jonathan, since we left about 3:30 to head towards UT. Many thanks! It's very nice to have them here again. We had a relaxing day today, sitting on the deck in the beautiful weather having coffee while Kayleigh nursed. Later we went to the grocery store . . . tomorrow I'm actually going to make a new recipe for dinner. I can't remember the last time I did that! It had better be worth it.
The last few days have been quite trying, I must admit. I was most disappointed by the election results--even more so by *why* people apparently voted for Bush than by the fact that he won. If it were a true disagreement over policy, the role of government in society, etc., that would be one thing--but according to the polls, most people didn't think he was doing that great a job on just about everything, but they voted for him in spite of that because they think he shares their "traditional moral values". That I completely fail to understand. Have they no brain? No critical thinking skills? I could respect a clear argument that simply relied on values that differed from mine, but this is an abdication of responsibility.
Wednesday morning I went to see Jessica, Eamon, and Jack (her nephew), as usual. Eamon was in a most awful mood--teething, we discovered later--and it rubbed off on me a bit. The day did not improve much from there due to other things. However, coincidentally or not, Kayleigh did learn to blow wonderful raspberries that day and has continued practicing at length since then.
Last Sunday and today were nice as they began with a 3-mile walk around Town Lake. Jonathan is racking up miles towards his marathon, which he needs to complete by the end of February.
This evening I went out to get a backless booster car seat for Jonathan so that we can move him to the back bench while Joy & Brian are here to save them having to crawl back there (it's not that easy). Babies 'R' Us didn't have it, although they did sell it on their web site, so I had to go to Target. While there, someone STOLE my wallet out of the shopping cart. NOT the way I wished to end my weekend. As soon as I got home I called to cancel my cards--the last one I called, Discover, had 3 charges on it already. Dale called to make the police report for me, and then I called the first place where the person had charged things (a game store on North Lamar). I spoke with the person who handled the transaction, and he said he remembered the woman well and that he'd had a bad feeling about it; he was worried about losing his job since he didn't do a couple of things he was supposed to do. One of those things was ask for a driver's license when someone presents a credit card--it would have taken care of this as the woman using my card is black! My shiny white face staring up from the driver's license would have put a stop to her little spree. At least I'm not liable for any of it. But now when I wanted to do nothing tomorrow but go to the grocery store (Joy and Brian arrive in the late afternoon), I'm going to have to go get a new driver's license, a temporary debit card, and also deal with a restaurant that initally charged us for another table's bill and then, even though the waiter took my credit card so that he could credit the mistake--nothing got credited back to our account! Oh, the incompetency that abounds in the world today.
In an attempt to finish on a nice note, Jonathan, Kayleigh, and I had a wonderful time yesterday at the Austin Celtic Festival down on Town Lake. (I would put a hyperlink to the site, but I can't because the batteries in my mouse have run out and I'm having to do everything right now via keyboard navigation; adding links is just too much.) We went down there b/c Jessica & Eamon were there, and we stayed a couple of hours after they headed out. The last thing we did was listen to a fantastic trio--Jonathan was dancing about, and even Kayleigh was excited--she was on me in the sling, squealing at Jonathan and biffing me with her arms, nearly in time with the music. We had fun!