Busy-Ness

My sister-in-law, Mindy, tells me that she knows we are crazy-busy when I don't blog regularly. She's probably right. We shall see if I can make up for it while all of my machines at work are happily humming along and I have nothing to do but make sure they all have bellies full of paper. Last week and the weekend that accompanied it were just insane. You all know that Chris was out in Orlando with Andrew at his first-ever TSA conference. I sent my camera along with Chris (that's why there were no photos of blueberry picking or pie, Amy!). So, here's a little proof of where they were: He's so cute, all business-like in his official blazer, though he'd never allow me to say so in public. He was a voting delegate for their club. Each club has two delegates that cast votes for the organization's officers for the upcoming year. Also? There was a lot of gaming going on. Food Court lunches are the best I think I said before that he was a finalist in all three of his events and came in third place in one of them. He got to bring home the team's trophy for the weekend and it was in the living room, on display for all to see.

And on Sunday, Emma had her first piano recital! We are SO proud of her! As is evidenced by the story of the Spelling Bee Choke, she has never gotten through anything on stage. She cried every time she was a flower girl (one time, she even refused to walk down the aisle), she has choked at every spelling bee, and the few times she has had to sing with her class on stage have terrified her enough that she absolutely refuses to be in the chorus at school. But she made it through her recital piece. No. Wait. She owned it. She loved her special dress that we bought, She played so perfectly and musically. There's a difference between playing the notes and playing the song. And she definitely played the song, simple though it was. It's surprising to note that you can hear a difference between those two things, even in the first year of playing. And when it was all over, she was thrilled to get a bouquet of flowers from her daddy. All the excitement was so overwhelming that we didn't notice until it was over that she had artwork on display in the lobby gallery as well. This was a Fine Arts Showcase, not just a piano recital. And none of us, including the Artist Herself, were aware that she was also a featured artist. I'm sure someone sent home the information, but I probably missed it in the mountain of other end-of-school-year papers. Here she is, explaining that it is a fish print, a Japanese technique, that she made using an actual fish! On top of all the good stuff, there was other crappy stuff. The only one I'll share publicly is that our car needed a new radiator. It was spewing coolant everywhere. My boys (hubby, brother, dad and son) took care of that for us on Monday night while I made a big pot of black bean soup to feed everybody. So, that problem is solved. A mountain of others remain. But that's the way it goes, isn't it?

DAILY BLISS: Emma, conquering a little bit of her own fear

Oh My, Pie!

Heavens to Mergatroid. I made a pie.
Remember all those blueberries we picked on Saturday? Nearly six pounds of blueberries! It's a good thing we picked that many because I had a pie recipe that called for two and a half pounds of them. It was a recipe for Blueberry Ginger Pie from no less than Martha herself.
I've never built a pie from the ground up before. I know that is nearly unbelievable, considering the culinary acrobatics I perform on an almost-daily basis. I mean, not that I'm great in the kitchen, but I'm always trying something new, you know? But never pie. Never allthewayfromscratch pie.
Cake I can handle. You throw some flour and fat and leavening and liquid all together, willy nilly, chuck it in the oven for a bit and, blam! You've got something tasty.
Not so with pie.
Pie is a diva. Pie wants the butter to be ice cold when you make the crust. Pie doesn't want too much water in the crust (one extra teaspoon might ruin the whole thing). Pie doesn't want to be handled with warm hands any more than it must. Pie needs steam vents and asks you to crimp its edges, please, or else! "Or else what?" you might ask it. I know I did. It threatened, "or else I'll leak all over your oven."
But you know what? Pie is magic.
It bubbles and it browns and after all that baking, you have to let it come back down to room temperature before you cut it open. That's the hard part.
I admit, I cut into it a little too early and the filling kind of spilled out hole left by the missing piece. And it was so good. I'd like to announce that I had blueberry ginger pie last night. I am just a little bit ashamed to confess that I also had blueberry ginger pie for breakfast. And I might have just eaten the last piece of blueberry ginger pie right out of the pie pan, sitting here in front of the computer.
It would appear that I bake when I need to calm down and de-stress. Apple tart on Saturday? Blueberry pie on Sunday? Goodness. No wonder my pants...
Nevermind.

DAILY BLISS: garden-fresh potatoes and broccoli for supper - thanks, Jeffries clan! and a new, Cadillac radiator, sitting in my laundry room, waiting to be dropped into my car

Efforts

Phew.
What a week.
What a couple of weeks.
Sometimes you feel like your life was sent through the shredder - the scraps of it dumped in your lap and you're not sure you really want to put it all together.
Car, health, emotions, work - none of it has been safe.
I sat in my car last night at 11:30, my sleeping daughter in the back seat, waiting in an empty parking lot for my husband to come rescue us as steam sputtered and poured from under my hood. And I decided that I would sleep in this morning, then begin making efforts to get things going right again.
What was I doing out that late? Oh, I was babysitting. You will almost never hear me say that. But some old friends, who I know to never have left their two children (ages 3 & 4) with anyone other than their parents, asked me to come and play with the babies while they went on a night out with their family. Of course, Kiki cannot say no to babies she loves, nor can she say no to old friends. So Emma and I trekked out to the other end of town, Hungry Hungry Hippos in hand, and we were a babysitting dynamic duo. We baked cookies and played games and sang songs and those sweet little things went to bed on time with no complaints. I may have worn them out.
So, we had a long drive home, late at night, Emma and I. Fortunately, Chris was on the road too, on his way home from Orlando, where he's been spending the last few days chaperoning at Andrew's TSA conference. We only had to wait, well, half an hour or forty minutes in the dark with a sick car before he could get to us.
When we woke up this morning, Chris back in Orlando with Andrew, and decided on a girls-only day of fun to cure the blues. We went out for breakfast and met my mom, who took us to the nursery where I've been buying my garden stuff. She bought me an upside-down miniature watermelon plant and a jack-be-little pumpkin vine for Mother's Day. Then...
Then!
Then we went blueberry picking.
Ah. Perfection.
Emma pretended we were wild girls, foraging for our food, living on the "farthest coast of the universe." Of course, I played too. It was a delightful. Have you ever eaten a fat blueberry, still warm from the sun? If not, you must.
Go. Go now! I beg of you! Seek out a local pick-your-own farm.
You will not be sorry. I'll wait for you to get back.

Wasn't that great? Now...where were we?
We ate blueberries and cream for lunch and baked an apple tart of Emma's devising in the afternoon. I put on a favorite apron and peeled the apples with my grandma's knife. Its blade, sharpened faithfully for decades, cut right underneath the translucent apple skin, paring it off in perfect, long, curly strips. It was such a meditative, calming act. You can keep your vegetable peelers, thank you.
Dinner out and shopping for a dress for Emma's first piano recital tomorrow rounded out our very long day.
My house is a wreck.
I'm not sure if I have a clean dish left in the kitchen.
We have people coming over for church tomorrow, a recital in the afternoon, and somehow, we must find a car if I am to get to work on Monday.
Tomorrow promises to be busy.
But our boys will be back home and we girls have made considerable efforts toward starting up a normal, drama-free week. Here's hoping it works.

Off

Things have been a little off around here, it's true.
Today was more of the same.
My guts are wrenched for the pain and loss a dear friend is suffering.
It's the sort of thing that makes you look at the world through different-colored glasses than usual, and let me tell you, they're not the rose-colored ones that people like to talk about.
You just sort of shake your head and you don't understand. You know that nobody ever understands the hard stuff, but you still feel like you need to try. And it doesn't work.

Sigh.

Some good news, though - Andrew and Chris are in Orlando for the Florida State Technology Student Association Conference. Kids from schools all over the state come and compete in a wide variety of events. Andrew's in three events over the next three days, and in his first event, the Multimedia Presentation, he is a top-10 finalist! That means he had to put on a navy blazer and a TSA tie and be interviewed. We won't know his final placement until Saturday, but it doesn't really matter to me. I think it's fantastic that he's already done so well. I mean, it's one of those things where you aren't really surprised, but it's still surprisingly awesome.

DAILY BLISS: a nest full of baby mockingbirds in my front yard - i think it's the same pair that nested there last year. i'm loving the sweet little hungry noises they make!

Psst

Hey!
Over here!
You know something?
You guys are the best.

<3 Me

Public Interest Announcement

Toward the best interest of my reading public, (all three of you) and so that you know it is not always homegrown-tomatoes-and-sewing-success-and-knitted-goodness around here, please take notice of the following announcements:

1) I have saggy, dark circles under my eyes as of about two o'clock this afternoon
2) I hate my job and I'm not sure how to gracefully get out of it, or even when I'll be able to
3) #2 makes the majority of my waking hours subject to unbidden daydreaming
4) #3 makes me less productive than I should be
5) I am very tired. I found myself sitting on the sofa today, with an hour and a half at my disposal. I could not, however, seem to coax my body into action. My body just sat there, leafing through old issues of InStyle Magazine that were passed on to me today and noticing dresses that it liked while my mind shouted, "What are you doing? Get up and cross something off that insurmountable list!"
6) I just wandered through the Super Wal Marts, listening to Kings of Leon on my iPod, for a two-weeks-overdue grocery trip (not that old mommies grocery shopping at Wal Mart is probably what they're after as far as an audience goes). I managed to leave there having purchased only one dinner's worth of groceries but spending over $100. Granted, we were out of almost every imaginable toiletry item. But still.
7) It's all good. Not hitting rock bottom or anything. Just feeling "bleh."

DAILY BLISS: balmy, breezy, nighttime, Florida spring air

Beets!

We pulled up our beet harvest today - our weensy beet harvest.
Granted, we planted them a bit late in the season, and the small hands that planted them put them in the dirt in a slightly crowded jumble.
But there are nearly enough greens to serve with some corn bread and black eyed peas for a dinner and there are nearly enough stunted, tiny beets for a colorful, roasted-root-veggie side dish to accompany some chicken or something equally nice.
And that's enough.
I'm not ready for Big Harvests and Adventures in Canning.
This is how little girls harvest beets - delicately and gently, caring for each wispy root as though it were still needed:

And this is how boys harvest beets - efficiently and in large, muddy clumps, never caring whether a tender leaf is bruised or torn:

These are among the first edible fruits of our gardening. Though it's a only small bit of food, it's exciting - even for 11-year-old boys who try very hard not to be genuinely excited about much. We are learning something nearly every day and now, as our tomatoes and peppers and beans, peas and cucumbers grow and bloom. I can hardly wait for August and September to get here. That's the next shot I get at really planting some stuff! From now until then, it's mostly okra, black eyed peas and squash, from what I understand (which I did go ahead and plant this weekend).


DAILY BLISS: evening coffee & the fun possibilities of paint chips