It Must Be F-U-N

Parents have lots of tricks. We bribe our kids with snacks in return for good behavior, we play games to get chores and homework done, and we spell words aloud in front of our children so that they won’t catch on to what it is we’re talking about.

My husband and I use the spelling trick all the time. My daughter has learned that when we start to spell, it means something fun is coming soon. I could say, “Well, you could let her ride the T-R-I-C-Y-C-L-E, or you could get out the P-O-N-I-E-S for her.” Even though my daughter has no idea what we’re communicating about, she jumps up and down and says, “Yes, I want to! Let’s do that!”

Silly parenting tricks don’t always work. Kids will eventually figure out that they can be as naughty as they want as soon as you run out of cookies. Sometimes your child has a better game they want to play, and no amount of coaxing will induce them to help, and you’ll end up doing the laundry alone. And someday, they’ll learn to spell; some sooner than others. My daughter, for instance, could decipher a coded conversation about dinner when she was two. Once, after one of these secret communications, she nonchalantly informed me, “I do like P-I-Z-Z-A, Mommy."

Percentages

I found this picture (rather unsurprisingly)
on facebook this morning. It was just
sitting there, accusing me of goofing off.

Sometimes I think I should time myself. Really find out how much time goes by from the moment I start writing in the morning until I post it on my blog.

I usually start out with an idea, compose the introduction in my head, and then get to it as soon as I can, before it’s gone from the place in my head where I keep introductions. Then I get to the main body just as I hit a good stride, saying the things I want to say, and then I completely halt the creative process by going to see if any of my friends have posted anything on facebook about their kids, their job, or what they had for lunch.

I continue in that for a lot longer than I realize, and by the time I get tired of hearing about the antics of college students and think, “what was I doing?” anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours can have flown by. Sometimes my kids have to interrupt me with their needs to end my lollygagging.

If being a good writer is 3% talent and 97% not being distracted by the internet, I think I need to work harder to change that percentage. My writing would be more talent if I was less distracted by the internet. After all, being distracted will always be there when I’m done using my talents to be awesome.

Common Enemy

I fed the kids and ate breakfast. I exercised. I took a shower. I put one daughter down for a nap and brushed the other’s hair. After setting her down to play with “claydough,” I left my daughter upstairs while I hauled the laundry downstairs, sorted it, and started a load. I refilled the oxi-clean and broke down the box to recycle. As I shoved it into the box of cardboard, I realized it would probably be a good time to take some of the recyclables out to the garage. I glanced over my shoulder and noted that after that I should probably do the dishes while prepping for dinner later.

Then I stopped.

It’s not like I hate having the chores done, but I needed to ask myself why I had the overwhelming inclination to do them all now. I’ve been looking at that overflowing bag of glass recyclables for at least a week and a half, knowing they’d need to go out soon, but not feeling like doing it. So why now?

I looked into the dining room where my daughter sat, “wrapping” her cookie cutters up in playdough. On the other side of her was my computer.

I thought, “Am I avoiding writing?”

That was exactly what I was doing. In the back of my mind, I knew I didn’t have anything to post today, and I didn’t feel like sitting down and getting to work. My chores were also work, but it was like they were all uniting together against a common enemy.

The job that I love shouldn’t be an enemy. Just because I might not have an idea of what to write about at this very second doesn’t mean I won’t ever have an idea. And who knows, maybe I’ll get one while doing all the chores.

At least this way they’re getting done.

Writing Prompt: A Shock

The empiricist was not surprised when the zap from the metal doorknob arced onto his finger after he had shuffled his feet across the carpet to touch it.

He was very much of the opinion that everything could be predicted as long as there was enough previous empirical study to support its outcome. His friends and family would listen to him drone on and on about the benefits of knowing by seeing, and nod politely as he regaled them with tales about his current and previous projects. They had ceased to listen, knowing (through repeated observation) that he would rarely, if ever, say something interesting or funny. They weren’t surprised that his static electricity experiment turned out exactly the way he had predicted it had.

What they were surprised about was that as he turned away from the door, shaking his zapped hand, he quipped: “Nothing shocks me. I’m a scientist.”

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Pickle Bite

“Does anybody want my guacamole?” my husband asked as our lunch arrived at the table. My mother’s gaze snapped immediately to him, and she said, “I doooo!” You have to know my mother to realize the amount of longing that she put into those two words. My husband doesn’t hate guacamole, but he usually ends up scraping it off of his Mexican food anyway, so he usually offers it to me. By offering it to the first taker, he earned the #1 Son-in-law Forever spot in my mom’s book. My mother loves avocados, and by extension, guacamole. They moved their plates together, made the switch, and ate their lunch, both happier.
When I was a kid we lived in a tiny village a short drive east of Lincoln, Nebraska. It had a small grocery store, but it only had absolute essentials. For anything else we had to go out of town, and often we went to the Hy Vee on 70th and O Street. Not far away, there’s a McDonalds which we used to frequent on the way home.
I can’t ever remember disliking pickles, but I or one of my brothers must have at one point. What I do know is that every cheap hamburger at every fast food place has the same toppings: mustard, ketchup, and pickles. My mom never had to order her own food when we stopped at McDonalds on the way home from shopping, because it became our ritual to give her the Pickle Bite.
“Yum, honey, thanks for the Pickle Bite!” she would say, and chomp down on the burger, barely able to chew and swallow before the next one would be brandished in her face: “Here’s my Pickle Bite, Mommy!”
Eventually it became our way of showing our mother that we loved her (and a race. Who would give Mom their Pickle Bite first?). But since we don’t all go to McDonalds anymore (thankfully), we don’t have as much opportunity to shower my mother with love in the form of food.
She never says no to an invitation to go out and get Mexican food, though. My husband is the only one who is willing to give up his guacamole, but I think the more important thing is that we are showing our mommy that we love her by giving her something that we know she likes. When we were kids, it was a Pickle Bite. Now it’s hanging out, maybe going out to get some enchiladas and a margarita occasionally.
Whatever it takes to show her we care.

The Real Winner

Beyonce is too bootylicious for the Big Easy.

For those of you who weren’t watching, shortly after her halftime performance half of the lights went out in the Superdome last night in New Orleans. We all waited half an hour for them to come back on, and the game was different than it would have been if nothing had happened.

The Ravens had an awesome first half. They were charging down the field and holding off the 49ers’ attempts to score. When everyone walked off to the locker rooms, the score was 21 to 6. My father entertained us during the halftime entertainment by making hilarious comments like, “someone call technical support, the stage appears to be on fire,” and “is her guitar supposed to shoot sparks? Someone get the stage manager.”

There have been many jokes made about how the flashy show shorted the power, or that it was somehow Beyonce’s sinister plan to attract more attention, but the reality of the outage was that both teams had another halftime.

Halftime is usually a time to regroup, plot out a course of action for the next half of the game, to take back the momentum from the other team or to keep that momentum going. It didn’t look like the momentum was going to change when everyone got back on the field for the start of the second half. The Ravens returned the kickoff 109 yards for a touchdown on the very first play. Shortly after that, the lights went out.

The referees weren’t much bothered by the outage, and were trying to get the players back out on the field to continue the game, but there seemed to be some sort of unspoken consensus among the players that no one was going to get back to work without proper lighting. They milled around, sat down to stretch and stay loose, and waited with the rest of us.

Shortly after everything was put to rights and game play started again, my husband and I decided to take our children home and put them to bed. It was also around that time that there was evidence of a turning of the tide. I got two text messages from my father while we were on our way home, both with the same report: “San Francisco got a touchdown again.” In fact, by the end of the third quarter, it was a game worth paying attention to again, with the Ravens barely leading at 28 points, the 49ers racing to catch up at 23 points.

My husband tossed the kids in their beds and we sat down to enjoy the final minutes of the game. When the end approached and the 49ers looked sure of getting a last touchdown to win the game, we confided in each other. “I have points on the Ravens,” I said. “Mine are on San Francisco,” he responded.

Our pick ‘em league was pretty fun this year. We started off with eleven opponents, all battling to see which could correctly choose the winners for each game. Everyone was required to put faith in their choice, ranking the games from 1 to 16 points. Each week we would choose who we thought would win, based on our gut, statistics, or whatever (one of our members made her mode of choice very clear by making her screen name “picking by colors”). Then we would put 16 points on the game we were sure we knew the outcome of, and 1 point on the game we were the most shaky on, and attribute 15-2 accordingly. Some weeks were pretty hard to figure out where to place my low points (everyone was going to lose!) and other weeks I didn’t have enough high points (I wanted 16 points for four different games!). It was really fun, and I’m excited to do it again next year. Sadly, near the end, not only had I never managed to win a week but also our players had dwindled to four people: myself, my husband, his best friend, and some other guy I don’t know but was glad to be able to compete against.

My husband and I had both been pretty disheartened that the Broncos had failed to beat the Ravens when they faced them in the playoffs several weeks ago. Really, all we wanted for the Superbowl was an entertaining game. I kept the pick ‘em league website up on my computer all week, not knowing if I’d change my mind, checking the stats occasionally to see what everyone else was saying about which way the game would go. It was about 50/50, but there was a slight leaning toward the 49ers all week. I’d put my points on the Ravens early, thinking that it was better for them to win, so we would know that we had been defeated by the champions, but I found myself thinking through the week that it would be nice to see a rookie quarterback take the trophy home, so I wouldn’t care who won, really.

The ending of the game wasn’t terribly triumphant, as it was just one team holding the other back until time ran out, like a brother putting his younger brother in a headlock until the end of the game. It ended with a score of 34 to 31. We weren’t jumping up and down, we just said, “huh.” And then we went to bed.

This morning I realized that I hadn’t checked the league to see who picked what team. I only knew that I’d beaten my husband. I rambled over to the computer and glanced at the website between giving bites of yogurt to my almost-one year old. And that’s when I saw it. Everyone else had picked San Francisco.

I finally won a week!

It didn’t even take a power outage to turn the tide. And it only took me twenty-one weeks to get there.

Tale of the Tea Cozy

I looked at lots of pictures on tea cozy patterns. They were all cute. I glanced at the actual pattern on some of them, and decided a couple of things:

1. I did not want to make two sides of the same thing and then stitch them together
2. I did not want some kind of bag cozy. That would be called “tea bag” and that would just confuse all sorts of terminology, and that sort of thing is unneccessary (also I usually end up with a puddle under my tea pot when making tea for some reason, and a wet tea cozy is not terribly cozy.)

One nice thing about all of the patterns I looked at was that they all recommended measuring against the tea pot as you worked, just to make sure it would fit. This turned out to be the best advice I got during the whole endeavor.

I went to the store, bought yarn that would “match” my tea pot, and I started making one, excited that my tea would soon be nice and cozy. This particular pattern worked up from the bottom, left a space for the handle and the spout, with a button added at the back under the handle to get the cozy on and off.

I ran into a snag right away. My tea pot is from a fancy tea store called Teavana, and since it’s so adorable, it isn’t like a typical tea pot. This first pattern called for a space to be left for the spout a couple of rows into the pattern, but the spout on my tea pot is near the top, so I would have had to make severe changes to the pattern to make anything fit.

So I went back to looking at pictures on patterns.

I’d initially dismissed the second pattern I tried because it looked a little too simple, but then I thought, “if I need to make any changes, simple is better.” This pattern started from the top of the pot, and worked in the round down to the sides. The person who made the pattern had a fancy tea pot that was nice and skinny, and of course mine is short and fat. So the straight sides that her pattern called for wouldn’t work.

I was a bit annoyed. I had undone one third of a tea cozy already to start again from the beginning, and I really thought that I could make this pattern work. So I kept the work I’d done so far (mostly just the very top) and started to alter the pattern.

I got as far as Row 7 before I had to change things to fit my fat little tea pot. This particular pattern calls for the crafter to make one side completely and then make the other. I was a bit concerned about that; how would I know if the cozy would fit if I did it that way? I dug around in my yarn box for some leftover yarn and paused one side while I went ahead and worked the other side, knowing that I’d have to pull that side out when I was finished and redo it in the actual yarn that I wanted to use.

I’m glad I did, because I noticed that the pattern the way it was would be too narrow for my tea pot. I unravelled the two sides, in their different colors, and started again. I shortened Row 7 so that it would stop at the right spot, to give the handle and the spout plenty of room. The other side wasn’t so easy to figure out. I wanted to mirror both sides, like the original pattern, so I eyeballed where the other side should start and did as many stitches as I had on the other side. It wasn’t quite right, so I pulled it out and scootched everything over one stitch.

That looked better, but now my concern was that the green leftover yarn I was using wasn’t quite the same as the yarn I wanted to eventually use: it was a bit thicker. I tugged the green yarn out and went back to digging in my yarn box.

There had been an imperfection in the skein when I’d first started using it: it was severed and had been tied together. Those who work with yarn will agree with me when I relate that this is not an ideal state of being for yarn, so I had untangled it, and rolled the little bit that had been tied on into its own tiny ball and stashed it for later. I found this little ball hiding in my yarn box, and decided that this would be the best thing to use: it was actually the kind of yarn I would be using, so there was no way that using it to try the size would throw off any of my measurements.

I went ahead with the next row, which was more like Row 14 than Row 8, but I was so far off the reservation by now that it really didn’t matter.

I went ahead and kept working with the tiny ball of yarn until it ran out, which was about two rows in. Then I took a look at my tea cozy. I thought, “What if I continued the row around the spout now, and joined one side to the other? Then I won’t have to undo any more stitches or sew anything together when I’m finished!” I had convinced myself. I chained across the front of the spout and joined the two sides together.

Things went pretty well from there. I had to pull things out and redo a couple of times just to make it look nice, and it still looks a bit weird here and there, but I’m fine with that. Once I hit the middle of the tea pot’s fatness, I started to decrease a bit, and at one point decided to add a little flap across the back by the handle like I’d seen on so many other patterns. I even asked my yarn-genius sister-in-law what she thought, and she nodded and said she thought it looked nice, so I felt I was going the right direction.

As I finished it, I fit it onto the tea pot and saw that it has all the touches of imperfection that make it just right. Even though it was kind of a pain to make, everything turned out all right in the end: it’s perfectly cozy.

I will have the coziest tea ever.