Right Now

It's 62F as I wait for the bus.  That has to be a record.
I might actually hope the groundhog sees is shadow!

Kidbits

Bud lost a tooth.  Literally.  He came home with one missing on the bottom.  He noticed it was gone on the playground, probably either dropped or swallowed.  But he much prefers to think it fell out (and frankly so do I).  And he was very worried that the Tooth Fairy wouldn't come if there wasn't actually a tooth.  No worries on that score.

-=-=-=-=-=-

Over dinner the other night, Bud told Sis that he could read her mind.  "Prove it," she challenged him.

"I don't want to right now," he demurred.

She kept insisting and so he gave it a try.  But she said he got it wrong.

His explanation?  "I was reading another part of your mind."

-=-=-=-=-=-

The kids were practicing their "ang bao" rhyme for Chinese New Year, with my help.  Of course, I don't speak Mandarin or Teochew (our family's dialect), but I can pronounce the words atonally so I was helping.

Well, come time for the kids to perform the rhyme for Ma and Gong to ask for the envelopes and the family started laughing.  The "tua tua" part the way I pronounced it, and taught the kids, sounded like "peanut" in Thai (another language I don't speak that the family does), not "big" in Chinese, and everyone thought this was funny.  Because, of course, the last thing you want is a peanut-sized envelope!  So I laughed and said that in one of the languages I know, Latin, "tua" is your.  And asking for other people's envelopes isn't a bad idea.  

Right Now

Windows opened to a refreshing spring-like breeze on an incredibly warm day for January.

Right Now

Georgia O'Keeffe clouds....

Going Vegan, Again

I have the urge to go vegan again and am starting today.  I read recently on The Happiness Project that people can fall into two categories when it comes to self-discipline (especially food)--moderators or abstainers.  After years of trying to moderate my eating with Weight Watchers, etc., I realize that I am a much better abstainer--just take vegetarianism.  I find it easier to give up meat (and mind you I do still like some of it) than to moderate a few cookies or pieces of pizza.  And so, with a desire to continue my healthy eating and weight loss, I'm going vegan again.  But not a full-on, honey-avoiding, soy-worshipping vegan who stresses about how the food was colored (with cochineal beetles) or sugar whitened (by bone char).  I'll be a vegan like I am a vegetarian--practical.  Which means honey, eggs and dairy in some baked goods, and only an 80% avoidance of dairy and eggs (thanks to Heather of Beauty That Moves for the 80-20 idea).  The other 20% gives me some wiggle room.  And a little cheese on my bean burritos!

Chinese New Year: Wrap-Up

As you could see from all the pictures, we had a wonderful, if belated, celebration of Chinese New Year at my in-laws' house in NYC this weekend.  Chinese New Year is actually, in part, a sacred, ritualized, private family holiday, with lots of prayers and food.  I've been celebrating with them now for several years  but learn new things each time (see here for my best description of the holiday).  This year, I realized:

• I have trouble praying on schedule.  We pray at the altar of the Buddha to present the food and then we pray with incense, approximately every 15 minutes, as the incense burns down by a third (at which point we add more incense and more sherry and tea), asking for luck, health, wealth, happiness, success, and all good things for the new year.  Anyway, I quietly recited some of my metta meditation but had trouble concentrating, and then finishing in the allotted schedule.  Also, while I've done some reading in Western Buddhism, in other words how it is generally interpreted and practiced here, even in its myriad guises (Zen, Tibetan, Theravadan), it is almost completely different when it is an actual Asian tradition (even though their version  is also Theravadan); the main difference is the praying to Buddha specifically, in the belief in numerous spiritual, celestial beings, that don't arise in the texts I've read.  Of course, Chinese New Year is also a Confucian ancestor ceremony.
• While Mama's family sets places for the ancestors, including Gong's grandfather and parents and Ma's mother (her father is in his 90s and doing well), this is unusual in that the woman's family is not generally included at all, but they wanted to acknowledge her.  Apparently, before Lao Ma's death, the seat was for Gong's father's childless first wife.  But apparently most recent deaths are more important.  Similarly, Ma's mother's paper money is in a separate basket from Gong's family money before we burn it.  The spirits don't mix and Ma doesn't want her mother to have to explain herself to Gong's ancestors. 
• The family's New Year table combines a few different traditions, including certain dishes from Cantonese tradition but also the platter of sweets which is a Teochew tradition.  The sweets are my favorite.
• Last night we ate the traditional Seven Vegetable Soup, on the seventh day of the New Year.  But Ma is not sure about the exact meaning of the soup. Each vegetable has a specific meaning but she doesn't know about the seventh day.  We laugh that it's to give you some vegetables after all the rich new year's sweets.

Playing in the Dirt

I spent this morning at the historic house sorting through dirty bags of artifacts found during excavations under the house's floorboards a decade ago, in preparation for docent training on our new 5th-grade tour which will include a section on archaeology.  It was great fun, even if most of the finds were uninteresting and, well, gross--like rat and mouse skulls and bones.  But I liked finding even the ordinary bits of broken crockery, bent nails and pins, and buttons, even if their exact dates are uncertain, as least to me.  I can picture the house's inhabitants and history more clearly through their odd bits of detritus.

It all reminded me of my time helping on an excavation of a Roman bathhouse near Carthage, Tunisia.  There, we found vaulting tubes (to make ceilings), hypocaust tiles (to hold up the bathhouse floor), tesserae (from the mosaic floors), rainbow-colored glass (it gets that tint from being buried), and, my favorite find, a fragment of a small statuette of a Roman matron.  It was hot, dirty, hard work with our heads by our ankles hours a day, garden trowel in hand, in the baking North African summer, with a short break for "cass croute" of dark chocolate and cookies.  But our dig house had a view of the Mediterranean and a great cook, who made fantastic couscous with chicken, carrots, and potatoes steamed in a giant, battered washtub-like basin.  

I think a dig in a New England summer might have been easier, if not quite as memorable, but if there was another one, I'd love to be there.

Just a selection of finds, including bits of pottery and glass, button, nails, bones and teeth, and oyster shells.

A photo of the original excavation under the floorboards, where the above finds were discovered.

Chinese New Year: Ang Bao

Chinese New Year: Feast

Chinese New Year: Burnt Offerings for the Ancestors

Chinese New Year: Praying to the Ancestors, Three Times

Chinese New Year: Praying to Buddha

Chinese New Year: Preparations

Beautiful Day in My Neighborhood

Okay, not meteorologically, since it is rainy and overcast, with a cold snap and high winds expected anytime now.  But socially.  I have spoken to several friends today, which really brightens my day regardless of the weather.  Especially because I hadn't spoken much to one grad school friend in a couple of years, one old church friend in several months, and one local buddy with some personal challenges in a few months.  I think we all felt better for the time spent together.  Friends warm you up (or even chill you out) when the weather doesn't.

Right Now

Watching a blanket of fog nestle the house snugly as I talk on the phone with friends far and near, and wait for the safe arrival of another one.

Reading in the Kitchen

"As long as you taste curiously, and watch and feel and listen, and prick your way toward food you like, you will find that you become someone about whom people will say that cooking seems to come naturally, like walking.  They will say it and it will be true."

Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal:  Cooking with Economy and Grace is that rare cookbook--more prose than prosaic instruction, more musings than exact measurements.  And while I usually prefer to follow exact recipes from standard cookbooks (and I do that a lot, from the many books I have), this book inspires me to want to cook, giving me the confidence and the ideas how to do it, without really giving me too many recipes.  Take the chapter "How to Stride Ahead."  Adler describes cooking all your vegetables as soon as you get home from the market so that you have the not-quite-raw ingredients for meals the rest of the week---they can be turned into delicious dishes with little work, which means you are much less likely to let them rot in your fridge. "By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once." Her description of her dance from roasted vegetables to sauteed greens is beautiful.  And easy looking. Her first chapter, "How to Boil Water," similarly suggests how easily a meal comes together with a pot and water, as it has for 10,000 years. (See articles in NYTimes here.)

Adler was an editor at Harper's before she ever stepped foot in a professional kitchen.  But a stint at Prune (with chef-cum-writer Gabrielle Hamilton) and then at other restaurants turned Adler into an accomplished cook.  Thankfully, following in the footsteps of M.F.K. Fisher, she has written about it both at Salon and in this her first book.  I'm only a few chapters into it because I read a bit and then muse upon it.  And cook!  Yesterday, between chapters, I made black bean soup for my lunch and broccoli noodle soup for our dinner.  And I'm ready to be back in the kitchen for dinner again today.  Where I'll be cooking a meal based on Adler's dictum to use what you have between reading such enticing sections as "How to Make Peace," "How to Weather a Storm," and "How to Drink to Saints."

Right Now

It's .... slushing!

Sounds of Snoring

Mama is working late tonight and so I've got "Basilisk watch," meaning I'm the adult on the second floor whose imperative it is to ward off any Harry Potter-esque giant snakes that might come get the kids.  Bud specifically is still very upset about the end of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and proves that he is just 6 1/2 by holding two completely contradictory notions in his head:  the HP books are a work of fiction by J.K. Rowling, whose picture we have shown him, and the books are real and the snake is coming (even if this overlooks the fact that Harry killed the snake at the end).  Mercy, I don't think he was this upset about Voldemort.  But fears aren't rational so Mama and I have been taking turns being in the next room as they fall asleep.  An easy solution.

And from the sawing next door, one that is working very well.

Right Now

Waiting outside for bus and two squawking wild, bright light-green parrakeets just flew by, part of flock that lives in nearby park.
Time to unplug....

Art History in Action

Check out Dr. Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, explaining to Stephen Colbert why you can't lick paintings and that those red fobs aren't George Washington's testicles!  It's art history in action, folks.  And I studied with and later worked for her for a bit  . . . . So glad the Leutze painting is back on view.  I've wanted to take the kids to see it for ages.