Quarantine Lunchbox (2020)

Backyard State U had a covid trainwreck last month. Who could have imagined that behavioral scientists and epidemiologists actually know what they're talking about?

E heeded the poem, but some of his bright-eyed bushy-tailed first-year suite-mates did not. (And who can blame them, really? We know that kids do all sorts of risky stuff when they're away from home for the first time.) A suite-mate tested positive for covid. 

Thus E spent two full weeks in quarantine, as required by BSU's overwhelmed Student Housing, waiting to find out if he had covid too. He tested negative ten days in, so was either barely symptomatic early on or never had it. As soon as E was sprung from confinement, S helped him move out of his quarantine dorm and then out of his regular dorm. E might not be on campus anymore, but hoo boy, he's certainly getting an education this year.

While hunkered down, E received two meals each day, delivered at the same time by Dining Services, providing him with a grand total of 14 memorable hummus-veggie wrap lunches and 14 functional dinners. E, a budding environmental engineer, set to work redeploying the cardstock lunch containers. He prototyped a lot of paper airplanes, but he also made some art. If you want to know what 14 days in quarantine looks like, check out the exhibit below.

E

Quarantine Lunchbox

2020

Cardstock boxes, glue, metal tin

9.5" x 3.75" x 2.25"

Private collection

Needle ice and ice discs on the Eno

E and I did our annual January Long Hike today. Instead of the 22.5-mile ATT (the length of which apparently I've only blogged about once, although we've now walked it in one fell swoop for two different January Long Hikes) in favor of ~10.5 miles along the Eno, from the Pleasant Green access to West Point on the Eno. E and I have both hiked this route before, although today was the first time we did so together.

The first amazing thing about this adventure was that when I said "hey E, want to go on a 10.5 mile hike with me tomorrow," he said "sure." The second amazing thing--thanks to a cold front that blew in quickly last night--was the variety of ice.

Puddles: after the surface froze, water underneath either soaked into the ground or partially drained away, leaving delicate ice formations with air underneath.

This fallen tree had large icicles draining from its roots:

Ice discs!

E pierced one of the discs with a stick. They were very thin in the middle and broke easily.

This tributary had frozen over and was remarkably flat on top, while the water underneath flowed down through the dam of sticks and leaves.

Needle ice!

The Eno River was impressively full; we've had a lot of rain in the past several months. This is a view looking east from what Schoolhouse of Wonder calls "the secret beach."

This is what the water level more typically looks like, from a warmer time of year:

Time still flies

We're a few months late for the photo shoot we scheduled back in 2010, but fortunate to have fit it in before the end of 2017. We'll call E & K back for another in 2024.

11.12.2017

7.20.2010

6.21.2003

6.21.2003

Expressions of love with a nod to the Woozy Works

At the beginning of December, while S was at work, I hunted down some hazelnuts at the local Fancy Grocery Store. My purpose: to surprise S by baking Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars), the German Christmas cookies that most remind him of home. I toasted the nuts in the oven, then rubbed them between my hands so the bitter husks would drop off. This left my hands delightfully warm and soft, but used up all my baking energy for the day. I swore E to secrecy and hid the toasted hazelnuts in a container in the back of a cabinet. After two weeks, I pulled out the container, thinking I would make the cookies that evening--that rather than the cookies themselves being the surprise, the act of having found and toasted hazelnuts and kept them secret until I could bake the cookies could be the surprise. But S came home before I started baking, our evening turned to other things, and the nuts became snack food rather than cookies.

This morning, I finally pulled out the digital kitchen scale (because Zimtsterne are German cookies and therefore all about mass rather than volume). I supplemented the 239 remaining grams of toasted hazelnuts with 61 grams of raw almonds, weighed out 300 grams of powdered sugar, let four eggs come to room temperature, got sidetracked by a phone call, became further distracted by a text message from E about SAT tests, and took a break to gripe with friends about standardized testing. 

Then I pulverized the nuts in the 20-year-old Cuisinart with the recently recalled defective metal blade, separated the eggs, started whipping the egg whites, and then remembered that the recipe calls for setting aside 2-3 tablespoons of meringue which is NEVER enough. So I added an extra egg white, approximated an appropriate extra amount of powdered sugar, dumped all the sugar into the whipped egg whites WITHOUT sifting and all in one fell swoop rather than ONE f*&%ing TABLESPOON AT A TIME, beat for maybe 5 minutes max instead of 20, added the juice of half a fresh squeezed lemon (the recipe calls for "a few drops"--which, while quaint, are undetectable when facing off with two cups of powdered sugar and five egg whites), beat again, and set aside one cup of meringue.

Then I combined the ground nuts with the meringue and two teaspoons--meh, make that a tablespoon, close enough--of ground cinnamon. The dough was super sticky, as always, with a tendency to spread, as always (even when the recipe is followed to a T), so even though I love my family, I had zero interest in dusting the countertop with ground nuts and/or powdered sugar and pressing out the dough to cut it into stars before gently placing each star on a piece of Back Oblaten (thin flour-starch baking wafers that keep sticky batter from adhering permanently to baking sheets and of which we currently have none). Instead, I tossed a sheet of parchment paper on a baking sheet, spread out the dough, baked it for 20 minutes, took it out of the oven, spread the remaining meringue on top, put it back in the oven, and thought of my great great grandmother Jenny, of whom my grandmother Woozy reminisced fondly:

She analyzed her housework. It was clear that the children had to be fed, even though she was sure that a good and just world would find a more sensible way of doing it. There were some choices. She could mix eggs and flour, salt and water into a dough, hit it firmly on the table a hundred times to develop the gluten, place it in the center of a white tablecloth and gently with the backs of her hands stroking the underside of the dough, run around the table for an hour stretching the most gorgeous strudel dough on the block, and then shell and chop the walnuts, peel and chop the apples, soak seed and chop the raisins, mix in sugar and cinnamon, spread on the dough and dot with butter, roll and bake, but she said it not only killed the whole day but you ended up with a dead head too, so she put a bowl of apples and a bowl of nuts on the table and read Paradise Lost instead.

Pictured below: Zimtsterne 2016, cooling and waiting to be sliced into bars, which rhymes with "stars" and will have to do.

Third generation is the charm: reflections on cherry pie and slide rules

When I was a kid, my siblings and I would ask my mother to tell us bedtime stories about her childhood. "Tell us a story about the Olden Days," we would say, night after night, and she would oblige with sepia-tinted tales about life on the Indiana farm or in Hyde Park, Chicago.

The stories that stuck with me most were wonderful adventures foiled by tragedy, like the time my mom and a friend decided to make a cherry pie, so they picked the cherries from the tree on the farm all by themselves, and they made a pie crust all by themselves, and they filled up that pie crust and baked that cherry pie all by themselves, and then no one in my mom's family would even taste it.

(Years later, when I brought up the story and wondered how her family could have been so callous, she said "oh, didn't I mention that the cherries were full of pits and worms, and I'm sure we didn't add any sugar, and we made the crust from flour and water and it was like grey paste? I didn't even eat any of it." I had somehow deleted all of that in my childhood indignation.)

Then there was the story about when my mother, as a little girl, got her very first helium balloon. This was after World War II, because during the war, all the latex was going to the war effort instead of to wonderful frivolous things like balloons. As she was crossing the street, with the balloon tied safely around her tiny wrist so it wouldn't float away (or so I imagined), that wonderful very first balloon popped. Popped! O cruel fate!

(Years later, after I had a child of my own, my mother observed that unlike my own son, my siblings and I had always cried and cried when balloons popped, and she had never understood what was up with that. I asked how we could not have cried, in light of her poignant story of post-war balloon loss. "It was just a balloon," she said.)

One memorable story was less tragic and less sepia-toned, at least to me if not to my mother. As I remember it, the story went something like this: "once upon a time, long ago in the olden days, when my sweet-sixteen birthday rolled around, I hoped for the usual things a 16-year-old girl wants for a birthday present. A pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or maybe a pony. Something pretty or fun. But I didn't get a pearl necklace, or a new bicycle, or a pony. Instead, my parents gave me a slide rule."

Perhaps I am mis-remembering, and I didn't hear that story until my own sixteenth birthday was approaching. In any case, because my mother has a sense of humor, I too received a slide rule when I turned sixteen: a six-inch long ca. 1936 Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D in a slim leather case. Fifteen months later, when my sister had her sixteenth birthday, she too was gifted with a slide rule ("only because it was tradition," she confirmed last night via email).

My sweet-sixteen Keuffel & Esser Ever-There No. 4097D

I am proud that the coming-of-age slide-rule tradition began with women, passed from my mother, as the first recipient, to her daughters. Family lore does not record whether my mother's brother received a slide rule for his sixteenth birthday, and as far as I know, my older brother's slide rules were not affiliated with his sixteenth. (Yes, "slide rules," plural. He reports, "I think I was given more than one because I think I lost more than one.")

My mother broadened the tradition to include menfolk and rites of passage other than birthdays when I married S. She felt it was important to properly welcome my husband into the family, so she gave him a big, fancy, vintage engineer's slide rule with a sturdy leather holster to call his own: a 14-inch long duplex Engineer's No. 1510 in fashionable plastic-coated bamboo, made in Japan, presumably by Relay/Ricoh, for the US market, no date.

S's hefty Engineer's No. 1510 is more than twice as long and twice as thick as my diminutive Keuffel & Esser Ever-There. Surely there's a Master's thesis waiting to be written about slide rules and gender.

My father was a math professor. He owned a slide rule and knew how to wield it. When I was young, I enjoyed playing with its smoothly gliding bars, but by the time I was old enough that a slide rule could have helped with school math, the world had begun its shift to TI-30s and wasn't looking back.

Neither my sister, my husband, nor I ever learned how to use our slide rules. My sister's probably migrated to my parents' attic decades ago. For the past 20 years, S and I have kept ours in their leather cases, tucked away in a desk drawer (his) and in a box in a closet (mine), unused.

Until last week. My son, just thirteen months shy of his sixteenth birthday, is learning about logarithms at school.

"Logarithms?" I said brightly, when he told me. "Let me show you something."

I opened the top right-hand drawer of our roll-top desk and pulled out his father's marital slide rule. We removed it from its holster, and E and I went online to learn how to use it.

"This is SO COOL," E said, as he figured one square root after another to within two significant digits; "when the power goes out after the Zombie Apocalypse, I can calculate numbers without a calculator! Let's do another!"

He asked why we had such a fascinating object. I told him about his grandmother's sixteenth birthday, how she had wanted a pearl necklace or a new bicycle or a pony, and how she had gotten a slide rule instead, and then I fetched my own sweet-sixteen slide rule.

"That is sooooo cute," he said, picking it up.

"Yeah. It's not as fancy as papa's though," I said.

"But it's really cute. It's so small!," he squeaked in admiration.

I put an arm around my delighted child, pointed to the two slide rules on the table, and quoted from the Woozy Works: "Someday, son," I said, "all this will be yours."

And thus it came to pass that a questionable gift for a bright-eyed girl on the cusp of womanhood almost sixty years ago is finally bearing fruit, two generations later. This metaphorical homemade cherry pie will not just be tasted: to paraphrase Sir Francis Bacon, it will be chewed and digested. And thirteen months from now, my son will receive a slide rule to call his own.

"One day, son, ALL THIS WILL BE YOURS." My grandfather Mitch shows my uncle Bob the splendor of the junk in the barn; from Woozy Works: The Nearly Complete and Mostly Unexpurgated Writings of the Blue Spanch (1996).

Penguins

I did finally get outside this afternoon. I learned that 52^oF is really not all that cold for throwing, especially with a container of hot water from the kitchen. I threw a colony of penguins.

S thought they might benefit from eyeballs.

E informed me that only Emperor penguins are this tall. "Most penguins are only about"--he held his index finger and thumb about two centimeters apart--"this tall. You know that, right?" He knows such things because he had a unit on penguins in Kindergarten and first grade, and probably second grade too. Penguins were very popular at his elementary school; apparently aspect ratios were not as interesting. (For the record, he knows real Emperor penguins are more than 4 inches tall.)

Songs for children

When E was a baby, I made up lots of songs for him, and I notated the cream of the crop in Sibelius 2.0. I've moved on to Sibelius 7.0, and E has moved on to adolescence, but the world around us is still largely the same. Here's the end of one song that we still sing, followed by the beginning of a song I had forgotten entirely about. (If you feel a need to see "Murder, Mayhem, Chaos, Death, and Destruction Makes [sic] Baby Cry" or "Pistachios and Noodles Don't Go Together Well" in their entirety, let me know.)

Men still in Lederhosen*

Same men in same Lederhosen, 27 months later.

*Note that men have slept, eaten, showered, attended work/school, changed clothes, and otherwise gone on with their lives between photo sessions.

Summer recap almost done: Bahston

E, my mom, and I went to Boston in early August to visit my aunt and two of my three cousins on my dad's side. Much time was spent clarifying cousin ordinality and removedness, as E got to know multiple generations of relatives. My cousins are just enough older than me that when I was a kid, I recognized their TOTAL TEENAGE COOLNESS and wished I could be just like them. I'm pretty happy with being me these days, but they're still totally cool, as are their kids.

Last spring, E had a long unit in school on the American Revolution, so our touristy side-trips all had a revolutionary focus. My aunt lives in Lexington, so we visited the Lexington battle green, where the first shots of the revolution were fired on April 19, 1775, and also toured Lexington's historic Buckman Tavern, Munroe Tavern, and Hancock-Clarke House. We saw the reconstructed North Bridge in Concord, and later walked the Freedom Trail from Boston Commons to the USS Constitution (we didn't quite make it to Bunker Hill; next time).

It's impressive how quickly one learns local history when one crams multiple historic sites into three days--and equally impressive how all the details trickle out of one's brain when one doesn't take any notes and then waits almost two months to write about it. Fortunately, the war has been well documented elsewhere, so instead of feeling embarrassed about the lack of detail here, I'll simply insert a handy summary map below, courtesy of the U.S. National Park Service, and hope it sufficiently jogs my memory when I look back at it a few years from now. I did learn that, prescriptive rule-follower that I am, I probably would have been a loyalist rather than a patriot. (Indeed, my inner loyalist saw some worrisome parallels between the so-called patriots of 1775 and those of 2010.) I also learned that it's a bad idea to try to march a militia of 700 sleep-deprived soldiers some 40 miles from Boston to Cambridge overnight. Oh--and that it's difficult to paint arms and legs, so portraits are more expensive if you want those body parts included, i.e. it costs an arm and a leg. (Thanks, swell high school intern tour guide at the Massachusetts State House!)

I didn't take a lot of pix, but here's the cream of the crop. Check out the double and triple exclamation points in this monument from 1799!!! It stands at the side of the Lexington Battle Green!! It reflects the righteous joy of a new nation at having cast off the yoke of British tyranny!!! I love the proud expansiveness of the text ("Built in the year 1799"--how about just "Built in 1799"?), and how divine intervention is implied to have played a role in American victory but not in monument carving (compare "the ever memorable Nineteenth of April, An. Dom. 1775" to "Built in the year 1799"), and how the rules of capitalization clearly hadn't been worked out yet ("The Die was cast!!!"), and  how sometimes letters are replaced by apostrophes even when there's enough space to spell everything out ("They nobly dar'd to be free!!")!!!

This spiffy window is in the ceiling at the Massachusetts State House--a gorgeous building worthy of triple exclamation points, though we didn't see any there.

Here's my beloved child and my beloved mom. Don't they look great?!!

Salt garden update

By day 5, our salt garden had started sending satellite crystals across the kitchen counter.

We could see evidence of the green, blue, and yellow food coloring, but no red.

By day 7, there was as much crystal growth outside the bowl as in it. The blooms were turning dingy grey and starting to crumble, so we rinsed out the sponges and called it a wash (ba-da-bum).

Liquid bluing

Yowza, this has been a busy, busy summer, and I'm way behind on blogging. I have much to write about, but will begin with the most current event: E and I are growing a salt garden.

When I was 12, I had a homework assignment to design and carry out my own science experiment. In browsing books for ideas, I came across instructions for a salt garden, with a recipe for a liquid concoction that, when spooned over cut-up sponges, would bloom into puffs of salt crystals. The recipe called specifically for non-iodized salt. Since most readily-available table salt by then was iodized, a person really had to go out of his or her way to find the non-iodized variety, so I assumed there was a reason the recipe called for it. My experiment involved growing two salt gardens--one iodized and one non-iodized--whereby I discovered that non-iodized salt made no difference except for the challenge of finding a supermarket that carried it.

The even bigger challenge of that experiment involved obtaining another vital ingredient: liquid bluing. Liquid bluing is a colloidal suspension of blue iron powder (ferric hexacyanoferrate) in water, and it was already a rarity in 1979. When I finally tracked some down at a tiny, dimly lit, locally-owned grocery store across town, I became a hoarder: I needed a mere four tablespoons, but I bought two 8-oz. bottles, figuring I might never again have access to this relic of olden-days laundry whitening.

Over the intervening 33 years, every time I moved, I took my two precious bottles of liquid bluing with me, from Urbana to Tucson to Corvallis to Madison to Lawrence and finally to Durham. In Durham, the bottles remained undisturbed for twelve years in a plastic bag in a storage cabinet, until, during a recent cleaning frenzy, I rediscovered them and decided I had guarded them carefully for long enough. It was time to play.

E and I accumulated the other ingredients and on Sunday afternoon, we mixed everything together and started our garden.

Here's what it looked like on Sunday:

And here's what it looked like this morning:

Notice the crystals hanging over the edge of the bowl. They completed their escape this afternoon, and I expect to find them making their way off the countertop later this week.

Happily, we still have nearly two bottles of bluing left, so E can share this experience with his own kid(s) 33 years from now (by which time he will also be conducting an experiment on the stability of ferric hexacyanoferrate suspensions).

Here's the recipe:

4 T salt
4 T liquid bluing
4 T H2O
1 T ammonia

Mix together and distribute over cut up pieces of sponge. For colored crystals, dribble drops of food coloring on the sponges before adding the salt solution.

Learning the classics

Calculus fans that we are, we have learned how to maximize sleep while minimizing our weekday morning routine. S and I get up at 7:45; we wake E up at 7:50 and consent to "just one more minute" before forcing him out of bed at 7:55. He gets dressed ("hurry up dude, it's 8:00!"), brushes his teeth ("hurry up dude, it's five past eight!"), eats a leisurely breakfast ("dude, focus! focus!"), packs his backpack ("yo, dude!"), and slides on his already-tied shoes ("dude, we're going to be late!") in time for us to pull out of the driveway by 8:17. We turn into the school parking lot at 8:27, which gives him three full minutes to walk to his classroom and still be on time. Surely two of those minutes could have been spent sleeping.

The consequence of this carefully honed routine is that E spends the ten-minute drive to school staring vacantly out the car window, while I'm still pumped up on the adrenaline it took to get us out the door. Occasionally we'll exchange pleasantries about the weather or analyze another driver's crappy driving (a gift passed from my father to me and now from me to my son), but usually conversation is minimal. "I'm tired," E explains, when I nudge him to talk. I understand: it takes time to get the mental wheels moving after you've been asleep for 10.5 hours.

Then a school assignment injected some verve into the morning drive: E had to memorize the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, so we learned the Schoolhouse Rock version together, and spent two weeks singing it on the way to school. When we got to the point where we could both recite it without singing, and without pausing after "ensure domestic tranquility-ee-ee-ee [2 3 4]," it was time to move on.

"You need to learn some poetry," I declared. "If you can memorize the preamble, you can learn some poetry."

--"Do I have to?"

"Yes," I said. E still hasn't figured out that he doesn't have to do everything I tell him.

--"No."

"Yes. Do it. It'll be fun!"

--"Uhhh..."

"Here, repeat after me."

I chose a classic to start him off:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
At three o'clock he had his great fall.
The King set his time machine back to two;
Now Humpty's together and good as new.

After two attempts, he had it down. "There, OK, I'm done," he said, and went back to vacant staring.

The next day we moved on to another rhyme from The Space Child's Mother Goose:

Little Jack Horner
Sits in a corner
Extracting cube roots to infinity.
An assignment for boys
To minimize noise
And produce a more peaceful vicinity.

Done. Easy. The next day, it was time to pull out the big guns.

"OK dude," I said, "it's time to learn 'Jabberwocky.'"

--"But I already learned some poems."

"Yes--and they were fun, weren't they? You're doing great! Now you need to learn 'Jabberwocky.' Ready?"

--"No. Why do I need to learn it?"

"Because you know I'm going to recite it over and over again until you try."

By the time we pulled into the school parking lot, he had a good start on the first stanza, but he was still skeptical.

--"So why do I need to learn this?"

"It'll give you something to say at parties when you don't have anything else to say. Trust me, it's very useful."

It only took another two days before he got tired of the stanza-per-day method and zoomed ahead. At home, I showed him the page in my well-worn copy of Through the Looking Glass. Was it any coincidence that the spine had broken in half, years ago, right on that very page? We held it up to a mirror so he could read it, and there was no going back.

Last night, E dug out his cape, built himself a Tum-Tum tree, and hung a Jabberwock from the stairwell. Needless to say, I'm thrilled that he seems to enjoy this most excellent poem as much as I do. Perhaps in a few weeks, he'll be willing to move on to Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout (who would not take the garbage out).

Incidentally, if you listen carefully at the beginning, you might hear the Jabberwock meowing behind the camera.

Dang

No, no, no. This is not what an arm should look like. This arm is wrapped in a splint from the armpit to the palm because the ulna broke on Thursday during an improper alignment of the stars at the bottom of a slide on a school playground immediately following three long, mind-numbingly boring mornings of End-of-Grade exams (boo, evil consequences of No Child Left Behind, I say, boo!). The human to whom this arm belongs is understandably not a happy camper, but is doing better with each day and looks forward to trading the splint for a cast.

Men in Lederhosen

Time flies

E and K have been chasing each other in circles for over seven years, and judging by their smiles, it's still as much fun today as it was in 2003. We'll call them back for another photo shoot in 2017.

I'm not making this up

"Mama?" says E during a quiet moment, "Did you know some kids try to not do what their parents say?"

--"Yeah?" I reply.

"Yeah. But I don't think that's good. I think it's better to listen to parents."

--"Really? How come?"

"Because parents are smarter than kids. Well, not smarter, but parents know more."

I will keep journalistic distance and let this conversation speak for itself, as the gods of Mt. Parenthood frown upon hubris and will toss a thunderbolt at me if I gloat.

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Happy birthday to E, our sunny summer solstice boy.

Before E was born, S and I made a list of potential names. We compared each name's English and German pronunciations. S, for example, liked Leonhard (LEH-n-hardt), but I wasn't a fan of Leonard (LEN-rrd). We had settled on the name Daniel (DAHN-i-el/DaaN-yul) until the night before E's due date, when we realized whatever name we chose would be his forever. We revisited our list and returned the very first name we had written down: E, chosen for the Mendelssohn connection. In our frenzied state, we forgot that while the entire rest of the planet pronounces the name as E*, in the United States, it's E**. Oh well. It was so difficult for the adults at E's first daycare to pronounce his name that they dubbed him E-man, a nickname that has stuck to this day.

Our midsummer lad is proud to know his name derives from that of the Greek sun god, Helios. Indeed, there's a narrative connection between the names Helios and E***, as both traversed the heavens in flaming chariots.

This morning, E stuck Abbey Road into his CD player and soon started singing along: "I'd like to be [dooh-dooh-dooh] under the sea, in an octopus's garden in the shade." There are few things cuter than overhearing your nine-year-old getting down with the classics. Then he sang along with "Here Comes the Sun"--a good song for an E, that's for sure.

Mother's Day

First come the eggs...


Then come the muffins...


Best Mother's Day surprise ever.

When I was a kid, my brother, sister, and I would make my mom dry rice cakes with cold cottage cheese on top--just like she always made for herself, so we knew how much she enjoyed it. E is wiser than I ever was...