west of the moon

christmas culinary scorecard (annotated).

Holiday meals prepared in a two-day period: two.  (One for our Christmas Eve party, and one for just the two of us on Christmas Day.) 

Familiar standby recipes used: three.  (Gingersnap cookies for the party, flank steak and roasted root vegetables for us.)

Familiar standby recipes tweaked into new and exciting variations: two.  (For Christmas Day, I added some blackberries and candied ginger to the apple pie, creating a very fabulous apple-blackberry-ginger pie.  For the party, I made lasagne; I tend to use store-bought sauce in the lasagne, and this time I bought a "spicy basil and roasted red pepper" one, which added a nice kick to the dinner.)

Brand-new recipes tried, to enormously good effect: one.  (French onion soup.  My impression was that it wasn't actually that hard to make, just time-consuming, but since Matt did all the work on this one, I can't really say that definitively.  But it was impressively tasty.)

Dishes (and glasses, and pots, and pans, and serving plates) washed: just about everything we own, sometimes twice or more. 

Minor injuries sustained:  three.  (I burned my thumb on the cookie sheet while making the gingersnaps, and sliced through two cuticles on the edge of a tin-foil box while wrapping the cookie dough for freezing, Matt nicked his finger on a steak knife that had fallen into the wrong slot in the silverware drawer.)

Holiday cheer: plentiful. 

solstice stories.

I noticed it too late to do it right, but I did finally notice a number of people marking the winter solstice by telling family stories on the webjournals.  It's a really charming idea, and an especially appropriate solstice celebration.   That's part of what I love about the confluence of winter holidays, the idea that it's a dark and grey time of year, and that when everything's kind of grim and cold and miserable, it's especially important to hold on to your friends and family.  (For me, that's the major symbolic function of Christmas cards, retracing all of those lines.)  So I'll take some time out from wrestling with cookie dough (there's a reason the gingersnap recipe says to use an electric mixer, I know, but in the absence of technology we do what we can) to talk about Great-Grandma Anna. 

Anna was my mother's grandmother, and when I was little, she lived in her own apartment in Garfield, New Jersey, in a building overlooking the Yoo-Hoo bottling plant.  She was well past ninety before she had to move into an assisted living facility, and she was so proud of being able to still take care of herself, of being able to walk to Mass every morning.   She came to our house for Christmas every year--my father drove her to and from--and I remember her sitting in a corner in the living room, laughing at everyone's stories and smiling a lot at the kids. 

Great-Grandma Anna was born in Vienna in the 1890s.  I asked her once about Vienna, and she told me that she didn't remember it very well.  When she was twelve years old, her mother sent her to the United States.  Her two other brothers were there already, working in factories, and they said that Anna could come live with them.  So she went.  (On a class trip to Ellis Island in high school, I found her name in the listings on display.)  She lived with her brothers in tenement housing in Paterson, and for years she worked cleaning houses, and eventually she met and married my great-grandfather.  I only remember her in bits and pieces--the glass candy dish in her apartment, the way she laughed--but my mother and her siblings say that she loved to tell dirty jokes, and that she taught them to make chicken soup and pot roast, and that she had dreams that sometimes came true.  What I keep coming back to, though, is Vienna, and Anna at twelve years old, saying goodbye to her mother at the train station.  That's one of the things she told me, when I asked her about Austria, that she said goodbye to her mother at the train station and then never saw her again. 

The Tim Pratt Birthday Scavenger Hunt

Today is the day that Tim Pratt turns thirty.  Thirty!  The first thirty years have done right by you, Mister Pratt.  I hope the next thirty are even better.

Now, to the scavenger hunt!  I was going to take a literary tack with this, but figured I'd do something different.  For this clue, we're turning south, to the town you so lovingly levelled with earthquakes in your last book.

Clue #3: The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is home to a seventy-foot-tall wooden rollercoaster, originally built in 1924.  (It's my favorite of the boardwalk rides, possibly because of the added thrill of suspense I get from knowing that I'm trusting my life to an eighty-year-old carnival ride.)   What's the name of this rollercoaster?

• The Gold Rush
• The Giant Dipper
• The Big Bopper
• The Rattlesnake

Happy Birthday!

semester's end.

The timing of the Christmas tree (and the associated good cheer, etc) is particularly fortunate, since the end of the semester is making me a little melancholy.  I'm looking forward to my courses next semester, and it's nice to have a little break from the lecture schedule, but I'm going to miss these students.  It's worse with the lecture class than the seminar--I'll be seeing most of the seminar students again next semester, since I'll be acting as a senior thesis advisor for all but one of them.  The people in the lecture class, though, I may never really see again, and while I understand that this is the nature of the academic life cycle, it's still sad.

Although, come to think of it, it's not really just the nature of the academic life cycle.  This is only a temporary teaching position for me.  I may not be here next year, or the year after that.  I'm probably not going to have the opportunities to have some of these kids in future courses, for instance.  Some of the students have been talking to me about the kinds of research and coursework they're planning on doing over the next few years.  My students this semester have been mostly freshmen and sophomores, and some of them have some really fascinating stuff ahead of them, and I'd kind of like to be around to see it.  Except I won't be, probably.   The fact that I'm here on a short-term contract means that I'm effectively cut off from some of the most rewarding aspects of this profession, and while I know this won't be the case forever, it's a little melancholy right now.

I know, I know.  Not that big a deal.  My students next semester will also be fabulous.  I'm just saying.

be of good cheer!

Where Christmas is concerned, I have very little shame.  I love all the goofy decorative trappings of the holidays, without any reservation or hesitation.  Christmas exploits all of my sentimental weaknesses all at once.  This is one of those things about which I have no tendency for cynicism or over-intellectualization. 

Today, the project is setting up the Christmas tree.  In my heart, I'm really a real-tree kind of girl, but when I Matt and I moved into this apartment, we had a long discussion about Christmas trees and decided to buy a fake tree.  Once we live somewhere nicer, or somewhere more settled, we'll probably go back to real trees, but this isn't a bad stopgap, especially since we invested in a pretty good fake tree.  (And the apartment is small enough that one good pine-bough wreath hung near the tree manages to fill the house with good authentic pine smell.) 

The bulk of the tree-setting-up work, so far, has come from cleaning the house.  Getting this (massive) tree set up in our (tiny) living room involves moving a lot of furniture; I had to re-arrange the furniture in almost every room in order to clear the space.  Then there was the dusting, the vacuuming, the jury-rigging of a system to hang a string of icicle lights in the front window.  (In the past, I tried using big wads of poster-sticky, but that just leads to heartbreak and fallen light-strings.  The current setup involves a lot of thumbtacks and loops of yarn.  It's not perfect, but it gets the job done.) 

By the time I got to the most annoying and horrible part, the part where I have to drag the tree components out of the hall closet, I was in a vicious mood, totally lacking in Christmas cheer.  This was about when it occurred to me that I hadn't really eaten all day.  I took a quick break, had some food, and found some Christmas music on the radio.  Just as I was starting to tackle the tree-parts again, the radio came through with a wee little Christmas miracle, in the form of one of my favorite Christmas songs.  And lo!  There was much joy, and perhaps a little bit of dancing, and a renewed spirit for continuing to take on the tree-assembly project.

technical difficulties.

I had a dream last night that I was trying to present a conference paper in someone's living room.  It was a nice living room, but a little cluttered, and I kept having trouble getting my computer hooked up to the television display.  The paper was apparently one with a lot of visuals (possibly part of my brain was still working through today's lecture, which had a lot of slides of anatomical drawings from Vesalius?) so I really wanted to get the projection working, but the host couldn't find cables that actually connected to my computer.  We finally got it working, only to discover that my presentation had been overwritten with some unrelated pictures.  By this point the audience was really restless, so I decided to just go ahead without the visuals, but somehow in all the fuss I'd misplaced my notecards, so I didn't even have my presentation outline.  In desperation, I launched into an impromptu lecture on how we can learn something about popular images of science in the United States by examining the state of science education in Gilmore Girls.  I think I even wrapped it up (in increasingly desperate dramatic flourishes) by calling Rory Gilmore a "latter-day Theophrastus". 

So, anyway.  Hello!  Long time no see.  The main reason I haven't been writing is that I've been both busy (with my classes) and sick (with a cold that just keeps lingering on).  I've been keeping up with teaching despite the cold--I suppose I could have cancelled class, but the closer we get to the end of the semester, the worse I feel about the possibility of dropping a lecture.  Early in the semester, I could have justified it, figuring that we'd catch up with that material later, but there's not a lot of "later" left.  There's only a week left, now.  One more seminar meeting and three more lectures, then  exams and some paper grading.   

How'd it get to be December already?  Madness.  How's everyone else doing?  I've gotten so out of touch.