Fountain of Life

Several months ago, on a long car ride, we were fortunate enough to hear a Radiolab podcast about Oliver Sacks. It was a beautiful program centered around recordings that he and his partner Billy had created in the final months before he died. They were often everyday conversations, and somehow the mundanity of the topics discussed made it more poignant than many of the interviews I had previously heard from him.

Oliver Sacks is one of those people that had so many interesting facets to his life that he makes me feel sad that I have not accomplished more in my life. The fact that I need to take someone else's remarkable life accomplishments and turn them around to create petty thoughts about myself speaks volumes, but it is what it is.

His writing was thoughtful and elegant. He took scientific subjects and not only made them accessible to those of us who aren't brilliant neurologists, but he made them engaging. No small feat.

In the podcast, there was mention about his use of fountain pens. Sacks wrote free hand, and in the tapes you can often hear the gentle scratching as he writes. I love to try different pens, and those that write well make me supremely happy. I'd never used a fountain pen, so the next day we found a stationer's store in Boston. In the back of the shop, there was a counter with a huge variety of fountain pens and a wonderfully knowledgeable salesperson. A few minutes later, I was the proud owner of a fountain pen. And then a friend of The Professor's mentioned his own favorite, and I somehow felt the need to pick that one up as well. Now these live with me:

So now that I have two, I think that makes me a collector. The salesperson who sold me the one on the left mentioned fountain pen conventions. I wonder what it says about me that I was immediately intrigued? Probably not very positive things.

I have enjoyed my collection, and expect to expand it soon (there may already be one or two in my Amazon cart, but I can't be sure). I'm also fully anticipating that my writing will be prolific, engaging, and deeply scientific very soon in the near future.

The Icing on the Cake...

New Year's (as well as Christmas) really crept up on me this year. I don't know if it's age, or just weariness (or most probably a combination of the two), but I used to be able to keep a lot more balls in the air. Some days they seem to be falling all around me, and keeping up with them seems to have become both more difficult and less interesting.

Miss Serious commented last night that we weren't doing anything interesting for New Year's this year, so I got up this morning and made these (cinnamon buns from the America's Test Kitchen Baking Book):

The picture in the cookbook had a gentle drizzle of icing on the top, but I decided that if I had all that nice icing, we should be eating all that nice icing - thus the less than pretty pile on the top. Delicious though!

May we all have a healthy, happy, productive, and fulfilling 2018. Happy New Year!

Tiny Squares

So a while back, we had gone to New Jersey and taken a hike in the woods. We wore long pants and sleeves, and checked ourselves carefully for ticks on our return. No ticks.

We stayed the weekend in New Jersey, and returned home. The morning after our return, I was in the shower, and noticed what looked like a poppy seed on my right hip bone. Hmmm. I went to brush it off, and it stayed put. Giving it a little tug, it came off. I put it on the ledge in my shower, not thinking too much about it. When I had toweled off, I gave it a peek - still looked like a poppy seed. After placing it on a pice of paper, lo and behold, it started moving. Yuck. Mind you, this is a full 3 days after our hike in the woods...

So I bagged up the little offender, and we gave each other a very careful once over. No ticks.

Next morning, I woke up, and decided to give the spot where the tick had been a look to see if the bite had done anything. The bite was fine, but I was horrified to discover a poppy seed about 2 inches to the right of where the first one had been. And on further inspection, he had a little friend on the other side of my waist as well. Hmmmm.

So we bagged my new little friends, and gave everybody a check. The Professor and Big Trouble remained uninhabited, but Miss Serious also had a little friend, which got its own special bag. We delivered all of the bags to our respective doctors for testing, and tried to figure out what exactly was happening. I decided to vacuum the heck out of the apartment,  and wash everything that was washable. And then we thought of the dog.

The dog had stayed the weekend with friends who have a backyard while we were away. so our first thought was that he had gotten ticks from the yard and brought them home to visit. We took him to the vet, and decided to toss out many of the items that he liked to sleep on, one of which was the sock yarn blanket I had made. To be fair, it did have several squares that had rips in them, because some of the yarn I used wasn't sock yarn and wasn't as strong as the others. Three hundred dollars later, we learned that the dog had no ticks, and I immediately regretted getting rid of the blanket, as well as having given all those dollars to the vet.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I decided to start another one:

I've been working on it for a while, and now it looks like this:

It's nowhere near as big as the one I tossed, but hopefully it will be someday. And of course, tick free.

Coronation Day

So it's official. I've entered my elder years. I know this, because I have now had to endure the kind of dental work I only ever heard my grandparents talk about.

About 10 years ago, while camping in Connecticut, I broke a molar while eating one of the mushiest foods ever, a soft, cheesy breadstick. After breaking off a chunk of said tooth,  Miss Serious and Big Trouble insisted that I leave it under my pillow. The next morning, as the sun rose over our little tent, I reached under my pillow and discovered a dollar bill that had been torn in half. The Professor must have his little jokes....

Upon returning to Chez Necessity, my dentist put a sort of wall around the tooth, and basically gave my a gigantic filling. He stated, not in a particularly comforting way, "It might work."  It did, but my new dentist has been eyeing it since I started seeing him, and finally convinced me that I would rather take care of it on my own terms rather than when it breaks (and he assured me that it definitely would).

My dentist is an older, Russian gentleman with an accent so thick that everything he says sounds like a Dostoyevsky novel. I did not quite understand what getting a crown entailed, and would have enjoyed remaining blissfuly ignorant, but after he finished drilling my tooth, he gave me a mirror so I could see what he had done. Appalled, I gazed at the nub of what used to be a tooth that he had created in my mouth. He stuck the temporary crown on top of this horror, and sent me on my way.

Two weeks later, weeks in which I learned that it is possible to only chew on one side of your mouth,  I returned for the permanent crown. I was thinking of asking him if I could have it bejeweled, but I decided that it is unwise to kid around with the person who holds the dental drill. After my second shot of novocaine (the first one served only to numb my neck, an odd sensation at the best of times), my permanent crown was attached to my little tooth nub, and now lives with me forever. I'm feeling more royal already - maybe I'll pick up a Corgi.

Like Poofs Through an Hourglass

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, and in the morning, as we have often done, we went to an interfaith service sponsored by the Interreligious Council of New Rochelle. It is enlightening to hear people from many different faiths and walks of life all in one place, sharing together. The speaker was an Imam from a local mosque; in his introduction, it was explained that he is not only an Imam, but a speaker at the UN, a liaison with the police department, a consultant around the country, and, of course, his day job, which was a medical director. You know, like you do. His talk was thoughtful, engaging, and funny.

When being presented with such an accomplished person, it would be most appropriate to be impressed and interested in hearing the upcoming talk. Instead, I decide to take this opportunity to feel slothful and unhappy that I am somehow unable to accomplish even a small percentage of the resume being presented to me.

And then I got home and looked at my knitting pile, and decided that he probably isn't spending a lot of his time making these:

Who needs to be a speaker at the UN when you can have lots of little poofs made out of sock yarn? These are for The Beekeeper's Quilt from Tiny Owl Knits. I hope to someday have enough to create a quilt - maybe in time for one of the kids to take to college. Or not.

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I am thankful for my wonderful family, who make me smile every day. I am thankful for friends who open their homes to us on this and many other days throughout the year. I am thankful to be able to have a job that fulfills me, and students that are quirky and exhausting and lovable. I am thankful that a group of people from wildly different backgrounds are still able to come together to share their thoughts and beliefs with kind and grateful hearts. And I am thankful that a pile of yarn poofs can make me so happy, even if they aren't truly a replacement for actual accomplishments.

And Back Again

So, yesterday Miss Serious needed a sweater to match a skirt she was wearing. She hunted through my closet, and came up with one that I knit a while back. It looked great on her, and I offered to make her one, but then realized I had no idea where the pattern was. I had downloaded it ages ago, but I did remember that I posted it on this blog, so I decided to do some digging. I scrolled back for several years of posts, and realized I had forgotten how long I had written this blog. It made me laugh and cry, remembering funny things my children did when they were young, and sad things that broke my heart. I've never been one to keep a journal, but it made me understand why people do - it's a treat to have a record of all the quirks and foibles of life. All the things that I was sure, at the time, that I would never forget, were so easily replaced by other memories that were also forgotten disturbingly quickly.

Writing is one of those things that I often think would be a wonderful thing to do. Unfortunately, I rarely get past the thinking stage. I have read countless books about writing, and spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about writing, but barely any time actually writing. Maybe this is the extent of any writing I will do, but maybe that will be enough.

Sometimes you have to pay the stupid tax

I like to think I have a pretty good head on my shoulders; I read a lot, I have a Master's Degree, I am able to generally navigate life in a positive way. But then I get reminded that maybe I don't have everything as together as I think I do.

Our building has on-street parking. In order to sweep the streets, which, don't get me wrong, I am pro clean streets, you need to move your car off certain streets where we usually park. This is only one day a month, from 9-12 (one side is the 2nd Wednesday of the month, and the other side is the 2nd Thursday of the month). This doesn't sound too complicated. And it usually isn't - when school is in session, both cars are long gone by 9 am.

But now it's summer. so even though I like to think that the world stops and everyone isn't actually paying attention to what day it is, this is sadly untrue. Thus, exhibit A:

Bummer. I pulled it off the windshield, and chalked it up to summer brain. The Professor and I looked it over ruefully that night, and put it aside. Now, The Professor is no lightweight in the brain department either, having not only an aforementioned Master's Degree, but a Doctorate as well. Thus, the following day's excitement was even more appalling:

There was an episode of Cheers where Kirstie Alley's character has something awful happen due to her own mistakes, and she cries out, "I am too stupid to live!" Enough said, I think.