100-Thing Challenge

Spied on Apartment Therapy today, this fellow is honing is belongings down to 100 things (with some exceptions, "Underwear" is counted as a group, for example), and plans to live for a year with no more than 100 things. How lovely. "The main thing to remember now is that stuff is not passive. Stuff wants your time, attention, allegiance. But you know it as well as I do, life is more important than the things we accumulate."

New Year's Resos: Six-Month Mark

Trying something new this year: I have all of these high hopes that never quite get accomplished. So, inspired by Jordan over at Oh Happy Day, I planned my year around very specific new year's resolutions that support my larger vision for the kind of person I want to be. I've been slowing down lately, so need to get going again. Time to revisit the list...

1. Eat breakfast every day: Check
2. Make bed every day: Check
3. Look more polished: Hm. Do jammies count?
4. Read three Tough Books: I've read one--Moby Dick.
5. Read more poems: Check. Also reading more to the children.
6. Join a CSA and start a garden: Check and double-check!
7: Buy bras that fit: I had done this, but then I lost weight. Uncheck.
8. Start blog: Check
9. Eat lots of whole grains/greens: Check
10. More adventures: Check. More planned, too.
11. Sell/purge things I don't use: Doing better at this, could purge more.
12. Walk places: Check.
13. Pilates: Checkish. I've been skipping class lately.
14. Run: Check. I'll run my first 5K in the fall.
15. Care for my car: Um. Kind of. Could use washing.
16. Take a class: Planned for this summer
17. Submit poems: Nope.
18. Buy a dresser: Check
19: Flowers once a week: Check
20. Edit things: Check
21: Get a bike (Sell car?): Nope. Still need to do this.
22: Drink water: Not so much. More water drinking.

Wow. I'm doing better than I thought. Ok, time rock these out.

Catherine Ledner

If you buy me one of these, I will be your friend. I'm a good friend. We could go for walks, and maybe eat an ice-cream cone together and laugh. (In case you are wondering, I like the rooster best, but the cows are good too.)

First Veg!

First veggies from the CSA yesterday were on the light side due to this year's late frosts, and include two enormous, beautiful heads of lettuce (!), several sweet white onions (!), peas in pods (!) and ... kohlrabi (?!?!). Kolhrabi looks like a leafy squid. It tasts like a turnip, if turnips tasted like really bitter cabbage. Not even the Food Network website has ideas for kohlrabi.

Treats Truck

There's a Treats Truck. Actually, there are TWO Treats Trucks. I'm going to find one of them, and I'm going to eat its treats.

Start Spreading the News

Bought tickets/booked rooms yesterday for next week's vacation to New York. I haven't been in a couple of years, so am thrilled take the week for some tromping and eating. Possible adventures: Coney Island, Shakespeare in the park (Hamlet).

Garden Update

The end of last week ended up being great for getting things done. I tore out and replanted parts of my garden. Lettuces and radishes were bolting like crazy, so they've been re-sown and moved to a cooler, less sunny spot to (hopefully) leaf out and become edible. I repotted some thyme and moved things around, and everything looks beautiful and green. Trying to catch the tomato worms that gobble the basil at night (then again, the basil could use a little gobbling. It's getting enormous). My sources say theyll crawl into a saucer filled with beer, but no one showed for the Negro Modello saucer party last night. Perhaps they're Pabst swillers, instead?

Weekend Round-Up: Mojito, Prosecco, Shiraz

Good, plim days well spent, despite the heat. Welcome, summer.

Saturday: Ate breakfast, made bed. Spent morning wrapping gifts and otherwise readying for the rest of the day: Across-town baby shower at 3:00 followed by a wedding at 6:00 required a speedy costume change or two. Blue dress from Anthro for the baby shower, paired with sweet strawberry sandals. Sexy black dress with pearls and green heels for the wedding. I'm LOVING my short hair.

Sunday: Made bed, ate breakfast. Lazy morning, breakfast at Gaia and farmers' market crawl followed by some post-party picking up and a couch nap. Afternoon party down at Osteria Marco involved making organic bath products and eating tasty food: Mojitos went with a lime/mint sugar body scrub; cayenne/rosemary almonds and Prosecco went with a red pepper/vanilla massage oil. Also plenty of Osteria's tasty fare: house-made mozzerella, prosciutto pizza, et al. Line of natural, locally made beauty products, sans carcinogens, can be found at the Queen Bee's sauce shop. Il Posto for more Prosecco, dinner of razor clams and burrata and charm.

Tuesday will bring the first round of produce from the CSA. I can't wait.

So good to see most of my favorite ladies over the course of two days. They are a witty, engaging and enjoyable bunch. It is a joy to be among such women.

Climbing Out

I've spent the past couple of weeks fighting gremlins for various reasons; they've left me whelmed with a messy house and plenty of indecision; usually signs of a sad Amanda. To get myself back on the right track, I'm starting with two small things:

1) Breakfast. Every day. I need to eat in the morning. I have low blood sugar, so starting the day without breakfast equals disaster, arson. It means I eat crap all day (hammering the nail in the blood-sugar coffin), forget to drink water, neglect to run or breathe calmly or look at leaves. Breakfast.

2) Make bed. Every day. Making the bed every morning is something that just smoothes out the day, makes the house happier, allows accomplishments to build. Make bed.

I also took some time this evening to mop and dust and do a week's worth of dishes. I did laundry and wiped down smutty surfaces and swept and emptied trash. It was nice to come home. I'm going to bed so I can wake up and 1) eat breakfast, 2) make the bed.

-Please Excuse Our Dust-

I've taken the time I would have spent blogging today to add some new features to my little page. It was looking a mite dusty, so I've rearranged a few things and added a couple. Find links to pretty, lovely and otherwise sweet Web sites under "Concupiscient Curds." Links to other blogs can be found under "Heavy Cream."

Ham, Cheese

If you are local, do yourself a favor and head over to the Fisher Clark Urban Delicatessen on the Bonnie Brae block of University. Treat yourself to the Spanish ham and cheese sandwich. Be happy.

New Yorker: Yes, Please

I'm now five issues into my New Yorker subscription, and am finding it deeply satisfying. In my few issues so far, there have been plenty of gems: A story each by Nabakov, Woody Allen (ridiculous, just short enough to scoff at), John Updike (lovely!), and many more. Also, a scathing and nasty review of the Sex and the City movie that I enjoyed almost as much as the movie itself. I've perused an article about Chinua Achebe and spotted the ghost of E.B. White lurking just inside one of the title "E"s, all over lunch. A mere month's worth of tuck, roll and crease leaves me wanting more.

Tuesday Poem: Ode to the Potato

Things have been feeling a little heavy-handed this week, so a lighter, earthy gem today, from Barbara Hamby's Babel:

"They eat a lot of French fries here," my mother
announces after a week in Paris, and she's right,
not only about les pommes frites but the clestial tuber
in all its forms: rotie, puree, not to mention
au gratin or boiled and oiled in la salade nicoise.
Batata edulis discovered by gold-mad conquistadors
in the West Indies, and only a 100 years later
in The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff cries
"Let the skie raine Potatoes," for what would we be
without you--lost in a sea of fried turnips,
mashed beets, roasted parsnips? Mi corazon, mon coeur,
my core is not the heart but the stomach, tuber
of the body, its hollow stem the throat and esophagus,
leafing out to the nose and eyes and mouth. Hail
the conquering spud, all its names marvelous: Solanum
teberosum, Igname, Caribe, Russian Banana, Yukon Gold.
When you turned black, Ireland mourned. O Mr. Potato Head,
how many deals can a man make before he stops being
small potatoes? How many men can a woman drop
like a hot potato? Eat it cooked or raw like an apple
with salt of the earth, apple of the earth, pomme de terre.Tuber, tuber burning bright in a kingdom without light,
deep within the earth where the Incan potoato gods rule,
forging their golden orbs for the world's ravening gorge.

Weekend Round-Up: Strawberries, Jane

Weekend included a good billing of summer events executed with children in tow: Street fair with corn dogs and balloons; pool time; strawberry picking up at the farm.

Collapsed in a heap sometime yesterday afternoon after walking into my own child-free house. Ate strawberries, tiny and exquisite, all acid and sweet. Watched Becoming Jane, which had all of the angst of Pride and Prejudice without the triumphant ending. Also, I hate Anne Hathaway and her smirky ironic face. I hope she trips on it.

Milk-Maid Mondays: Emily Dickinson

26

It's all I have to bring today --
This, and my heart beside --
This, and my heart, and all the fields --
And all the meadows wide --
Be sure you count -- should I forget
Someone the sum could tell --
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

Will, Shall

This entry, in Strunk and White, left me terribly amused this week:

"In formal writing, the future tense requires shall for the first person, will for the second and third. The formula to express the speaker's belief regarding a future action or state is I shall. I will expresses determination or consent. A swimmer in distress cries "I shall drown; no one will save me!" A suicide puts it the other way: "I will drown; no one shall save me!"

Freckles

I have them. Must be summer.

Tower-Free, Lock-Free

Gladly light-headed.

Gosling Update

The Canadian Geese and ducklings have hatched out by the dozen this year, as I've noted in earlier posts. The goslings have nearly grown now, and rather resemble t-rex young, and the ducklings have grown rotund and bother one another through nips and splashing. One family, however, seems never to bear any young: The flock of large white geese. White and grey with orange feet, they're really more like those geese that bothered Charlotte in the barn cellar, more like those geese in story books. This year, they have hatched one of their own. Only one, which I find interesting: Why? One egg? Were the others eaten? Did they not hatch?

Whatever the reason, the adults do more to protect her than do the other fowl their numerous young. They urge watchers to leave after a few moments only, and they hiss at dogs and bikes and children, and two adults flank her at all times. She is yellow and very, very small.

Elements of Style: Illustrated

It turns out that this basset hound is making this face because she knows how dissapointed you're going to be with the rest of the illustrations. She feels terrible to have gotten your hopes up, poor dear. She, too, was hoping it would be brilliant. She alone knows how you feel.

Tuesday Poem: Rapunzel After Her Marriage

This offering, from Eve Rifkah:

Every morning in front of the mirror
I take the silver scissors
and cut my hair and my daughter's
shorter

the hand-maidens, the ladies
all snigger behind their veils
the queen gifts us with emerald-encrusted combs
pleads with me to stop this daily snip

my husband, my prince, talks soft in my ears
tells me we are safe

but all those years
I yanked brush through tangles
snarled in pain
all the years my neck bent
with the weight of wet
washed hair
all the hours sitting still
waiting within the spreadcircle of hair
a heavy cloak I could not set aside

It was not Dame Gothel's heavy climb
or you dear husband
that burdened my head
but the braided ropes tying my time in care

now my daughter runs hind-swift
and I, tower free lock free
gladly light-headed

Smirk, Surf

Plenty of smirking going on at Apple's Town Hall today as Steve Jobs, smirker extraordinaire, announced the new iPhone. Coming July 11th, to smirkers everywhere.

Milk-Maid Mondays: Misty Fields, Paradise

More from Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" for this Monday:





4

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
before the fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

Weekend Round-Up: Calm, Bright

-Pool on Friday night with the small ones, complete with a full bag of cherries. Salad from their garden, fish, sweet corn. "Silent Night" wafting from one boy's bed around dusk: What could be more holy?

-Saturday lunch at Gaia (love). Crepes, coffee, orange juice, buzzing garden. Library visit. Park for play; looked for Nessie in the lake. Soft-serve ice cream. Mushroom and arugula pasta.

-Difficult Sunday morning pilates class with Bosu ball. Perfect pool sunburn under my big blue hat. Thyme brought by my sweet neighbor. Melon and parmesan wrapped in prosciutto, sprinkled with my own garden's first real offering of basil. Dinner with friends; evening ice cream walk; charming small children. Peonies.

Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling

Found at Brooklyn Social Cards. $250 for the powder room, anyone?

Hair Pins/Thoroughly Modern Millie

My dentist, a lovely man, seemed charmed months ago when I answered that the chip in my front tooth is from a hair pin. He smiled and mentioned that they don't get many of those "these days." Vacuuming last week, when I had to take my vaccuum apart because it would not suck, I found six hairpins stuck length-wise, which were blocking muck from entering the vaccuum's sacred chambers. I step on hairpins, find them in the laundry, rusted in the tub, keep them in my wallet, use them as bookmarks. They live in dusty corners in my house, and I have used one to unlock a closed door more than once.

My old-fashiondy love for hair pins, handkerchiefs, gloves makes me wonder: Certainly other Thoroughly Modern Millies don't have this trouble; finding the evidence of "keep" doubly in vacuums, wallets, enamel. Where else are we to keep, if not between these delicate tines? So much does not hold, gives way. This seems a quiet place to hide, hoard. A spot for holding strands, souls, latches, teeth. Olly-olly oxen free.

Tuesday Poem, Milk-Maid Mondays

A Tuesday poem/Milk-Maid Monday entry this Thursday from Gerard Manley Hopkins:




Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in a stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change,
Praise him.

Happy Birthday, Mommy!