Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Will the Circle be Unbroken

My sister gave me the Will the Circle be Unbroken box set for Christmas, and I have been listening to all three versions of the title track over and over.

I was standing by my window,
On one cold and cloudy day
When I saw that hearse come rolling
For to carry my mother away

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, lord, by and by
There’s a better home a-waiting
In the sky, lord, in the sky

I've loved this song for years, going back to before I thought twice about whether there might be a better home a-waiting in the sky. Still, I like the circle idea.

This is an appropriate song for the season, for me. We visited my grandparents' graves, we taught my niece to make my grandparents' recipes. We don't sing hymns, we cook.

Appetizer Meatballs with disconcerting sauce

I'm not sure how the subject of meatballs came up at work, but in the course of a meatball discussion, one of my co-workers said "You'll never believe what my mother used as a sauce for cocktail meatballs!"

I said "Grape jelly and chili sauce."

Her jaw drapped. She was amazed that anyone had ever heard of such a thing. "How did you know?" she asked.

"Because that's how you make cocktail sauce for meatballs," I said.

Actually, when I found out that my grandmother's meatballs, the ones we devoured at every party, were coated with grape jelly and chili sauce, I was a bit, well, disconcerted, too. But you can't argue with success, and a Crockpot of these babies were always a success.

Here, straight from the church cookbook, is my grandmother's recipe:

Click if you need it bigger.

Science News quiz

Fun stuff: the Nature 2005 News Quiz. (Scroll down a bit.)

All that clean living

It's paying off. My blood pressure is 110/70, down from the stubborn 120/80 that it's been for the last few years, and down from the 140/something that it was when I hit 30 that had my doctor saying "You are moving in the wrong direction."

Speaking of clean living, a spam e-mail caught my eye just as I was about to delete it: there's a new diet book out called The Sonoma Diet. I'm tempted, since I read diet books like normal people read novels. It might be worth it for the recipes (since I also read cookbooks like normal people read novels), and I do want to know if it includes healthy amounts of Sonoma County wine...I am newly in love with zinfandel.

In fact, I'm pretty sure zinfandel is where the normal blood pressure came from.

Scenes from a family party

We had good food, we had good beer, we had a 35-20 win over the Giants. (Think it's just me? If we'd have taken a family picture...which we didn't, because nobody has a wide-angle lens...you'd have seen more burgundy & gold than red & green.)

I've been worried that my niece and nephews were going to grow up with a certain lack of awareness of diversity, what with living in a very white suburb and going to Catholic school. I'm less worried. When my niece unwraped her Poly Pockets play set and saw a candelabra, her reaction was "Cool! Kwanzaa candles!"

I've been getting the feeling that my nephew's behavior notices from preschool aren't because he's a bad kid, but because he has the makings of Class Clown. (He comes by it honestly...the family party made me remember, duh, my dad and my uncles are all class clowns.) So I wasn't surprised when they encouraged my nephew's passionate rendition of "Jingle Bells, Batman Smells." Luckily my nephew does have a 4-year-old's attention span, and he forgot one uncle's instruction "Mommy loves that song, so you should sing it to her all the way home."

This is only funny in the context of another old family story: Nephew had escaped the rec room, where the party was, and had gone up to the top floor of my grandmother's house. I caught up to him in the guest room, where he was looking at pictures displayed on a shelf. Most were old family portraits, like one of my cousin (now pregnant with kid #2) as a toddler. The only picture that wasn't family was a Sacred Heart print. "Do you know who these people are?" I asked my nephew. He shook his head. I pointed to the Sacred Heart and told him "Well, this guy is Jesus." (Victor points out that I would have really spread some cheer if I'd said "Take it to Grandpa; he doesn't know either.")

We have a grab bag thing for the adults that is sort of hard to explain (although this page has a variation it calls the "Holiday Gift Grab"). There is a tradition in which alliances (generally spouses) form to try to either get a particularly coveted gift or to stick someone else with a particularly obnoxious gift. Another tradition is complaining about that tradition. My cousin and her husband were whispering before my cousin took her gift-picking turn, and one of the aunts said "Hey! No family planning!" After a moment there were guffaws from all four corners of the room packed with four generations of smartasses, along with comments like "Yeah, that's obvious."

Tradition

I blew off the hockey game last night because I still had presents to wrap, not to mention the making of the Traditional Christmas Key Lime Pie and the Traditional Christmas Cole Slaw.

Of course we need cole slaw. How else would we top the Traditional Christmas Bar-b-que?

Yes, bar-b-que. After all, the family is gathering from far and wide for the Traditional Christmas Eve Viewing of the Redskins Game. Who has time for roast goose or figgy pudding? We need a crock pot and a view of the tv.

I like Christmas music

Unlike some grumpy people, I rather enjoy Christmas music. Ok, I don't want a steady diet of it starting in October, but long about now, it makes me feel festive.

Really, how can you not smile with I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas going through your head?

And not a drop to drink

Work's a charlie foxtrot. It involves a leak...the real kind, with water where it should not be. (Like, for example, under my desk.) We actually got a free day off out of it yesterday, when the plumbers were there shutting off water, and I'd be pretty happy with that if the water under the desks were under desks not mine.

So without my computer at the office (guess what sits on the floor under my desk?) not only is my productivity shot, so was today's feeding of the Internet addiction.

Reruns are traditional

Or, traditions are reruns. Think about it, when the family has gathered and someone says, as they do every year, "Remember the Christmas that Uncle Fred's pants caught fire and he put them out by sitting in the snow?," it is just like watching Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown for the 40th time.

We had the traditional beigli & chrusciki day on Saturday. (Google searchers looking for recipes? Here's the post from last year.) As they do every year, the rest of the family laughed at the way I line the raisins up in rows on the beigli (if you just throw 'em on, you end up with clumps. I prefer my raisins distributed evenly.) This year, my seven-year-old niece joined us to sprinkle the sugar on the chrusciki, and she even tied a batch of them herself.

At one point when we were sitting around waiting for dough to rest (there's a fair amount of downtime in this process) we were discussing the fact that beigli is usually made with either nuts or fruit, but we haven't been able to come up with any recipes that call for both except the one from my great-grandmother. "It makes you wonder if someone from a fruit beigli family married somebody from a nut beigli family," Mom said.

The answer, unfortunately, is lost to history.

In another family historical note, Saturday would have been my grandfather's birthday. That's the chrusciki grandfather. The beigli grandfather was born December 24.

Missing my grandfathers at Christmas is another tradition.

Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Taunt Cowboys

I love Joe Gibbs.

It was so bad even Joe Gibbs was pitying Dallas near the end. In the final minutes, the Redskins coach gestured toward the stadium's sound control to quit playing Willie Nelson's "Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys."

Good sportmanship, very important.

But boy oh boy, I also love trouncing Dallas.

Outsourcing my blogging/5 Weird Things

Ted has a meme, so I will be posting tonight.

The meme is: Five Weird Things About Me

I'm stumped. So I e-mailed the people who know me best, my sister and Victor.

From: Nic
Sent: Friday, December 16, 2005 12:15 PM
To: Karen; Victor
Subject: 5 things

i'm trying to do the 5 weird things meme, but i don't think i'm weird. (if i thought something was weird, i wouldn't do it.) but i'm not so delusional as to think that *others* don't find me weird, so i need your help. what is weird about me?

They both responded very quickly. (Like, immediately. Little did they know this was actually a test to see if I should return their Christmas presents.)

From Victor:

you don't mind having rats pee on you

You spend more per month in vet bills than you do for yourself in one year

From Karen

- your level of knowledge about the death of Bob Crane
- your aversion to eating canned green beans, even though you like green beans in all other forms
- do you have any words that you just cannot seem to spell correctly, even though you know full well that you are mis-spelling them? Like wanting to put a "d" in refrigerator, even though you know it doesn't have a "d"? (I know you know how to spell it, that's just an example)

For the record: I will eat canned green beans. It's just that they squeek when you chew them, and I find that, well, weird.

I have trouble spelling squeek. Is is ee or ea? Squeak. Yeah, not squeek.

I was pondering these when Victor added

How, when served a meal, you have to have the 'mushy stuff' presented to you such that it's in the upper right-hand corner of the plate.

Karen's first one is pretty good--your knowledge of *that* is pretty encyclopedic.

Ok, look, I don't know that much about Bob Crane, ok? I just read a book about it once. A book I picked up on the remainder shelf years ago. It's not like I went to Scottsdale and did my own investigation or anything. I can't even remember the details.

The rest of it is all true, though. And it's easier to blog if I get other people to do most of the writing. Can you guys come back tomorrow?

Throw me a meme

I want to write, but I got nuthin'.

Well, I have angst and annoyances, but even I am sick of listening to me whine.

I can't even fall back on recipes. I don't think the Carnival needs "Open spaghetti sauce and dump in saucepan. Heat." I don't think I can get away with repeating the family holidays recipes for the third year in a row.

I've used up every topic I can think of. Well, I can think of some topics, but they'd require a lot of typing. Nutrogenomics is interesting, but I'm not firing on all intellectual cylinders. I need something that writes itself, like a quiz. What Hogan's Heroes character are you, anyone?

Holiday diet tip

One way to get fewer calories: consume all snacks in the presence of ten rats. They'll snitch or beg so much of your food you'll never gain an ounce.

A-hunting we did go

Dad and I went hunting this morning. We got up early, put on an extra layer of warm clothes, and treked through waht's left of Friday's snow in search of...trees.

I bagged a white pine. It's not everyone's favorite, since the needles are a bit yellow and the branches droop if you have heavy ornaments. I like that the trunks are straight as rulers and the needles are soft.

My mom does have heavy ornaments, so she requested a Scotch pine.

We found her a nice tree, tossed them in the truck, and went to pay. "We have a Scotch pine and a white pine," Dad told the tree farm guy.

"No sir, you have a white pine and a Douglas fir," the tree farm guy responded.

"Uh-oh. I was instructed to get Scotch pine," Dad said.

"Tell her it's a Scotch pine," he said. "She'll never know the difference."

(Actually, she might. Mom probably looked it up on the National Christmas Tree Association to figure out what she wanted.)

Battle of the Bands

Victor and I are fighting over the XM: pretentious seventies art rock vs. eighties pop-synth dance.

Guess who wants what.

Fun with Screen Shots

I got up at 5:30 to shovel slush. (We definitely had as much sleet as snow. And I read a wonderful defense of the Washington snow reaction in a Post chat earlier this week...a lovely person from North Dakota, instead of laughing at us, pointed out "It's not cold enough. Sleet, Slush, Ice and refreezing are infinately more dangerous than cold dry snow. The colder it is the less moisture in the snow and the lighter the flakes...add a nice 20MPH wind and the roads clear themselves." )

I made Victor clear his car and parking space, even though he was taking the bus (so we could switch places...he was in the reserved space, and I didn't want to lose my unreserved space when I went to the doctor. My neighbors aren't above poaching a clean parking spot.), I spread salt, and I could very easily get out now. The doctor is only a few miles away, so I'm thinking I'm ok.

The doctor's office called about an hour ago to tell my they're closed. (I don't know how far out the doctor lives, so I don't know if there's a good reason for them to close. I think the Russian receptionist was laughing at us, though.)

Theoretically I could go to work (we never close), but I already submitted my time sheet, and getting that back and changed may be more hassle than it's worth. Plus I do have other plans for today, like getting the living room rearranged to accomodate a tree.

I decided to check the traffic reports, still toying with the go-to-work idea, and this cracked me up:

A plow wedged under the Beltway and 40,000 pounds of cookies. Screw it, I'm stayin' home.

That reminded me. Yesterday I was reading about the dog genome. Fairly recently, washingtonpost.com started listed blogs that link back to the articles, and this made me giggle too...not that I'm usually so Bevis & Butthead-like, I just wondered if the Post people were pleased to see this in their family newspaper web site.

Dashing through the snow

Man, they sure are playing lots of Beatles on the radio today.

I think I'll get everybody a Brad Wilkerson jerseys for Christmas, since they'll be on sale now.

When I get to the point where 6 out of 10 rats are on medication, would it be more efficient to just aerosolize it and pump into their room?

Maybe I'll start blogging like this all the time: one sentence per topic as it enters and exits my mind. That could be quite a time saver.

Today was like that, disjointed. I hate to jump on the embarassing obsessed-with-the-weather bandwagon, but today I have been unable to pay attention to anything but the weather service. I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow that I don't want to reschedule...I'm mentally prepared, I took the day off to recover...not that it's a huge deal, I just want to have it at 9 a.m. and not have to think about it again.

Happy Holidays!

Ok, I admit it, I'm just trying to offend people.

Learning experience

My niece's school sold poinsettias for a fundraiser this year. I like poinsettias; I usually kill purchase one for the office and a couple for the house. I said sure, put me down for four poinsettias.

My niece failed to turn in the order form on time, so I bought my poinsettias at the grocery store. (Which turned out cheaper, I think.) But we can't let kids grow up thinking that actions don't have consequences, so my sister told my niece "You are going to have to call Aunt Nic and explain to her that she won't get her flowers because you didn't turn in the form."

I'm rehearsing my grief-stricken wail.

The back cover

Oh yeah, I scanned the back, too.

The image is a thumbnail, in case you need to enlarge it to read it. Seven food groups...funny, this is closer to the current food pyramid than what they taught me in grade school.

Dinner, c. 1943

When I'm in line at the grocery store, I don't read tabloids, I indulge in those little cookbooks that are essentially ads for packaged food. I come by this inclination genetically; when we cleaned out my grandmother's house after she passed away, I found boxes of cookbooks like that dating back to the '50's. (If you are familar with Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food...and I hope you are...I have a bunch of those cookbooks. I own Depression Chicken.)

I recently stumbled on a little 5 x 8 cookbook on eBay that wasn't in my grandma's collection, but easily could have been. It was published by General Mills in 1943:

As you might guess from the patriotic cover, this was meant to help the homemakers help the war effort.

I expected more "mock" recipes in here than there actually are (although I'm intrigued by "Nutburgers"). I didn't get it for the recipes, though. I'm becoming interested in old cookbooks as documents of social history (something I'll really pursue if I ever hit a lottery and ditch that pesky day job). Flipping through this little book, I realized that I'm overlooking something better than documents: my grandmother and great aunt were adults right here in D.C. during the war, but it's not something I've ever sat down and asked them about.

I'm thinking of inviting them to dinner and showing them this cookbook. I'll leave it up to them whether they'd like me to make "Victory Pancakes."

We have a winner!

I guess if I'm going to get the Christmas cards out before Easter, I'd better finish them. Which means I need to declare a winner in the caption contest, and it is (drumroll, please)...Owlish of Owlish Mutterings!

Thank you all for playing, and Owlish, I hope you like Eastern European pastry.

The card:

I hear Santa's going on the Atkin's diet, anyway.

World AIDS Day toughts

As I mentioned in previous posts, on the first Word AIDS Day in 1988 I was working on a pediatric HIV/AIDS study. That is how I got "into" the cause, so to speak.

In the eighties, you might remember, it was still common to hear AIDS dismissed as a disease you got if you were a bad person...a faggot, a druggie, a slut. I'm a shy person, rarely confrontational, but occasinally I'd get up the nerve to look someone in the eye after they'd made some denegrating comment about people with AIDS, and I'd say something like "One of the patients in our study died this week. She didn't make it to her second birthday." And the person would say something like "Oh, well, of course I feel bad for the children..."

It made me queasy then, and it still does, that people can think like that. Oh, the few innocents, that's too bad, but the rest, well, it's their fault and not my problem...

Queasy, and angry, and depressed. I can't even articulate a decent argument about the young women in Africa and Asia (and undoubtedly here as well) who are victims of violence (so go here: The Global Coalition on Women and AIDS). And it might be hard to believe by knowing me now, but I went to Sunday school when I was young, and I remember lots of stories about lepers. Seems like there might be a parallel or two.

I hope I was just reading the wrong blogs today. Right now I'm sitting here in front of my computer, feeling worse than I was yesterday with the statistics page up. Because those numbers, holy shit. But that attitude, how do you fight that?

World AIDS Day 2005

World AIDS Campaign