Ingredients:

lasagna noodles (uncooked)
3 1/2 cups spaghetti sauce
1 cup sliced mushrooms (canned or fresh)
1 green pepper, diced
1 large onion, diced
2 cans black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can corn, drained
Swiss cheese
cheddar cheese
mozzarella cheese
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon cilantro
1 teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon garlic powder

What to do:

Grease a large rectangular pan. Preheat your oven to 350. Cover the bottom of the pan with uncooked lasagna noodles.

In a large bowl, combine everything except the noodles, cheese, and sauce, and mix well.

Spoon half the mixture over the noodles; cover with half the sauce and half the cheeses. (Cheese layer will be thick-ish)  Put another layer of noodles over the cheeses.

Spoon the rest of the mixture over the second layer of noodles; cover with the rest of the sauce.

Bake for 30 minutes; remove from oven and add the rest of the cheese. Return to oven and bake for another 15 minutes.

Eat up.

Oh, and thanks for asking!  You’ve made me very happy.

Put the following in a large bowl and set aside:

3 tablespoons cocoa
3 cups quick-cook oats
Huge blob of peanut butter (my kids liked lots of peanut butter in the cookies) (use less according to your own taste; the recipe actually says 1/3 C.)
2 teaspoons vanilla

Put the following in a medium-sized saucepan:

2 cups white sugar
1/2 cup milk
6 tablespoons butter or margarine

Bring to boil, stirring constantly. Once mixture begins to boil, cook one full minute (watch the clock hands; don’t overcook!) and then remove and pour over mixture in the big bowl. Mix well.

Place on waxed paper by spoonfuls.
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I made these cookies a lot when my kids were little because A. they were really fast and easy and I didn’t have to heat up the oven in the summertime, B. they contain oats, milk, and peanut butter, which by my mind constituted a nutritious breakfast, and C. I like them too.

If you let them boil past a minute, they get harder. (not an intentional innuendo.)

I got this cookie recipe out of a little hand-made cookbooks of recipes the children had liked over the course of the year that Andy brought home from PreSchool when he was three years old. His teacher was constantly making and sending home helpful things like that; I still use many of them, and I really appreciated, and STILL appreciate, her thoughtfulness in going that extra mile. (I still put all the little ornaments with his picture on them, that she made for each of her tiny students every Christmas, on our tree.) I thanked her each time then, and here’s still another ‘thank you’ twenty-some years after the fact. Thank you, Karen, for taking such good care of my little boy so long ago. I think of you every time I get down this little orange cookbook, held together with blue yarn, with his tiny handprint on the inside front cover, and full of easy, inexpensive, mostly nutritious, and tasty recipes. My son loved you, and this made it easier to drop him off every morning.

I ain’t sentimental or anything.

Y’all enjoy those cookies now.

There are, of course Twelve Actual Rules of Christmas, according to the law, and in case you don’t know what they are and have intentions of storming the school or business that’s maliciously ignoring your rights as a Christian/Jew/Catholic/Protestant/Wiccan/Pagan/Atheist/Order of Elfland/Kisser of Mother Earth’s Backside, etc, perhaps y’all should take a glance at the law concerning such matters.

. . . interrupting my Christmas Eve blues (it’s almost here, which means it’s almost over!), my wallowing in Love Actually, my longing for visits from family, my worry about family members who are ill, my total digging (hippie language) of the White Christmas Blizzard happening outside as I type, and my dread of taking down all my holiday decorations in a week or so, with another version of the  Twelve Rules of Christmas, just for you:

1.  Christmas is always better than you thought it would be, even if it’s not.

2.  Christmas brings people together, even if it’s by contrast and not comparison.

3.  Christmas gifts made by childish hands are the best.  Christmas gifts FOR a child are even better.

4.  Christmas dinner is always great, even if it’s frozen pizza.  Because it’s Christmas.

5.  No one is alone on Christmas unless he/she chooses to be alone.  There are just too many places to go or to volunteer, to stay at home or in one’s room and whine.  Feeling left out?  Put on your coat and drive to the soup kitchen/homeless shelter, etc.  If being needed and appreciated is what you’re after – and who isn’t? – head for places where you’re definitely needed and genuinely appreciated.  It’s your own fault if you’re alone and sad at Christmas, or any other time, actually.

6.  Every Christmas tree is beautiful.

7.  Every wrapped package under the tree is beautiful, especially the ones wrapped by inept fingers.

8.  Christmas M&M’s taste better than ordinary M&M’s.  Ditto Christmas Snickers and Christmas Reese’s Trees.

9.  Christmas fruitcakes make great footballs, doorstops, and stories for next year, unless you actually like to eat fruitcake, in which case, bon appetit.  Watch your teeth.  And what exactly are those green slimy things?

10.  Christmas trees often bring the outdoors inside for our pets, ifyouknowwhatImean.

11.  Christmas season begins too soon and ends too quickly.

12.  The proper and polite response to “Merry Christmas” is “Thank you,” even if you do not believe in it.  Rudeness is always a choice, and it’s never appropriate to throw someone’s well-wishes back into his/her face.  If you’re insulted by someone’s wishing you well, keep it to yourself.  Charming Fairylit Woodland Seasonal Solstice Nothingness Greetings to you, too.  (Thank you.)

I’ve watched Love Actually three times this Christmas week, and I might have to give it another couple of viewings to get the sentiment and emotion out of my system.  Otherwise, I might be like Rebecca Randall’s Aunt Jane, so soft and sentimental it’s a wonder I don’t leak out the doorsill.*  It’s been suggested before.

Just to hear the music. . . . That soundtrack – it’s blazingly fantastic.  Fantastic, and, well, lovely.  Just lovely.

Excuse me.  I have to go mop myself up off the floor before all of me oozes under the door and out onto the yard.

If you haven’t ever seen Love Actually, what the bloody hell is WRONG with you!!! oh dear Lord, watch it now.  Be aware, however, that it’s not exactly family friendly in a few scenes.  Watch it late at night, with someone you love.  Or all by yourself in your kitchen whilst making homemade bread and fudge and trying not to weep copious tears into the dough.

P.S.  #13.  Christmas is a time for family and friends, and it’s so magically wondrous when they come to visit!  I can believe in God when I’m with family.  Without them, it can be difficult.

*Bonus points if you understand the reference.

Mamacita says: By request (ask, and ye shall receive) here is the persimmon pudding recipe again.

Persimmons don’t grow in too many places, so chances are good that most of you have never heard of them.  However, southern Indiana is a persimmon tree’s favorite home, and the trees grow healthy and prolific here.  My fantastic and generous Cousin C gives me persimmon pulp, fresh from her parents’ back yard.

Hint:  Don’t EVER taste a green persimmon, unless you like the sensation a blast of raw alum gives to your lips and tongue.  Persimmons must be ripe before they can be used.  VERY ripe. Asking someone you’re mad at to just “touch your tongue to this green persimmon for a second” is a fun, albeit cruel (depending on the age of the taster) trick to play on someone. Raw alum on the tongue. Yum. It’s a sensation vaguely akin to being turned inside out by the tongue.

Hoosiers can be very protective and possessive of their persimmon pudding recipes, but I’m not.  People have been asking me for it, so here it is:

Jane’s Persimmon Pudding

First of all, preheat your oven to 325 degrees.  NO HOTTER.

Get out a very large bowl.

Put the following ingredients in it:

2 C. persimmon pulp (Use fresh or frozen; the canned stuff is terrible.)

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1  1/2 C sugar (I use Splenda)

1 C brown sugar (don’t use fake)

1  1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt (don’t leave it out!!!!)(don’t use fake salt, either.)

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

2 C flour

2  1/2 C  evaporated milk (not sweetened milk)

1/4 stick butter (not merely oil)

Put everything in that large bowl and mix thoroughly.  Use an electric mixer if you don’t think you can get it blended by hand. Get the lumps out.

Pour mixture into a large buttered baking pan.

Put the pan in the oven.  Set your timer for 60 minutes.

After the timer goes off, stick a toothpick in the center of the pudding.  Clean?  It’s done.

Let it cool just enough to slice.  Most people like to top it with whipped cream.  Non-Hoosiers often sprinkle nuts on it.

You can also add coconut or pecans or cocoa to the mixture, but then it’s not Hoosier Persimmon Pudding.  Your call.

Eat up.

Every Christmas morning, he would sloooowly set up the monster lights that burned so hot and so brightly, they half-blinded us and heated up the whole house.

Then he would slooowly position himself with the camera, so as to get the best shot of his children running into the glittering magical room.

Then he would put the camera down and go get some toast and a bottle of RC.

Then he would come back into the room and sloooowly pick up the camera again, focus it, and finally, finally, he would say,

Okay, kids, come on in!

And four kids, pumped as high on anticipation and magic as kids can be, came running into the room. We stopped short at the sight: that huge sparkling tree, and whatever Santa Claus had brought it, displayed (unwrapped) around the wrapped presents that had been tantalizing us for two or three days.  (My parents put up the tree a few days before Christmas, and took it down the day after.)

Everything we got was always a complete and total surprise. We never snooped into closets or under beds, like some kids did, because, well, why would we do that? It all came from Santa Claus, and he brought it all fresh and new on Christmas Eve, straight from his workshop in the North Pole! It had nothing whatsoever to do with my parents; all they did was unlock the front door before they went to bed, so Santa could get into the house.

We didn’t have a chimney, and that worried us ’till Mom explained that Santa just came in through the front door of houses that had no chimneys, and that he was glad not to have to balance the sleigh and reindeer on the roof sometimes.

Dad was as much of a little kid as we were, at Christmas. He would lie underneath the tree, shaking and feeling every present, and guessing its contents. He was good at it, too. When we were a little older, we used to put marbles in his present so it would make a noise and possibly throw him off the track. It didn’t usually work. He knew the sound of marbles rolling around wrapped socks.

When Dad was a little boy, they were poor, poor unto destitution, but his mother usually managed one present for each of her many children at Christmas. One year, however, there just wasn’t anything to be had. On Christmas morning, my dad found a pair of hand-me-down overalls under the tree.

He was just a tiny little boy, and he went out on the back steps and cried. His father, who was a terrible mean violent man, went out there and found him. Dad cringed, expecting the worst, but instead, his father reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver dollar. He gave it to Dad, explaining that Santa had meant it for Dad but had forgotten to put a name on it. Sometimes, the most unexpected things will come from the least likely person.

I think that was why Dad was such a kid at Christmas. When he WAS a kid, there wasn’t much of one.

I think that was why Dad wanted to make it last as long as possible. He made us stand back in the hallway on Christmas morning as long as he could, to make it last longer. I think he also knew that the anticipation is the best part.

Dad had his faults. Who among us doesn’t? Some of his faults were pretty bad, too. But whatever they were, they disappeared at Christmastime, because at Christmastime, he became a little kid with the rest of us.

This meant Mom had the burden of being the planning adult, but we didn’t realize any of the family politics at the time. And that, too, was as it should be.

When Dad died, Tim  and I took all the dozens and dozens for reels of 8mm film and had them made into VHS tapes for all of us. The tapes even had a soundtrack. They were wonderful. He’s working now on transferring everything to DVD, and after that, I suppose whatever technology rears its awesome head.

When I look at those early tapes, I see my parents, younger than my children, looking for all the world like a couple of teenagers, pretending. Except that they weren’t pretending, they really were a couple of early twenty-somethings who were in charge of our house. It’s almost incomprehensible.

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve Day, my favorite day of the year, more favorite even than Christmas Day or Christmas Eve night. Christmas Eve day is a day of action, of baking and last-minute cleaning, of waiting for my children to arrive home, of delivering homemade bread to my aunts and to my cousins and to friends. On Christmas Eve day, the house smells like baking bread and cinnamon and vanilla, and the aromas do not come from candles.

On Christmas Eve night, the preparations and planning cease and the participation and celebration begins. But for me, the real fun of Christmas is these few days right before, because I love the preparation and the planning and most of all, the anticipation. Maybe this is because, even while standing in my new pajamas behind the door in the little hallways with my sisters and my brother, prancing with excitement, I really relished the ‘it’s all still before us’ thing, without realizing what it was.

Now. Slow motion. Four kids in new pajamas running into a magical room where only a few hours before, Santa Claus had been. Christmas dollies, smelling of new untouched plastic. The new-dolly smell is every bit as good as new-car smell!!! Stockings, always with an orange in the bottom because Santa cared about our health, but really to take up a lot of room. Slow motion, because our memories so often are. That’s why movie flashbacks sometimes begin in slow motion.  When Dad would bring out the 8mm projector and start showing films, it was a genuinely thrilling thing.  That was US, up there on the glittery screen!  Watching those films helped prime our memories.

Nowadays, a child’s entire life is on film, but back then, only “moments” were filmed.

Real life goes FAST. Let’s all try to see it clearly the first time around, so we don’t have to see only in memory’s slow motion what we should have seen as it happened.  Every second is a “moment.”  Look at each other and what’s happening so you can remember; let that library of videos be a memory-primer, not a file cabinet of toilet training.

Merry Christmas, dear precious Blog-friends. Merry Christmas, and may your lives be full of wonder and enchantment on this day, and always.

This semester, I will have to say that most of my students have been exceptionally fine.  Lovely, hard-working, sincere people who genuinely want to improve themselves, so they can improve their job status, so they can improve their way of life, so their children’s lives will be improved.

Throughout my career, I have always loved and respected most of my students, and deeply resented the fact that the majority of the perks and money and attention and programs seem to go to the students who least deserve them, while those who most deserve them are expected to get by on their own.  I will always resent this fact.  The fact that it’s a fact is completely unacceptable to me, and I will work until I die to get this unreasonable fact changed.  I doubt this will happen in my lifetime, however, so I am counting on YOU to work hard to change it, too.  The lowest common denominator does NOT deserve the highest amount of praise, programs, and cash.

I never forget any of my students, but there are always a handful of students I don’t want to lose track of, either.  There are always students who are too good to lose.   I followed my middle school students through high school and college (not the creepy stalking follow: the interested concerned follow)  and often went to their weddings, graduations, etc.  Now, while some of my students are just out of high school, and, indeed, some of them are the same students I had back in the middle school, most of my students are approximately my age or older, and after I’m finished being their professor, sometimes I want to be their friend.

You know, I can close my eyes and see group after group of students.  I remember where they sat.  I remember things they said.  I remember essays they wrote.  I remember their circumstances.  I can remember positive things about most of them.  Others, well, sometimes I have to try harder to think of something positive. 

I don’t think it’s enough for a teacher to be smart and knowledgeable about his/her subject.  Yes, those things are important, but they’re not enough.

To be a good and effective teacher, I think a person must be smart, knowledgeable, and genuinely interested in the students.  As a professor, I am bound by certain rules, but I am not imprisoned by them.  If a person in authority does not know when and how to bend a rule, that person has no business having authority.

Because, you see, there are times to be inflexible, and there are times to make allowances.  Knowing the difference can be the difference between a teacher and a machine.  One has a mind and a heart, and the other can only spew out what’s been programmed into it.  I have no desire to be (or have, for that matter) a bread machine.  I prefer to get my hands dirty and my fingernails crusty  (Eat up. Yum.)

One of my fears is that our drilled, re-drilled, prepped, re-prepped, tested, and re-tested students are going to become so out of practice and out of synch and out of even simple acquaintance with their minds and hearts, that they’ll turn into machines.  Even now, our kids are pretty good at making their marks heavy and dark with a #2 pencil, but not so good on understanding WHY a certain answer is correct and another isn’t.  Without the understanding, what do we really have?

We have machines.  Bewitched, Bothered Machines,  bullies, and a lot of bewilderment.

To quote Mr. Horse:  I don’t like it.  No, sir, I don’t like it at all.

(WHAT?  You don’t know Mr. Horse?  This is unacceptable.  Go find out, right NOW!)

Knowledge is knowledge.

Mamacita says:  My family always knew when  I’d had a particularly rough day in the public school;  almost the very minute I got home, I would get out the ginorous stainless steel bowl and start throwing flour, yeast, sugar, salt, butter, eggs, and milk in  it.   Then, I’d set it on the stove top – no burners turned on! – and wait for an hour.

An hour later, the mixture would have risen to the very tippy-top of that huge bowl.  Then came the therapy.

I would sprinkle flour over my very scrubbed kitchen table, turn the dough onto it, give it a name, and beat the shit out of it. The angrier I was, the better the bread was.

You see, with yeast bread, you really can’t knead it hard enough.  With quick breads, you really don’t want to mix them very much.  You can’t make quick bread when you’re angry.

But yeast bread?

I can’t put into words how therapeutic it is to use your hands to hit, hit, hit that pliable lump of dough, knowing in the back of your mind that what you’d really like to be doing is hitting something else, but knowing you’re not the hitting kind, so you make bread and hit, hit, hit it over and over again.  Fold it over and use the heels of your hands to push, push, push it into shape. Knead it through four or five songs; sing along if you want.  Knead rhythmically.  The bread, if it’s made of the right stuff, will respond.  Yes, it will change.

Unlike the real target of your anger, the bread will let you bully it into shape.

You can bully that lump of dough into loaves, into rolls, into doughnuts, into fancy star-shaped things of such lightness – because they’ve been properly molded, you see – that they fairly float up to the clouds.  You can require that lump of dough to become something people will beg for, request, ask for by name.  You can sprinkle sugar on it, melt butter on it, shake some cinnamon over  it . . . .

Whatever you do to it, however you shape it, whatever you sprinkle on it, will be wonderful, because before you made it presentable to society, you made bloody sure it was going to behave itself and do what it was supposed to do.

Once the dough has been taught to behave, it can then soar to the clouds.  It will then deserve butter, cinnamon, sugar, pecans, whatever you decide to enhance it with.  Without that severe kneading, your dough will not respond properly and anything else you do to it will be wasted effort.

Now, don’t get all huffy with me.  I’m not advocating hitting.  I might, however, be recommending some discipline and some self-control.  I might be hinting that nobody deserves anything until it’s rightfully earned.  I might be connoting that before anyone gets all fancied up, he/she should be ready to deserve it.  I might be outright, downright stating what I’ve outright, downright stated so many times before: nobody deserves anything he/she hasn’t rightfully earned.

Whether that be sugar and cinnamon, butter, toys-when-it’s-not-Christmas, parties, privileges, ice cream, a turn at the playground swings, a promotion, a life outside of a jail cell, a driver’s license, a good job, or a good grade: it doesn’t matter.  Earn it or go without.

I’ll say it again:  Life is full of choices.  Choose to get behind the wheel of a car when you’re in no fit condition, and you’ve also chosen to deny yourself most other privileges you might have had free reign over had you not been such a duck-billed jackass.

Once you’ve whipped your dough into shape,  you put it in the oven.  Don’t think for a moment that your job is over, because you have to watch over it carefully while it’s in there.  Take it out too soon, or leave it in too long, and all you’ve got is a mess.  Be vigilant.

And if you do your job, the dough will do its job, and everybody in the world will be better for its existence.

Here’s how to do it:

Step one:  have a lot of sex until you get pregnant.

Step One: Get out a ginormous bowl.

Step Two:  Put 1/4 cup of yeast and a cup and a half of lukewarm water in the bowl.  Stir in a tablespoon of sugar.

Step Three:  To this mixture, add six eggs, two sticks of melted butter, four teaspoons of salt, and two cups of milk.  Any kind of milk will work, even buttermilk or milk that’s a few days past the freshline.

Step Four:  Start dumping flour in the bowl.   Begin with four cups, and just go from there.  Add flour and blend until you’ve got a bowl full of dough that just feels right.

Step Five:  Set the bowl on the back of the stove and go play Facebook Bejeweled for an hour.

Step Six:  Poke your finger into the dough.  If it leaves a dent that doesn’t fill back up, it’s ready to knead some more.  Knead it through three or four more songs.

Step Seven:  Start shaping wads of the dough into loaves, and put each in a well-buttered loaf pan.

Step Eight.  Roll out a wad of the dough and use your biscuit cutter to make rolls.  They won’t look like biscuits after they rise.

Step Nine:  If you have any dough left, roll it out thin, spread butter over it, and sprinkle it with sugar and cinnomon.  Roll it up.  Cut it into medallions, or stuff the intact rolled-up log into a big pan, or shape it like a heart.  Use your imagination.  Go nuts.  Speaking of nuts, you can sprinkle them on your rolled-out dough along with the butter, sugar, and cinnamon if you like nuts.

Step Ten:  Let it all rise again for about a half hour.

Step Eleven:  Turn your oven on to 375, and put the loaves in.  They will need about a half hour.  After 30 minutes, just keep checking.

Step Twelve:  After all your loaves are baked, turn your oven up a notch to 425.  Put your rolls in, and watch them carefully; they need about fifteen minutes.

Step Lucky Thirteen:  Last of all, put your rolled-up cinnamon goodies in the oven.  They will need about fifteen minutes, also, unless you’ve got a loaf, in which case it will need about a half hour.  Be sure your pans are well-buttered, because the sugar will leak out and stick.  If you like your buns sticky (heh) put some pancake syrup, honey, and vanilla in the bottom of your pan and set the sliced rolls on top.  Watch these even more carefully than you watched the plainer breads.

Step Fourteen:  Bag everything up because homemade breads get stale fast.  Set some aside for your family, and put the rest in a box.  Get in your car with the box and start giving your bread away.

Step Fifteen:  Accept the gratitude and praise gracefully.  Understand that without all that careful preparation, you would not have delicious and beautiful breads for your family and friends to eat.  Realize that everything worth doing requires effort and dedication.  Remember that to deserve recognition and praise of any kind, you first have to do something worthy of recognition and praise.

Remember that the lump of dough would be nothing but a grayish inedible smelly lump of ick fit only to bury in the back yard in the dead of night, in shame, if you didn’t do it right.  Understand that when you DO do it right, you’ve got wondrous treasure that other people will also recognize and desire.

Then take a good long look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself:  Am I kneading myself properly?  Am I kneading my children in such a way that they will know and understand how to do this by themselves when the time comes? Do we do what is right no matter what, or do we settle for what is easy?  Am I teaching my children, and myself, to work for what they want, or to go without it?

You’d better be.

Because if you expect things handed to you without effort, and are enabling your children to expect the same entitlements, you’re a bad, bad parent, a bad, bad person.

P.S.  That’s a real yeast bread recipe.  I’m making some tonight, as a matter of fact, and I feel better already.

And guess who I’m hitting, hitting, hitting, over and over and over again?  Yep, you got it.

SCUM.

Obi’s Sister

I was ambushed overnight by Maggie’s Notebook. You find out the most interesting things about folks by playing along with these things. So now I have to share 7 things I love. Like Maggie,

I’m going to play this a bit differently because all of us will probably say we love our God, we love our family, we love our country, we love our friends, or some variation of this, and we all love to blog, so I’ll say those are my first loves, and here are the next 7:

Sounds like a plan to me, too. Here goes:

1.  I love to go to writing conferences.  All kinds, in all sorts of places.  I have never NOT learned something really important and helpful at a conference.  I am one of those odd people who go to a conference to go to the conference.  I am seldom tempted to cut out early or skip a session to go shopping.  In fact, I think the only time I EVER did anything like that was at BlogHer 08, when Shannon, Kim* and I cut a keynote and skipped over to Chinatown, and then met Fausta at a sushi bar.  But then, any of you would do the same if it meant you could hang out with Shannon, Kim, and Fausta.  Sigh.

2.  I love WordPress.  I know, I’m a geek.  But I really do love WordPress.  Thank you, Matt Mullenweg.

3.  I love nuts, berries, and fresh fruit.  I channel Yogi Bear daily.  I also love fresh lemons, and I do not put sugar on them. I adore tart things.  Sour things.  Explains a lot, huh.

4.  I love to bake homemade breads of all kinds, and pies.  However, I do not eat bread or pies.  In fact, I do not care for most breads or sweets.  Once in a while I’ll have a hot roll – go nuts, Google – or a Snickers bar, but diabetes is a hard master and will not usually let me indulge.  Fortunately, I seldom want to.  I just love to create them.

5.  I love books and music.  They are so entwined around my heart and soul and so blended with the blood in my veins, that I can not even imagine a life without them.  People who do not read or listen to music are missing out; they’re lacking.  There is no adequate substitute for books and music.  Those who choose a life without either or both have chosen to live a life of  “lacking.”  It is beyond my comprehension.  Also, such people are boring and insipid.  I think this is because they have chosen not to enhance themselves with other people, other places, other times, and other dimensions.  Real life can take us only just so far; we need books and music to take us farther.

6.  I love a good turn of phrase.  I can be swept off my feet by it.  I can be swayed and influenced and converted and my vote can be purchased and my virginity can be compromised. . . .um, pretend you didn’t read that part. . . . Language is power, and a pen is more powerful than any Ollivander wand.  I love wit and whimsy and sarcasm.  I love a quotation that knocks my socks off.  I love WORDS.  I love their meanings and their origins.  I love all the things that can be done with them.  I love making them into adjectives and adverbs and nouns.  I love the “kick” of a strategically placed interjection.  I love how the choice of a tiny preposition can change the focus of an entire book.  I love how a comma can turn a legal contract into the opposite of what a non-careful reader believes it to be.  I love dictionaries.  I love to play with a thesaurus.  I love the preciseness of grammar.  Even more, I love how someone who KNOWS HOW can take that preciseness and twist it, toss it, and tie it into a knot.  Um, I teach writing.

7.  I love cats.  They are purry, furry, quirky, loving  little people.  They only thing I don’t love about cats is scooping clumps out of the litter box.

There ya go.  If anybody else wants to do this, please let me know so I can find out all about you.  I promise to use this knowledge only for good.

* Please go to Kim’s blog and tell her Happy Birthday.  I love her and so will you.  She is absolutely beautiful, inside and out.

When we’re buried in snow, as we are this week, it always makes me think of the day I got married.  The church was buried in snow on that day, and few people were even able to come to the wedding because the snow was just too deep to navigate.  My new husband had to borrow his father’s pickup truck to get us to our little house, and once we got there, we were pretty much completely snowed-in for a month!  Every time the city and county managed to dig out a path wide enough for cars to travel on, it would snow again and fill it in.  It reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, when she wrote about how the railroad would dig out the tracks only to have them filled with snow again before the trains could even go through.  When I was finally able to drive to my teaching job some twenty miles away, it was like driving through a tunnel; the snow was piled up so high on both sides of the road.

But even now, all these years later, I think of that time when I look out of the windows and see the snow piled deep.

My mind’s eye can also see my small children, building snowmen and making angels. . . .

We’re trapped in this house, but it’s a pleasant experience.

Of course, if I hadn’t stocked up on milk, bread, and toilet paper last Monday, my attitude might be quite different indeed.

My son is also here; he’s just as trapped as we are.  He’s worried about the pipes in his apartment freezing, but there’s nothing he or anyone else can do about it, so he isn’t dwelling on that, but rather on all the square meals he’s getting while visiting Mommy’s house.

The snow is so deep, they’ve even cancelled COLLEGE!  And that is something that just hardly ever happens.

This is the view from the French doors in the back of the house, off the deck.  So far, we haven’t even seen any deer venture out of the woods.

The snow is beautiful, smooth and pristine, but to tell y’all the truth, I like it much better when the snow is mussed up, after little kids have played in it.

Sigh.  All those sleds in the garage and under the deck, going to waste.

I’m doing a lot of reading.  Life is not really life without a good book to look forward to.

As I was telling Fausta earlier today, when I’m snowed in, I like to bake.  It helps heat the house, and it satisfies something in me; perhaps it’s dormant domesticity.  My husband and son are having homemade lasagna for supper, and I’m going to bake a lot of bread later tonight.  I might even get my 30-year-old sourdough starter out of the freezer, feed it up, and get it going.  I might as well, because we aren’t going anywhere for the next few days.  To which I say, “Cool!”

Mamacita says:

1.  My sourdough starter is over twenty years old.  The bread is delicious.  Whenever I use it – and it’s been a while; the starter is currently residing in the freezer – I think about pioneer families, with starters that went back for generations; some starters made the long trip across the sea, even.  This makes me really happy to think about.  I love the part of “By the Shores of Silver Lake” where Laura explains to Mrs. Boast why the biscuits are so light and tasty.  They were all astonished that Mrs. Boast didn’t know anything about sourdough bread, and frankly, so am I, today.  In “The Long Winter,” Pa mentions to Ma that he noticed she’d gotten her sourdough working again, and Ma replied that a body didn’t need yeast to have light, delicious raised bread.  And so we don’t.

2.  I am very upset when I meet someone who has never read the Little House books.

3.  I am actually horrified when I meet someone who has never heard of the Little House books.

4.  A home that contains children should be required by law to have copies of the entire Little House series* and the parents should be ashamed of themselves if they don’t read them aloud and do a lot of the things mentioned in them with their children.  MY mother took us on a road trip to Laura’s last home, for crying out loud.  I know, I know, you’re all busy and you all prefer electronic games.  MAKE THE TIME. This is important, dammit.   Are you the adult in your home or not?  Do the job properly. Those horrid, insipid, television episodes most decidedly do NOT count.

5.  Why would a student who didn’t have a computer at home sign up for an online or hybrid class?  It beats the hell out of me, these things they do

6.  It is a sad fact that many just-out-of-high-school students fully expect paper and pencils to be supplied by the college professor.  It is also a fact that I blame this trend on the dastardly and communistic community supplies policy many public schools and/or their teachers force their students to do.

7.  I was once punished in fourth grade for. . . wait for it. . . having too many library books in my desk.  To compound this dreadful sin, all of the books were from sections too advanced for fourth graders.  What might the other kids think?  Did I want to make them feel bad?  Well, frankly, I didn’t care then and I don’t care now.  My reading habits were my business, then and now, and I still loathe that teacher for making my business her business.  I loathe her for many other reasons, too.  She was ALMOST as interesting as a box of hair.  Not quite, but almost.  The box of hair still had her beat.

8.  The one and only thing I remember about sixth grade was that Mr. Norman taught us how to wire a little desk lamp.  Math?  English?  Science?  History?  I’m drawing a blank. Two fascinating hours out of an entire school year of tedium.

9.  I am probably the only kid in the history of the world who hated recess with an unholy passion.

10.  When a kid demonstrates mastery, the kid should be automatically moved on and up.  Why don’t we do this?  It’s CRIMINAL to make a kid sit and endure months of excruciating boredom, waiting for the other kids to catch on.  Why do our schools do this to the cream of the crop?  Oh yes, I remember now.  It would cost money to move them up, and we musn’t do anything to disturb the self esteem of the lowest common denominator.  The self esteem of the cream doesn’t matter; they’ll get by, somehow.  Bullshit mahoney.

*I know, there are chapters that contain things that some people consider politically incorrect.  How sad, that so many people have no concept of “CONTEXT.” I mean, jeepers, people!  Get a grip.  It’s history, for crying out loud.  That’s how it was, BACK THEN.  Deal with it.

Doesn’t Mamacita ever blog about positive things?  Sure I do.  Stay tuned.  You have to catch me at the primo momento.**

**I never pretended to speak a foreign language.  I only pretend to be witty.

I have stayed awake all day by inhaling one ice-cold Diet Coke after another.  I didn’t have any solid food until nineish tonight.  That’s not a real excuse for being snarky, but it’s all I’ve got.

Yeah, well, my children love me.  So there.  (I bought Belle a lamp tonight.  She HAS to love me for a few days.)  (It has a lovely bright red shade.)  (It was NOT on sale.)  If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.