Leaves (and luck) turning...

Ah, it's fall. I think I've mentioned before how I love fall; I like cool days and darker mornings—although I don't think we need quite as much rain as we've been having lately. In any case, the latest reason for me to love fall is sitting in front of my house: our beautiful new Brandywine maple tree that we planted a couple of months ago.

We have not had a history of good luck with trees at our house. One of the benefits of living in an older subdivision is plenty of mature trees, and when we bought our house in summer 1997 we had plenty of them: ashes as tall as the (two-story) house centered in both the front and back yards; a corkscrew willow for some extra shade in the back, and a cherry by the front sidewalk for a little variety.

When we returned from the UK in summer 2002, however, it was at the same time as the emerald ash borer, an exotic beetle that has since killed more than 30 million ash trees in Southeast Michigan. (No kidding, when we saw a documentary that showed the supposed "ground zero" for the ash borer, it was about two miles from our house.) It wasn't long before our beautiful, tall, shade-giving ash trees were naked and riddled with holes. There wasn't much to be done, so we had them both removed. I planted a garden with a juniper and a dogwood in the back—the corkscrew willow still looms over half the yard—and selected a river birch to replace the ash in front. It won't be as large, but I wanted something different than the rest of the neighborhood, to make it less likely to be susceptible to another epidemic of scale or bugs or whatever. River birches are native to the area, anyway, and it's very nice although it doesn't give much in the way of shade. It didn't need to; it wasn't far from the cherry, which sheltered the front room very well.

Then last summer we had a really big storm; the cherry tree fell, and we were lucky it didn't take anything else with it. We now had tons of sun coming in the front window, which wasn't exactly what we wanted in the summer. We couldn't plant something big, because the birch was already there. We decided to take advantage of a township program that reimbursed for homeowner planting in easements ... but what to plant? Going on the same theory of "not what everyone else has," we selected a London plane tree, which has interesting bark and is supposed to be a hardy tree. We planted it last fall, and waited this spring to see it leaf out....

... and waited and waited and waited. Eventually we contacted the nursery, and they gave the verdict: it was more than 50% dead. "We don't see many of these fail," they told us, but ours managed to do it. Luckily we had purchased one-year insurance (a requirement for the reimbursement), and decided to go with something nearly indestructible. Sure, everyone else has maples, but there's a good reason: they're stubborn and they stick around. And ours is prettier than everyone else's, I think. So here's hoping our arboreal luck has turned, along with the leaves. I really don't want to imagine what could go wrong with the corkscrew willow....

Photo of the Week--5/18/09

Leave it to me to go to New York and find the spot with the most water and trees together. I've said before that fall is my favorite season, and this glorious day did nothing to change my mind. World-class museums, fantastic live entertainment, and 843 beautiful acres of parkland in the middle? No wonder people ♥ New York!

Photo of the Week--2/16/09

You can tell I'm starved for color in the landscape, because I couldn't resist posting this photo. I took it outside the Bishop's Castle in Wells, England, one November. A little bit of old building, some moving water, a little bit of fall color, lots of trees ... I wish I were there now (the time as well as the place), sitting on the grass doing not much of nothing.

A Coda on Pie

So last week I wrote an Ode to Pie in celebration of the Thanksgiving week. Yes, I said, "Thanksgiving week," and I suppose I should explain for those of you who are unfortunate enough never to have experienced the annual pie massacre my family calls "Thanksgiving."

You see, every year my mother prepares for the descent of locusts family members into her house by baking pies. (Sweet, tasty pies!) And every year, the number of pies is close to 40. This year it was 41. Last year, I believe it was 38. Whatever the exact number, it's a lot of pie.

But we have a lot of people visit throughout Thanksgiving week. If family fly in from out of town, sometimes they arrive on Tuesday, so we have to eat pie. We definitely get people coming up on Wednesday night, so we have pie with the usual dinner of homemade soup. On Thanksgiving proper, we don't usually get the bird until 2pm, so we might need a piece of pie to tide us over until then. After digesting for bit, we usually need to top things off with another piece of pie; after all, there are so many yummy flavors available. This year on Thursday we had something like 30 people in the house for Thanksgiving dinner and pie, so lots of pie was needed.

Friday is an almost exact repeat of Thursday (pie, turkey dinner at 2, more pie), except we usually have a few more people attending. Again, lots of pie needed. Then we have the stragglers who stay through Saturday, finishing up the soup and the jigsaw puzzle that's taken over the dining room table, and of course it wouldn't be family time without more pie. (Really, people, there's something like 10 flavors to try!)

So anyway, that leads to this little coda. When I left my mom's house on Saturday, she told me to take a pie. Actually, she told me to take two: apple and pumpkin, of which there were a few extra. No problem. After all, pie for breakfast is no different than a "breakfast pastry," except it has more real fruit and tastes better. So we've slowly been working our way through the pies, and last night Boy and I went out to dinner because TSU was out of town. We went to his favorite restaurant, and he requested their tasty chocolate chip cookies for dessert. I gave him a skeptical look and said, "But there's still pie at home." When he complained that there wasn't any pumpkin left, I corrected him and said there was still a piece, I had just moved it into the apple pan. He frowned and gave this response:

"But Mom, that's not dessert pie."

!!!! Only in my family, I suppose.

An Ode to Pie

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I won't be around for the rest of the week because I'll be too hopped up on turkey and pie to bother writing in my blog. Thanksgiving is a major holiday in our family: we usually have 20-25 people on Thursday, then close to 30 on Friday. We do not know the meaning of "leftover turkey," and we love our pie. So here is a very poor ode celebrating a very tasty dessert:

O cherry, pumpkin, apple, peach!
I will have a slice of each.
And berry pies (of black
and blue) I shall not lack
Tho' some may blanch, I think I'll try
A míxed rhubarb apple pie*
I really love pecan
(So does the whole damn clan)
Two crusts, or pie with none on top
When eating pie, I cannot stop!
A pie that's a la mode
Could merit its own ode
And coconut, banana cream?
I'm only eating in my dreams
(And neither is there orange;
'cause nothing rhymes with orange!)
Of every pie I'll have a slice
Fourteen kinds; that should suffice
(at least for the first day;
don't worry what you weigh!)
And when the pastry's all devoured
And the plates have all been scoured
I'll burp a fond good-bye
And dream of Christmas pie

Have a great holiday, everyone!

*Not really. Rhubarb={shudder}. But it's called poetic license for a reason.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for ...

... my family, my health, yeah, yeah, sure, I'm grateful for all that stuff. But as I was baking cookies last week, I realized what I'm really thankful for: GADGETS!

Gadgets are cool! Gadgets are fun! Gadgets make life easier! "Gadgets" begins with a G! (Whoops! Word Nerd isn't returning until next week!)

Here's one that I just discovered a couple of weeks ago. Now, in general I love my DVR (aka TIVO) and you can have my remote when you pry it from my cold dead hands. I not only use the satellite service to record and playback TV shows, but also to listen to XM Radio. They have two classical music channels with little or no commercials (or even talking), something sorely lacking on regular radio in my area. Since this is a radio channel, they broadcast a still picture with the music, and the "info" button shows the title, composer, and performer of the piece. Now, because it's a still picture, after a few minutes the TV goes into "screensaver" mode, blank except for a DirecTV logo that bounces around the screen. The bouncing logo can be fun; Boy and I like the game from "The Office" where you wait for the logo to hit the corner perfectly, although TSU thinks we're nuts. But a few weeks ago, a miracle happened:


The bouncing logo is now a box with all the title/composer info, so I don't have to find the clicker if I want to remind myself if a piece is Brahms or Schubert or one of those other guys I forget about. Hallelujah!

So I'm listening to classical radio as I begin baking, occasionally glancing over to get title info, and I come upon another favorite gadget. I luuuurve my KitchenAid mixer, which has a certain sleek mechanical beauty to it. More important, it saves my increasingly tender elbows and wrists from overwork as I make a double batch of cookies (4 cups of flour is hard to mix) or a tasty cheesecake (it makes quick work of lumpy cream cheese). It's heavy, but its motor could probably power a small lawnmower. It's perfect and I'm so thankful I have it this time of year.


Last, there's this tiny little kitchen gadget I love for making cookies: this doohickey that ejects whatever goop you might scoop with it. It's perfect for making rolled cookies; much easier than the "two-spoon" method and much cleaner than pinching dough with your fingers (I hate getting dough under my nails). Nope, with this baby I just scoop some dough, squeeze the handle, and with a satisfying "snick!" I have just the right size ball of dough to roll (and dip in sugar). Even if I didn't like eating cookies, I'd bake them just to use this gadget.


Although there are other little utensils I enjoy, I'm going to stop here with my list of gadgets for which I'm grateful. Gigi, however, would like to add she is thankful for the gadget we call the "Flat Rat." It's a little hunk of fur with a leather head and tail, and she loves to chase it so much she's been fetching it back to me as I write this entry so I can throw it over and over. Sigh. A cat-slave's work is never done. Maybe I should invent a gadget to chuck cat toys....

Happy Halloween!

I love Halloween. It's one of my favorite holidays. I mean, who couldn't love a day when you're supposed to dress up in crazy costumes and then devour tons of sugar? Even as a so-called grown-up, I've taken any chance I get to dress up for Halloween. At my first job, before the company became corporate and boring, we actually had a Halloween party and employees were encouraged to dress up. I came up with some weird costumes for those parties. One was "prom date from hell": I took an old bridesmaid dress (and matching shoes!), ratted my hair, and wore socks and a jean jacket with the outfit. In 1992 I went political: I borrowed a suit from the TSU, wore it backwards with a George H.W. Bush mask on the back of my head; put a duck bill on my nose, and used a squeaky red-white-and-blue cane. (Lame duck, get it? Okay, it looked better than it sounds.) In 1994, when I was six months pregnant with Boy, I made a snake costume that had a mouse's tail sticking out of the mouth. (Recently fed snake, get it? You had to see it, I guess.) More recently, I've been able to dress up for the Dexter Community Band's annual Halloween concert. I've made Cat in the Hat, Moon Goddess, Renaissance Princess, and Egyptian Queen costumes for those events. Tragically, this year we couldn't get the auditorium for Halloween and so I have no excuse to dress up.

Still, there's always the decorating. I don't go crazy with lights and sculptures and fake webs and ghosts, like some of my neighbors. No, I'm all about the pumpkin carving. I make my pumpkins do weird things. Last year I re-enacted the alien-busting-out-of-the-stomach scene from Alien using a pumpkin and a squash. This year, though, I'm going with an old favorite: the barfing pumpkin. Instead of the usual CSI: Pumpkin patch scene (one pumpkin with a knife in its head, the other a barfing witness), I went for something a little more topical:

You can't read the sign, but it says: "I told you not to eat all your Halloween candy at once." Here's a closeup of the barfing pumpkin:


Halloween is the best!

The Quilt Files, Episode 4

The big quilt is still in being displayed, but I have something totally cool and more appropriate for the season to talk about instead. As you'll remember, last time I wrote about my first applique project. It was fairly simple; a few large pieces, mostly symmetrical, so it was easy to fudge any flubs. My next applique project was a bit more complex, and it's hanging up in my entryway all this month:

I made this over the course of a couple of Septembers. The first one I spent piecing the background; relatively easy, because it was only a few squares with some borders in between. Then I looked at all the pieces that had to be appliqued onto the background and went, ulp! Back it went into my projects box until another September, when I had a little more confidence and a goal of getting it ready for Halloween. I tried not to think about the number of pieces to be appliqued (over 60, I think); instead, I just did a few at a time. I managed not to get any pieces cut out the wrong way, and got all the satin stitching done with the help of a ton of stabilizer. Then came the fun part!

It's hard to see on the big picture up above, but all the eyes on this wall hanging are made from buttons. Finally, something to do with the spare buttons in my button box! (I don't think I've ever made a shirt where the number of buttons I needed and the number of buttons I could purchase matched exactly, which is why I have a button box.) So some spare turquoise buttons came out for the cat; some gold buttons with crystal centers were given to the owl; I bought some iridescent purple buttons for the ghosts; and clear gold ones for the bat and this friendly spider here.

So now I have a Halloween hanging, to go with my regularly-scheduled rainbow round-the-world and the Christmas poinsettia my grandmother made for me. Someday, I hope to have a separate wall hanging for each month of the year, but that's going to take me a while. For now, I just have fun with this one every October.

Change is afoot!

No, I'm not going to be talking about politics. I mean, the election is historic and important and all that, but if you're anything like me, you're on political overload. Too many ads, political talking heads, and unimportant "stories" produced by the endless news cycle. (I liked Jon Stewart's observation that the media covering the election are like six year olds playing soccer. "Who's got the ball! Who's got the ball! Sarah Palin's got the ball! Let's chase her!")

No, I'm going to take a moment to talk about my feet, and how they're mourning the end of summer. I know just last week I blogged about how I love fall and the cooler weather, but my feet think it's gone too far. I have an expression when it comes to my lower extremitites: Happy Naked Feet. I love going barefoot. My feet are extra wide, and kind of flat, so it's never been easy to find shoes that are entirely comfortable. By now my baby toes look rather twisted and monstrous after all these years being squished up against the others. I'm sure they've been broken a couple of times (due to my natural grace), and the right one points in the wrong direction. I have to tape it every time I train, or I can easily dislocate it by making a wrong turn.

Then there's the whole sock thing. Sure, socks are warm and soft and keep my toes from turning white, but they never ever fit. It's frustrating. Because of my wide, large feet, I wear a size 9½ shoe. (Honestly, I should be at least 5'10" with my huge feet, but I barely hit 5'6".) Twenty years ago, I had to buy fancy brands to get that size, but women's shoe manufacturers realized that women's feet are getting larger and now I can find a 9½ anywhere I shop. Unfortunately, sock manufacturers haven't kept up at all. Their "9 to 11" sock size does not correspond to those shoe sizes. I put them on my feet, and the sock heel always stops short of my heel. I have to stretch the sock to fit, so it feels tight on my toes and wears out quickly. So I (and, I assume, many other women) really need a larger sock size. Good luck finding it, because I can't—unless I turn to "Queen Size" socks, which end up bagging around my ankles because my legs are relatively small, at least compared to my gargantuan feet.

So although I'd rather run around outside in sandals, letting my toes hang free, the changing weather means my Happy Naked Feet must become Sad Sock-Clad Feet. Luckily they can still be happy on the taekwondo training floor—at least, until winter sets in and the freezing temps turn my toes white. Sigh.

Fall is here!

Yesterday was the first day of fall, my favorite season. Some people love summer for the heat and lazy days; others prefer spring, with its fresh breezes and new flowers. There are even some crazy people who prefer winter and love being in the snow. (I will admit that I missed snow just a little bit while I was living in London.) But for me, fall is the season that tops them all.

First of all, there's the weather. The days are temperate, even warm, but not very humid, so I can enjoy the outdoors without wheezing like a broken vacuum cleaner. As a bonus, the nights are nice and cool, so I can sleep easily. (I think I've mentioned I like my sleep.) I received the first notice of fall last week when I woke up in the middle of the night and realized I couldn't move my legs because the cat was sleeping on them. She never does that when it's warm.

Another thing I like about the fall is the sense of possibilities. Sure, spring is the time of rebirth. (If you remember how messy birth can be, maybe that's not such a great analogy.) For me, though, fall holds more potential. When I was a student, fall meant the beginning of a new year—new classes, new friends, new things to learn. (I was a nerd, so I liked school.) I'm not a student any more, but I still get that feeling: there's new music to learn at band practice and new students to teach at the TKD studio. Fall is also the beginning of football season, when all my teams have the potential of being champions. (Okay, maybe not so much for the Lions, but a girl can dream, can't she?)

Then there's the bonus: my birthday is in the fall. Okay, maybe not technically, since it's two days before the equinox, but anything after Labor Day is "fall" for my purposes. I like my birthday. I get presents. People say nice things to me, like "You don't look 43!" I get cake.* So hurray for fall! Let the days get a little shorter and the leaves turn crimson. I'll just sit back and enjoy it.

*Well, not this year, but I made a tray of Rice Krispie treats instead. It's a good substitute, especially since Boy and TSU have left it mostly to me. Or did I beat them away with a stick? In any case, I do believe I ate the whoooole thing. Because breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?