Avert Your Eyes (Fingertip Edition)

Oh, gosh! I'm sorry!

Did you not pay see the title of this post and accidentally glance at today's "beauty shot"? (I use that term ironically.) Well, believe me when I say that the assortment of copyright-protected shots of funguses, infections, and other stomach-turning maladies that result from a Google search of "strange fingernails" is even worse than the image you see here.

We are now at T-minus 47 days in the countdown to the Wedding of the Century Part Deux, which means that the speed of Project Mutton Into Lamb is accelerating. (As, obviously, was the usage of capital letters in that previous sentence, for which I apologize.)

The Mother of the Groom dress has been checked off the list, and although I'm not posting any online pictures until the day of the ceremony or thereabouts, suffice it to say that I love it. It is so fancy and princess-y, in fact, that I realized the hands emerging from its sleeves were not up to snuff.

My hands can be charitably described as well-used. They have developed Grandma Veins(TM) and age spots because I'm an overachiever even though I don't have grandchildren and still feel quite young. They have converted years of piano playing and knitting into knobby index knuckles. They have been mistreated (one fingertip crushed by slamming into a Suburban door, another scarred by injudicious use of a cutting tool) and my fingernails are routinely used as screwdrivers, pot scrubbers, back scratchers, weed diggers, and label removers.

But I am optimistic, always, and when a young and beautiful friend said that all my hands needed was a dip manicure, I believed her.

I have never had a manicure in my life. Oh, I've slapped some clear polish on my nails, and when Boy#1 and Lovely Girl were married I asked the woman doing my pedicure to clean up my cuticles, but a full manicure? See the list of things I use my hands for and tell me if that seems like a good investment. (Rabbit trail: Almost every time I am in the nail salon I see teenagers in the salon having full manicures and pedicures. HOW DO THEY AFFORD THIS?)

So last week, when I was in for the every-four-weeks maintenance on my summer feet, I asked the sweet girl who does that job to also give my fingertips a makeover.

"A dip, please," I told her. "I like my nails short, and I'd like a French tip."

Well.

I was the worst manicure subject ever. Even though she warned me to PLEASE STOP MOVING MY HANDS, I apparently have ticklish fingers because every time she grasped a different digit I flinched. By the fifth application of powder and polish I was getting the hang of it but did you know that you can't blow on a dip manicure, or wave it around, or do any of the things you'd normally do to make it dry more quickly when you have already been in the nail shop for upwards of two hours and there are miles to go before you sleep? Poor Kelly was beside herself.

"I CANNOT FIX THEM!" she warned me, probably remembering the number of times I've limped back into the shop after smacking my new pedicure as I got into the car. "THEY WRINKLE!"

So I sat there with my hands quieted, pondering the new reality in which my fingernails wrinkle. It's the logical next step, I guess, since the rest of my body seems to be more Shar-Pei every day.

Five days later, I'm optimistic about my fingertips. My instructions of short plus French tip means they are not exactly what I want to see (a little too much of both of those) but the durability seems excellent. In fact, as I picked baked-on casserole off an under-soaked Pyrex last night I forgot to pamper the nails, and they were still shiny and unchipped when I finished.

Now if I could only do something about those Grandma Veins....

The End of an Era

I knew this morning that I was going to write about the end of an era in our family's life, so I typed "camping" into this blog's search box. This picture came up:

Please, go back and read the post associated with that picture of the five adorable moppets shown above. It explained better than I have room to do here how I feel about the vacations we've taken over the years.

Husband and I were always strongly in favor of family vacations, but we had children rather than hefty bank accounts so there were no trips to Disney World for us--we camped. And beginning on Boy#1's second birthday (when Boy#2 was four months old), our camper always was a pop-up trailer.

First we borrowed my parents' little pop-up, and made The Trip From Hell, a 16-day, 12-state ordeal during one of the hottest, dryest summers in United States history. Despite this trip (during which I recall sobbing gratefully when Husband suggested we spend the final night in a hotel) a few years later we bought a second-hand trailer that was heavy and clunky but slept all six of us.

And 18 years ago, we bought the trailer you see above.

It felt as if we'd moved from the Motel 6 to the Waldorf Astoria. Air conditioning. A curtained-off toilet and shower*. Queen-sized beds. Hot water. An outdoor faucet for clean-up after outdoor days.

I loved this trailer. As you read back through this blog you'll find entries about a trip to Colorado in the summer and a long weekend at a Kansas lake in the fall. You'll hear me talk about the year we visited every site documented in the Little House books, and another year when we drove to all of the historic forts in Kansas. I hope I properly documented how much I loved waking up in the night and hearing a gentle wind just outside the screen next to my face, and stretching just a little to see the stars, and sitting in a camp chair under pine trees as I read my book.

But empty nesting meant we took the trailer out less and less frequently, and not at all in the past two years. Trips to see Boys living in four different states took priority over de-winterizing and re-winterizing for the odd weekend we might be able to use it. And frankly, we could afford the cost of non-camping vacations more easily than we could during those full-house years so we began to rely on hotels and AirBnB. It made no sense to let the camper sit idle and deteriorate through inactivity.

So last Saturday we got the trailer out of storage and cranked it up. I took pictures and posted them on the Facebook page of a local bluegrass festival, and less than 24 hours later the trailer was no longer ours.

We're glad it sold quickly, to Small Town friends who will use it often and lovingly. But it's a bittersweet moment, a full stop ending to an activity we love. It is a sign that we are getting older: Camping is often physically difficult, and the distance to the bathhouse seemed to stretch every year.

In many ways, though, it's like mourning the end of having toddlers in the house. I only remember how much I loved their sweet-smelling heads and tender hugs. I forget the emotional constancy and sheer never-ending work mothering toddlers requires.

I remember the excitement of getting on the road but I forget the undercurrent of tension that accompanied every single second of pulling a trailer up a mountain and wondering if all the hitches and tires and cooling systems would bear up under the load. I remember the playing-house feeling of cooking on the camp stove but I forget how often I tamped down worry when we pulled into a campground where signs warned that bears could be lurking between my children and the bathhouses. I remember reading aloud to the Boys after they were tucked into bed but I forget that I constantly walked the line between letting the Boys explore and play, and keeping them safe from campfires and critters.

And that's okay.  It's fine that I forget the downside of camping and only the parts I loved. I hope I do that with all my memories.

It's the end of an era, and that era was wonderful.

*None of us ever used that toilet or shower, because the entire world is a toilet when you're a boy, and if you think I was going to entrust my privacy to a tiny curtain separating me from the sleeping child 18 inches away then you do not know me well at all.

All's Fair

Check-in. Easy-peasy, and free!

The last time I entered anything in the county fair I was, if I recall, 13 years old. I was a 4-H member until I got into high school, and mid-summer fair was the highlight of the 4-H year.

My memories of those days are still vivid after more years than I want to admit but the emotions are decidedly mixed. The adrenaline rush of the last few days leading up to the fair as we finished hemming sewing projects and weaving in loose ends of sweaters. The excitement of seeing our market hogs in their pens. The panic when cookies did not come out the way they should and WE ARE OUT OF FLOUR. The heartbreak when the market hogs we had tamed and groomed and bonded with were loaded out to the packing house after the fair.

Maybe that's why in all those many, many years I didn't even consider entering anything in the fair again.

A couple of weeks ago, though, the owner of our wonderful Local Yarn Store suggested that her Facebook followers enter some of their work at the fair. She knew Small Town is full of knitters but the number of open class entries doesn't reflect our presence.

"Did you know that any one in the world can enter?" she posted. "It is also nice to show the public that knitting, crocheting and weaving is NOT a dying art that is only popular with the older generation! Let’s inspire new stitchers..."

Well. 

I have often described myself as a willing semi-competent in most areas of life. I'm not the best piano player, but if someone asks me to play I never say no. I'm not a very good cook, but if I'm asked to take cookies to the hospital auxiliary sale, I do.

I'm not a terribly good knitter, but...well, okay. I could enter something at the fair.

I gathered up a couple of projects I'd finished during the past year, plus a couple that were slightly older (anything made within the past five years is eligible) and headed down to the fairgrounds. It was a prep time of, maximum, 10 minutes. Check-in itself (which I remembered as being an all-day, anxiety-fraught ordeal) took an additional 10 minutes, and it only took that long because I hadn't pre-registered. Within minutes I had two shawls, a sweater, and a baby blanket entered.

There were all kinds of handcrafts in the open (non-4-H) class, with entrants from pre-teens to octogenarians. There were sewing projects, embroidery, crochet, cross-stitch, woodworking, and a wall of gorgeous quilts.

And you know what? Once again my willing semi-competentence was rewarded. There were only a few dozen knitted items and...

Hey! That's my shawl with the blue ribbon on it!

And this is my other shawl with another blue ribbon on it!

And this is my hand holding the prize money I was handed for being awarded two blues, a red, and a white!

You could have knocked me over with a feather. In fact, speaking of feathers, my face looked much like this:

He (she?) also received a blue ribbon, which just goes to show that I have no clue how to judge a chicken.

But the judge who left comments on my entries (and noted, correctly, that I should take a little more time with the hated weaving-in process) was so encouraging that I'll be grabbing some new items  and entering again next year.

Once again willing semi-competence proves to be a rewarding lifestyle.

Hmmm....maybe I could embroider that on a sofa pillow and enter it next year?

Please Read This One

If you have read this blog for any length of time you know that the vast, vast majority of the 1,145 posts that have gone up in this space are fluff. With the exception of the times I talk about how I have won life's lottery in every way that counts, they are instantly (and deservedly) forgotten. I try hard to avoid injecting my political views into this safe space.

Today I'm making an exception because I want to make a point. That point it this:

The legitimate news media is not your enemy. 

I would never have believed I'd ever have to write that sentence when I graduated from college with a journalism degree just after the Watergate era. Remember those days? When Woodward and Bernstein were heroes to all Americans, not just to me?

But then this happened:

And this:

Of all the ways I have been shocked by this president (and there have been many), this may be the worst because it demonstrates such a blatant ignorance of the purpose of journalism:

"The purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing." 

I didn't come up with that--it's the thesis of the classic textbook written by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel that was used in the introductory course in journalism I led at Small College last year. Kovachs and Rosenstiel went on to identify the essential elements and practices of journalism.  I won't list all of them here, but the very first is that journalism's primary obligation is to the truth, and the profession's first loyalty is to citizens.

Did you get that?

Journalists, true journalists, have a responsibility to tell the truth so that people can be free and self-governing, and their first loyalty is to citizens. Not to any political party, not to any politician, not to any corporation or special interest group, and certainly not to themselves.

The essence of journalism, Kovachs and Rosenstiel added, is a discipline of verification. Journalists absolutely must find legitimate sources and verifiable background for the stories they produce.

That's why I re-posted the placard shown above on my Facebook page over the weekend. While I would have worded it a bit more elegantly ("ick" to the non-agreement between subjects and verbs) its sentiment is spot on. And it almost immediately provoked this response:

"Not too many good journalists left."

I wanted to cry.

The response was from a dear woman in my church, one who's kind and thoughtful. One who believes there are not many good journalists left, because she has been told that in uninformed and dangerous tweets.

Journalists, real journalists, are committed to the truth in the same way doctors are committed to healing. What if the president had decided to turn his platform toward doctors? Would his followers give up modern medicine? Or if he'd decided to belittle pilots, would they quit flying?

Of course, I know that what may appear to be legitimate sources of news often are not. Just as there are quack doctors in the medical profession, there are irresponsible journalists in the media who need to be weeded out. Also, social media was a truth-killer even before the Russians got involved. But there are legitimate journalistic sources of truth that can help us be free and self-governing.

I am linking here a chart that is helpful in finding legitimate news sources, journalists who seek out verifiable truths. It is copyrighted, so I can't embed it, but please, please, please click over and find out if what you are reading is someone's opinion or real journalism. Not only does it analyze which media base their reporting on facts backed up by legitimate sources and information rather than relying on commentaries and opinions, it lists which news outlets skew conservative and which skew liberal so you can look for sources that don't make your blood pressure rise. (Husband is a Wall Street Journal guy and I am BBC and NPR so we have some interesting discussions, but they are based on truth.)

There was a reason the founders of our nation included freedom of the press among the most crucial elements of their constitution. They knew that power is seductive, and that speaking truth to power is the only way to keep freedom alive. They knew that the first thing potential dictators do is attempt to take control of the media. (One of the measures of a democracy is whether it has freedom of the press.) 

I can only imagine they would be aghast to see what we've come to:



It is sad.

It is scary.

And it is dangerous.

What I'm Doing On My Summer Vacation

My Mother of the Groom Dress (Oh, settle down. Not really.)

Over the weekend one of my oldest and dearest friends sent me a picture of herself with two hiking buddies. They live in Alaska so the picture was gorgeous, shot in a field of wildflowers with mountains rising in the background.

"I went hiking this week with friends, ALL older than me.  The woman in the middle of our threesome in the photo turned 77 years old this week!  She kept up with all of us, and in fact on a boulder field I had trouble keeping up with her as we stretched, leaned, shifted weight, balanced, etc.  She is amazing. What a role model as this summer I find myself making age excuses for why I might be doing less…"

Well.

Where should I start about my summer? Outside of our Boston adventure I have been...well, shall we describe my lifestyle as "focused"?

Yes, that word works. Except the entire focus has been on me, me, me. Here's what I replied to O&D Friend:

Holy cow! That's amazing. Congratulations on finding the most picturesque spot in North America to take a shot AND coordinating your friends and outfits to match. 

I am doing way less strenuous work than that: I haven't started my accompanying gig yet so I'm taking advantage of a true summer vacation by knitting and binge-ing Netflix. So far I've finished a shawl and the entire "Midsomer Murders" series. (So very sad about finishing MM--each episode felt like spending a day or two in England and whenever I think of that possibility the angels sing, although Midsomer seems like a very dangerous place to live. So many options of how to be dispatched.)

Oh, and I've spent an inordinate amount trying to become beautiful. Our part in the Wedding of the Century Part Deux is obviously limited, since we're (a) not the parents of the bride, and (b) not there. So we sent a check ("Spend it any way you want!") and our best wishes, and I've channeled all other impulses into personal primping.

So far I've found a dress (finally, after having four different options lined up and hanging from the closet door), had custom trays made for teeth whitening, tried out a new pedicure technique, and spent several hours net-shopping and muttering "Hat or fascinator? Hat or fascinator?" before having the groom tell me that probably "neither" was the correct option. 

(A side note: I am a little concerned about whether I have made the right choice of dresses. You know that I hate, hate, hate shopping. Husband took me to the mall last week and after two hours I was walking the dangerous line between cranky and catatonic. The love of my life observed that his mother was a better shopper than I am up until about three weeks before her death at age 92. And yes, we are still married, but only because he then bought me an expensive dress.)  

Because much of my dress shopping was done online my search engine now defaults to "Mother of the Bride Dresses" and a few days ago today's beauty shot was the first result. I think Google has me pegged. Do I wear that with a hat or a fascinator? 

Anyway, I am absolutely sincere when I say I am so proud of you, O&D. That friend who's 77 has nothing on you--you just haven't lived that long yet. 

And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a trip to the yarn store planned and those British crime procedurals aren't going to watch themselves. 

I believe I'll put on my Mother of the Groom dress and be comfy. 

Ta-ta, and watch out for butlers bearing Roman swords!

QUACK-QUACK!

(Yup. It's still Boston.)

I have done a fair amount of travel in my life, from the days when my parents took their five children to the edges of the United States in a 1948 school bus that had been converted into a camper (and now you know why they're my heroes), to my stint in the Peace Corps, to the dozen years we spent herding the Boys through any museum near where we'd set up the pop-up camper. (Little known fact: Any space can be called a museum, and many of these "museums" are strangely mesmerizing. Barbed wire anyone?)

But because I was often traveling with a tribe, travel activities tended to be limited to the low-cost option--the self-guided tours, the campgrounds, the historic sites.

I had never been on a Duck Tour.

Now, though, I can cross that off my bucket list. Our recent trip to Boston included a city/water tour on one of these amphibious buses, and it was a hoot. To know why this was so much fun, though, you need to know that a primary reason for this Boston vacation was to meet Boy#2's future in-laws.

We have known Two's Lovely Girl for some time now, and she is enchanting. Smart, funny, beautiful, she is the perfect other half to our smart, funny, handsome son. In fact, she is so wonderful that it was a little intimidating to meet her parents. What kind of human beings raise the kind of daughter who can not only fit in at TWO Ivy League colleges but also in the House on the Corner?

That Tuesday when we met J. and L. we found the answer to that question. Her energy? Her intelligence? Her effervescence? Turns out they're genetic.

So when her mom suggested we go on a Duck Tour, then made that event happen, it wasn't surprising but it was delightful. It was so much fun, in fact, that the only picture I remembered to take was a shot of the Lovely Girl herself taking a picture of our replica World War II landing craft.

Today's beauty shot was taken right before we piled on the bus/boat and joined what seemed like dozens of other Ducks rolling through Boston. It was the perfect getting-to-know-you activity, even though the sheer volume of the tour and the fact we were sitting on different bus benches meant the parents of the groom didn't talk much to the parents of the bride. But we gawked at the Boston sights together, and laughed at the corny conDucktor (tm), and screamed QUACK-QUACK at the other Ducks when we passed on the streets.

When we piled back off North End Norma at the end of the tour, it felt as if we were one joyful, raucous, face-splittingly corny shared experience deep into this new world of shared family, and joyful, raucous, and corny are among my favorite descriptors of any family.

Quack-quack, everyone. This is going to be fun.

America's Test Kitchen Is My New Happy Place

(These posts about our week in Boston are in no particular order--kind of like my life right now.)

When I was in labor with our first Boy, Husband was my labor coach. At one point, in an effort to help me relax and save the fingers on his right hand (which I was in the process of crushing) he urged me to think of a happy place. "Vermont!" he told me. "Think of Vermont!" And the thought of the  cow-dotted New England landscape did help, although not as much as the epidural that came a bit later.

Anyway, after 32 years I have a new happy place: America's Test Kitchen.

Since this is my true confession medium, I admit that I am not one of those who have watched every episode of this public television show since it started in 2001. I didn't discover ATK (as we groupies call it) until Boy#3 found the Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe, and even then I skirted around the edges of devotion. But then I discovered Cook's Illustrated magazine (one of ATK's publications), which may be the most beautifully practical magazine ever, and...well, I haven't been such a fan-girl of anything since Here Come the Brides. 

With the exception of my dinner rolls and chocolate sheetcake I have always been been a mediocre-at-best cook and sadly, one does not live on bread and cake alone. America's Test Kitchen made me not only feel like I could be a good cook, they made me feel like I wanted to cook.

So when I knew we were going to Boston, and knew ATK would be so close that I could practically wake up and smell the (scientifically engineered, perfectly brewed) coffee, I really, really, really wanted to tour that facility. Sadly, they do not give public tours. But I'd had occasion to be in contact with the lovely Kelsey, one of the moderators of the the ATK Facebook group, so I messaged her to ask if there was any chance we could come peek through the windows.

"Sure!" she wrote back "I have some time Thursday afternoon. Would that work?"

Commence fan-girl squealing.

The rest of this post is going to have a lot of pictures, so if you don't have the time to look at everything I found fascinating, this is the bottom line: America's Test Kitchen lived up to every hope and expectation I had. Kelsey and her sidekick, Sarah, were the perfect ambassadors for ATK, and along with every person we met there made me want to go live in that building on the seaward side of Boston.

I mean, check out today's beauty shot. That is Kelsey (in the pink) and Sarah beside the Take-Home Fridge. After recipes are tested and rated, leftovers are put in this refrigerator and anyone who works there can TAKE THAT WONDERFUL FOOD HOME. I used to take the stub end of notebooks home for scrap paper when there were no longer enough pages for story notetaking--imagine if those notebooks had been crab cakes, or brownies, or Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookies. Aaaaaah.

Or there's this:

The recipe development area is a huge room with the kinds of equipment you'd expect to find in a test kitchen--walls lined with refrigerators, individual work stations--except this huge room had something not found in other test kitchens. Lan Lam.

Yes. This cooking star was RIGHT THERE developing a recipe for a better French toast! And as she saw our little group coming around the corner, she stopped and told us about her process. It involves finding five or so "old" recipes, trying them out to see what she likes and doesn't like about those recipes, modifying, cooking, comparing to previous versions, modifying some more, cooking again, comparing, repeat, repeat, repeat. The newest iteration was almost there--she liked its texture and taste, but she wasn't satisfied.

"Want to try some?" she asked. Uh, yes, we believe we would!

Those are my teeth-marks in the toast.

For the record, Lan's going in the right direction. Husband, Boy#2, Lovely Girl, and I agreed that the improved version is fluffier and richer-tasting, even though Lan didn't think it was perfect yet. When she gets done, she'll not only know the new recipe is better, she'll know why. Test kitchens, folks. It's science.

But all of our drooling at ATK was not over the lovely food. If you're a foodie yourself, take a look at this:

An entire rack of Le Creuset Dutch ovens. This piece of equipment won its category in the ATK equipment review, but is pricier than my occasional use would justify. I was delighted to see a more familiar friend:

Cuisinart 14-cup food processor. 

Just last week Amazon had delivered my new food processor, which replaced one I'd had for decades and finally pushed too far into a broken chopping blade. The one I ordered had been the top one in the ATK equipment review, and was far from the most expensive.

"We use the same equipment here that we recommend to home cooks," Kelsey told us. "We want them to be able to duplicate what we do and they can't do that if all we're using are commercial products."

As this rack of burned bread indicates, toasters are in the current test cycle. And what happens to the test equipment after the ratings are done? It goes into the Christmas party raffle, and whether you're a star or a dishwasher you could take home a high-end mixer or espresso machine. Ho, ho, ho!

Personally, I'd rather take home the staff. Three full-time dishwashers are responsible for keeping the pots and pans and other cooking accoutrements clean and organized. Also, full-time shoppers make sure all ingredients are purchased, bagged, and sorted for distribution to each tester.

Is this heaven?

"You can sometimes tell what they're working on by what's in the baskets," Kelsey told us.

And of course, the recipe and equipment testing is only background material for the real product--information distributed in three magazines (America's Test Kitchen, Cook's Illustrated, Cooks's Country), on television and YouTube, and in dozens of cookbooks.

We were practically still licking our chops from the delicious French toast when Lan was already preparing for a live question-and-answer session for online subscribers.

There were rooms filled with equipment and photo props, much the same equipment and photo props I have at home albeit not in the same multiples.

There were homey-looking studios and pristine pantries.

Better than the facilities or the food, though was the pride everyone we met seemed to take in their work. Kelsey will be transitioning to a different part of the company soon (she'll be working with a new initiative for kids) but it was obvious that she delighted in this work, including going out of her way to give these Kansas tourists a Boston highlight. Soon ATK hopes to make public tours a regular event, she said.

And when we left, she congratulated Two and Lovely Girl on their upcoming wedding--and handed them something for their new life together.

A week later Husband and I are still marveling at the people, the kindness, the calm, the beauty, the food of America's Test Kitchen.

It's my new happy place.