Cold Spaghetti

I’m doing a 10K in 10 days.

If you know me well, I suspect you may have just fallen out of your chair. I apologize. Let me clarify: I’ve been training for a 10K which will happen in 10 days.

If you’ve known me for a few years, you’ll not be surprised at why I’m doing this. I’m signed up for the Crescent City Classic, a run/walk through the streets of New Orleans, to support Abeona House — the much-loved non-profit Reggio Emilia-inspired early childhood education center that Paul and I helped open almost 4 years ago.

I tried to go through my old posts and find some to mention here to show how special Abeona is — not only to us, and not only to all of the families, teachers, and children within — but to the community around it.

I had volumes to choose from… you could start at the beginning and read some of the logistics of opening and sustaining.  Like about that darn ramp we had to build (written by Paul) or when we finally got the 501c3 or the day we got the sign or teacher appreciation or about walks to the levee.

You could find the letter that we put in our holiday cards in 2007 or the article in the local paper.  You could see how we came together in tragedy.  And then how excited we were when Starbucks employees flew in from Seattle to lead a hand.

You could watch the fun in the kids’ exploration of Oak Street through tricks-or-treats or a visiting a senior center or riding the streetcar to the zoo.  You could see how Abeona teaches kids to give back.  And sets the example.

You could laugh at pictures from our first annual Krewe of Abeona Mardi Gras parade down Oak Street — or the second annual parade when Will was king.

You could go elsewhere, too.  To Chrissie’s story.  Or Emmy’s.  (Both are wonderfully written.)

But no matter where you learn about our school, I hope that you’ll support me.

$5.

I’m asking every friend I’ve got for 5 bucks.

I’m at $150 right now and I’d like to see this grow.  It’s as easy as can be… just visit the Abeona House website and click on the “donate” button.  Sure, we’d love you to give whatever you can, but I know times are tight so I’m asking for 5.

Abeona House is a wonderful organization worthy of donation — but even so, I consider your donations to be equally supportive of me, personally.

If you do, please let me know so that I can send a personal thank-you.  (You can make a note that it’s to support me in the Reggio Run when you donate online!)  THANK YOU!!

VISIT ABEONA HOUSE HERE.

__________________________________________________________________

UPDATE: Last night, Emmy sent me this message regarding the donations received:

Quite a haul for one day. I’m able to send a developing teacher on a conference now. Unbelievable…thank you.

In other words, you all were so generous in ONE DAY that enough money was raised that she is able to send a teacher to a professional development conference — a very direct experience that will improve kids’ experiences at Abeona everyday!  AMAZING what $5 can do!  THANK YOU ALL!!

If you haven’t donated, it’s not too late to contribute to the Reggio Run!

“The dance class was great.  E and R were there and we got to catch up… I think we need to follow the class with dinner afterward.”

“Do you want me to cook for next week?”

“Actually, I was thinking that maybe we should make it a girls’ night dinner.”

“Sure, leave me at home with the kids.”

“Do you want to make a dinner, for real?”

“Will you make me wear the Chippendale’s outfit again?”

“You can wear either, Chip or Dale.”

“Well, either way you get my nuts.”

Today was Fete Francaise, the yearly French Block Party that serves as the major fundraising event for scholarships for our kids’ school.  Each year, all the kids perform at Fete.

Remember how the last time Will performed at school, he exceeded his previous stage-related penchants of yawning and nose-picking in favor of giving out wet-willies to other kids?  Right.  Well.

I’ll show you how it went.  Let me set the stage, so to speak.

There’s a lot of people there.

And the kids are all lined up on stage with parents crowded in as close as possible.

Cameras are everywhere.  All kinds of  Serious.  Cameras.

And it’s Fete, the most important day of the year for the school, so folks are really into it.

The kids are lined up on stage, ready to sing all sorts of deep philosophical things about Sartre and Voltaire.  All in French, of course, which is important because, as Fancy Nancy says, “everything in French sounds Fancy.”

So sweet.

Wait.  Except.  What?  That kid on the end?

Right, that one.

Yes, that’s the same one.  Good.  I’m glad he can be seen from all sides, then.  Just so everyone can experience it.  Who is he, anyway?

Oh, WILL.  Good thing he has that notebook so clearly marked.  Just so EVERYONE can know EXACTLY who he is.  No question, then.

Okay.  So, what’s that kid, Will… what is he DOING?

What is he doing indeed.

Okay.  Click on the video below.  Sound recommended. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you.

That kid on the end of the school performance. from Cold Spaghetti on Vimeo.

Still, I’ll take this over wet-willies. I’m calling it a success.

There’s a post coming about our wonderful Saturday morning volunteering in the garden of the Edible Schoolyard at Samuel Green School.  But while I fix the photos and think about how to write about the morning, where all the Fellows came, where we spontaneously met up with other friends and families who came out, where we gardened and then shared a community meal…. and then while I figure out how to describe the amazing garden, the inspirational school, and how it all grew out of ideas and work and people — while all that is in process, I couldn’t resist sharing just a little something.

Here is Kate, taking a break from weeding and watering.  Kate, sporting her fancy gardening hair.

I am in a really bad mood.

Yes, I’m upbeat and if you ask I’ll be fine, but the truth is that I’m just really pissed off.

I’m pissed that it’s Mardi Gras. I’m not ready for it and therefore, it’s presence and pressure in my life is totally pissing me off. If you’re preparing for, thinking about, or planning for Mardi Gras, I can guarantee that it’s pissing me off. I’m sorry, really. It’s not you, it’s me.

I’m pissed off that I’m not done, that I’m not asleep, and that my sheets aren’t clean. I’m pissed that I didn’t take my jeans out of the dryer and they’ll be short and I fucking HATE that because nothing is more ridiculous than pants that are too short on someone who is already clearly too short.

I’m pissed over the size of the piles of laundry yet to do. And every damn piece of clothing that is stained, inside out, twisted, or mis-organized (which means every damn article there) is each, individually, a source of pissing-me-off. Really, it’s out of control. If you saw it, I feel certain you’d find it pretty offensive. Chances are, it’d piss you off, too.

Every damn sign I see for Jay Batt pisses me off.

I’m pissed over work stuff for which I have no control and pissed over work stuff for which I do have control. I’m pissed that I’m distracted. I can’t stay on schedule and I can’t clear my schedule and it pisses me off. Every new tidbit of information to process, new detail to remember, new task to incorporate feels oppressive and stifling.

I hate feeling oppressed and stifled.

I’m pissed about people. I’m pissed about places. And I’m pissed that I’m even bothering to be pissed about people and places.

And I’m pissed that I really shouldn’t be pissed because horrible things are happening in the world and we’re okay so I don’t have any right to be pissed in the first place. By all rights, I should be bouncing out of bed every morning, eager to work to enjoy all we have going for us. I try to turn it around, picturing myself greeting the bright day with flowers in my hair and a smile for each moment but that image really gets on my nerves.

Try as I may, in my heart of hearts, I just feel pretty unpleasant.

Am I just a total whiny bitch? It’s okay, please tell the truth. It doesn’t matter because either way, my guess is that it will piss me off.

A good chaser is needed here. Something sickly cute. So cute it might even piss you off. I take no offense if it does. I know it’s not personal.

By the time I sat up, Paul was flying into Kate’s room.  He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear.  It was all too loud.  What was he saying?  Something about smoke.  And… fire.  A placid voice was booming that word between the whoops and beeps and wails of the endless alarm.  FIRE FIRE. GET OUT.

I walked out to the doorway just as Will reached his, groggy and looking panicked.  Kate was sitting up in her bed, trying to decide whether to cry in fear or indignation from the rude awakening.  I took both kids back to our bed, showing them with my own hands how they could cover their ears to keep out the sound.  Will looked conflicted.

“Mommy,” he hesitated, “shouldn’t we leave?” His shout comes out as a wail.

“Do you see any smoke, Will?”

“No…. but…”

“We’re probably okay.  Daddy is checking the house.  Let’s stay warm and wait for him, okay?”

Or maybe I just grunted and pointed, I don’t remember.   We shuffle into the bed, where thankfully the cat has had the good sense not to move.  We lift him with the covers and slide under his warm spot.  Kate has both hands over her ears.

In case you haven’t experienced the assault of a full-house fire alarm, let me describe it.  By code they are wired to all go off anytime one senses danger.  Each alarm has a different tone, each delivered at a deafening level.  When combined, it’s oddly melodic, with occasional commentary (FIRE FIRE GET OUT) from a humorless voice.   The sound is instantly overwhelming.  It’s repulsive enough that after a minute, you start to feel sick.  Will has a point; we should leave.  Who cares if the house is on fire or not?

Paul has finished his flying around the house, turned on all lights, and emerges in the doorway with a wild look in his eye.  “THERE’S NO SMOKE.”  He’s shouting at the top of his lungs.  “BUT I CAN’T TELL WHICH OF THEM CAUSED THE ALARM.”  His update comes at us in a rush and he’s off again retrieving a ladder.

Our shotgun house is 23 feet wide, and with the exception of the front room, holds rooms that, at the absolute widest, are 12 feet.  Add in cabinets or furniture, and getting an 8′ foot ladder through the room, set up, used, and then out again is not particularly easy.

Especially at 1:30 in the morning.  On one of the coldest nights on record in the city.

Luckily, our outbuilding is (still) under construction and the back room (still) holds all Paul’s tools.  Yes, technically it means that the kids could potentially decide to play around with a hacksaw, but (upside!) it also means that Paul does not have to go outside to retrieve a ladder.  Score one for slow-moving DIY home renovation.

It takes him just over 20 minutes to disable all of the alarms.  Disable = remove.

Thank goodness that this happened while Paul was home.

Finally, there is sweet, blessed silence.  The drama hasn’t ended, but at least it’s quiet.  You can hear echoes of the sound leave our skin as we start to breathe a little easier.

Paul announces that he’s found the culprit: it was the detector in Kate’s room.

I push out the memory of Jenny, a teaching colleague at Michigan, who lost her entire primary source document collection, the result of more of a year’s dissertation research in Ghana, to a fire that smoldered quietly in the exterior wall of her apartment for more than 24 hours before bursting into flame through her wall.  Surely, I say to myself, Kate’s room is fine.

Right?

I’m probably willing to say it’s fine, just to go back to sleep (big day! tomorrow! must leave house at 7am!)  But I’m married to a responsible sort of guy and he’s not keeping his family in an unsafe house, by golly!   He increases the intensity of the inspection.  He re-checks all rooms.  He conducts a flashlight search in the attic.  He even braves the bitter cold to look around outside.  (In retrospect, this is actually sort of hot, no?)

Meanwhile, he’s clearly irritated that he cannot identify a reason to cause the alarm.  (Scotland Yard would be no help at all, Watson!  We must uncover the true source of the misery!)  The three of us, Will, Kate, and I, lay in bed listening to the bumping, ruffling, shifting sounds of Paul’s thorough inspections.  Ever the helpful boy, Will offers his best hypotheses.

“Mommy, you know, the Addisonhunters are a group of very very very old ninjas who hunt down fires in the deep woods of Chinese….”  (Hey, at least Will offers comic relief.)  I do my best to calm the kids, who are still wide-eyed and dazed.

Finally, Paul is convinced that there is no immediately identifiable danger.

“Okay,” he says, holding on to a smoke detector, “I’ll start putting them back now.”

“WHAT?” (I’m thinking he’s out of his mind.)

Paul looks incredulous.  “You don’t want to sleep in a house with no smoke detectors, do you?”  Oh, right.  Probably not a good idea, especially tonight.  Thank goodness one of us considers these things.

After a half hour of taking down the offending alarms and 20 minutes of searching for signs of smoke, Paul starts the weaving-the-ladder-through-the house game.  We listen to his progress as his selects a few rooms to re-equip.  Fifteen minutes later…

FIRE FIRE.  GET OUT.

Yes.  It starts again.

The fifth of the five alarms he’s re-installed triggers a repeat performance.  Oddly enough, we discover five alarms to be surprisingly equal in sound level to the previous 11 (12 if you count the carbon monoxide detector).

Kate sighs heavily and turns to once again, cover her ears.  “Mommy,” she shouts, exasperated, “is our house on fire AGAIN?”

* Update.   Neither Paul nor I slept a bit for the rest of the night, and no one slept in Kate’s room.   Paul replaced the offending alarms (which he discovered had a high false-positive rate) with better-rated units and replaced all batteries.

Early on in our relationship, Paul and I shared books.  I introduced him to Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston and Toni Morrison (resulting in an interesting moment in an airport, where an African-American airline attendant stopped him to exclaim that she’d never thought she’d see the day when a white boy was reading Toni Morrison).  In return, he suggested a variety of science fiction, a genre where I had limited experience.

To his credit, there were a few books that were good.  Ursula LeGuin, as an example.

But then he recommended a book so horrendously terrible that he lost book credibility for years.  Further, it made me question the entire volume of Science Fiction literature, as this particular book had been given awards.

The book?  Snow Crash.

Granted, I find speculative fiction generally boring.  In my most critical mind, I would argue it is full of self-importance; creating unsophisticated pretend worlds as excuses for storylines characterized by masturbatory fantasies for the heterosexual male.  The epitome of this is Snow Crash.  The main character, Hiro Protagonist (oh, Hero. And he’s the Protagonist.  Haha… isn’t that author clever? *gag*) who is basically a guy who did some okay work in his past, got screwed by the man (so to speak), now delivers pizza and has, like, a really cool score sword-fighting with his virtual identity in a virtual world.  In short: he’s the stereotype of Science Fiction readership.  Seriously, though, I LOVE geeks, but let’s be real.  Hiro IS the Comic Book guy in The Simpsons.

It gets worse.  Hiro’s love interest is a teenage girl — a FIFTEEN year old girl — and yet there is never an issue with the fact that the dude is, ahem, a pedophile.

—

Anyway, I digress.  The point I’m making is that I’ve approached anything Paul suggests with caution.  And Science Fiction?  Well, if it’s even remotely related to something in the future, or fantasy, or is written by a possibly-creepy dude, I steer clear.

Which is why it took me so long to come around to Neil Gaiman.

Actually, laloca had more to do with turning me to Gaiman.  I figured if she liked him, he can’t be that bad.  Also,  I’d read Coraline and liked it quite a bit.  So a few years back, I gave Paul the book American Gods — because Terry Pratchett hadn’t published anything new at that time.

I recently finished The Golden Compass series (which I read out of curiosity of what strong young women are available in ‘youth’ novels these days — the first two books of the series were in the dollar sale at the library, so I figured I give them a try).  I wasn’t ready to go back to my usual nonfiction reading, so I picked up American Gods.

And I really enjoyed it.

So 2010?  Let this be my year to be more aware of my repulsions, and work a little harder to experiment.  (But please, give me a few months to work up to raw oysters.  I’m not quite there yet.)

Sometime late in the day on Christmas Eve, Paul and I started discussing what we were going to do regarding food the following day. Would he care for pot roast, I asked him, or maybe chicken? Or, hey what the heck, a turkey if you want. Turkey? Really? He asks. Sure! I say, why not, it IS Christmas.

And also? I figure, like me, he’s thinking turkey breasts ’cause they are easy to cook.

He wasn’t.

So he brought home an 11 lb bird. Frozen. For the record, my kitchen does *NOT* include any of the following items: roasting pan, meat thermometer, cotton string, basting brush, baster, roasting rack, or meat carving utensils.

In other words, we were completely ready to make a turkey.

The first order of business was to thaw the thing, so we spent more than four hours soaking the bird in cold water that we changed every half hour.

We didn’t brine it. The thawed bird spent the night in the pot (sans water) in the fridge. When morning came, we got out the neck and giblets (after watching a youtube video which showed the technique), rinsed off the thing and rubbed it down with butter and whatever random spices were hanging around. (I believe this amounted to salt, pepper, and rosemary.) Along with the flour, which is recommended to prevent bag explosion, I threw in onions, carrots and celery. I filled the inside with these veggies as well, just because it seemed to make sense to me to do so. The turkey went into the bag and into the aluminum pan — upside down — at Kitty’s brilliant suggestion.

After 3 or so hours at 350, we flipped the bird (wow, that was messy) cooked it a little longer, and then took it out.

The thing was just falling apart. It certainly looked done and based on the whole “clear liquid” thing we determined it was done. I did my best to put together a gravy. (Though Paul liked it, I thought it needed more flavor.) But the turkey? It was good! The darn thing was moist, too!

Paul “carved” it right into containers for freezing/storage. No picture perfect roasted turkey for dinner table carving, but that wasn’t our intent anyway. We were just shooting for a night that didn’t include food poisoning.

We brought a big collection of turkey sandwiches to the park today for a big impromptu playdate — no one was ill and two seasons cooks praised the meat. Take that, holiday cooking! You’re not so big and scary afterall.

Though next year? It’s worth it to pre-order a bird from someone else — or change the menu to a more New Orleans fare!

Wow. We told the kids that they could not dive into the holiday bounty until we gave the go ahead… and they listened.

(Please forgive the unfinished touches of the room. Have a mentioned that we’re in year 5 of renovation on our 100+ year old house… wait, I have? Well, don’t I get to use that excuse for at least a decade or so? Or at least get some reprieve because it’s Christmas?)

Paul and I were exhausted. Presents had been stock-piled far away from child eyes for weeks — Will has developed an “exploration” habit — because we couldn’t risk a security breach. So, it was a last minute effort to pull it all together. The effort would have come off without a hitch, had Kate’s tea cart come with both a right side and a left side. Instead, it was equipped with two left sides and a nice note on the receipt asking buyers to please return the items by December 15th if there were problems. The item? It’s no longer available on the seller’s website.

This is yet another reason why doing Christmas shopping early is SO OVER-RATED. Next year, I am totally waiting until the last minute.

Here’s another behavioral surprise for the day: the kids also took turns giving out gifts and watching others open them. (With constant reminders, but still.)

I did manage a few surprises for Paul, despite his finding out about his Very Special Surprise, which I had worked for months to acquire. (By months, I mean reading a few internet articles and wiki forums.) So when he opened the awesome astronomy binoculars I researched and planned for, he was underwhelmed.

Wait. Why did I work so hard for weeks in advance?

BUT. I did surprise him with this little cutie. A piece by a local folk artist:

It says:

“I loves you once
I loves you twice
I loves you more than
beans and rice”

Yea, you rite!

Kate loved her surprises. A Belle dress from Will, dress-up box and Fancy-Nancy book from Nana, princess puzzle & bracelet from friends Dave, Shelly & Zoe, cute socks from Aunt Deb & Uncle Gary, games from Uncle Skip & Aunt Emily, toys from cousins Brayden & Maggie…. and CINDERELLA’S CASTLE from Santa.

At it’s opening, I was expecting an ear-splitting scream, followed by a fainting episode. This didn’t quite happen, though she was definitely excited. Who wouldn’t be? The castle lights up. And plays music.

Really, we were all enthralled.

Will’s interest in it was a bit different. He was looking closely for things to push later on, for the purposes of driving his sister crazy. A skill he is VERY adept at using.

Also? There were one of a kind hand-made gifts!

Nana made a BEAUTIFUL matching sweater and hat!

Gwen made felt SUPERHERO capes!

Super Will…. with his pants unbuttoned.

And Super Kate, too.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Beautiful double rainbow, this afternoon, from our house to yours!

Merry, Merry!