This makes me utterly happy.  Lee ran across it while he was cleaning out and digitizing a box of stuff he’d been dragging around forever.  It was originally a slide show, that he’d cued to music.  Yay for technology–now it’s a Youtube video, and all we have to do is click the play button.

It’s worth watching, just for the clothes.  Those high-waisted pants . . .

He thinks he made this (took the photos, printed them as slides, etc.) when he was in the 11th grade.  I think it’s kind of awesome, both that he was so into photography, and that he was so good at it.  I also love that technology (that brilliant little camera in the iPhone) has rekindled his passion for taking pictures.

It’s distressing to think, though, that you’d never be able to do something like this today.  I try to imagine Toby hanging out at the park near our house taking pictures of random kids he’d never seen before, and, well, not so much.  I can see a mob of angry moms wrestling his camera away and stomping on it, or him being arrested and shoved into the back of a police car.  It’s sad, really, that we’re all so paranoid.

Anyway.  That’s another rant for another day.  Enjoy the video.

I’m writing this at the airport; Delaney and I are waiting for our flight to LaGuardia.  My big resolution for this post is to proofread it before it goes live.  Several of my posts in the last couple of weeks were written in, um, unusual settings (one on a plane, another in the car while we were barreling down I-26), and when I looked at them later, online, I realized that they were riddled with typos and misspellings.

I am mortified.

Sloppy language errors drive me crazy.  Actually, sloppy language in general sets my teeth on edge.  I’ve always been fussy about grammar–occupational hazard–but lately I’ve been on a bit of a tear.

It started with a series of odd emails from a random stranger, who apparently doesn’t have any punctuation keys on his computer.  At first it cracked me up, but then it started to get on my nerves.  And then . . . punctuation and spelling errors started jumping out at me, everywhere I turned, even worse than usual.

Even on my own blog!  Quelle horreur!

The worst thing, though, the most egregious error, the one that makes me want to tear my hair out and smash my head into the nearest wall, is plain old imprecise language.  It’s insidious and sneaky and DOES NOT WORK.  I’m not talking about anything that’s an actual error, per se.  I’m talking about words and phrases that, while grammatically correct and perfectly acceptable, mean absolutely nothing, or at least nothing useful.  The point of language, remember, its raison d’être, is communication.  Words are meant to convey meaning.

The example that’s stuck in my head at the moment:  someone asked me recently if I wanted to get a bite to eat.  Heard in a vacuum, without any reference point, this is not a particularly useful phrase.  Does it mean lunch?  Dinner?  A bag of potato chips eaten in the car?  I have a choice–I can attempt to pin down someone who (whether consciously or not) is avoiding a specific commitment, or I can try to ferret out the meaning.  Neither option is comfortable for the person trying to answer the question (me).

“Over there” is another one, or “That way,” if I don’t have a visual reference (i.e., when I’m driving, looking at the road, and the person giving directions is in the back seat.  Hello–please use specific directional words!  I can’t take my eyes off of the 18-wheeler in the next lane to look at you in the back seat, waving and pointing–just tell me right or left!)

Rant over. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Latest update on the Great De-clutter of 2011:

Photographs.

Those of you who came of age since the digital revolution can just skip today’s post–you won’t understand.

But the rest of us?  Those of us who used to have old-timey cameras that used that weird stuff called film?  We’re still living with the detritus of that now-defunct form of photography:  actual physical photographs.  Albums, bags, boxes, crates full of them.  They take up space under beds, in the bottoms of closets, piled haphazardly in the eaves of our attics and stacked on bookshelf after bookshelf.  Some of us are tidy and organized, treasuring the photos, labeling each one, filing them carefully, bringing out albums to show off to friends and relations.  The rest of us can never find the one we want because they’re all jumbled willy-nilly in dusty old shoeboxes.

Regardless of the system, we’re drowning in a sea of photographs.  It’s hard to be a minimalist when you’re stumbling over the evidence of every trip you’ve ever taken, every milestone in your children’s lives, every cute moment or fake smile.

What to do?

We had ours scanned.  Every last one (we sent them our negatives, but they’ll use whatever you have).  Lee sent them here; they scanned them and mailed the scans back to us on a disc.  We could’ve chosen to have them upload them for us, but we can do that ourselves.

Now I have to go into our online photo album and transfer the labels from the backs of the photos onto the website (and that’s years’ worth of photos–it’s going to be tedious and will require a great deal of caffeine and some really good podcasts), and then throw away the boxes of photos (which will require taking a deep breath and tossing them in the garbage–I’ve learned that it doesn’t bother me to get rid of anything, once it’s done.  The only hard part is the actual moment of dropping it in the trash).

And just like that, presto-change-o, that’s another whole stack of boxes, gone.  We’re getting there, slowly but surely.

Organisms.  Molecules.
Fermentation, gasses rising–living and breathing,
Cells divide and multiply.
They pick up speed, burning through fuel, growing–exploding.
The symbiosis of protein and carbohydrate, ensnared by
The profligate expansion of a microscopic miracle.

Flour, water, salt.
The staff of life–the daily bread.
Sustenance and comfort; a living mystery, a stale, hard crust.
Wars were fought, cultures rose and fell.
We ate bread, not cake.
Ancient yeast; the history of the world, trapped in a melamine bowl.

Proof, rest, rise.
Autolyse.
Bread speaks its own language, bides its own time.
We knead, we punch, we shape and bake and wait.
Crumb and crust; ovenspring and singing loaves
And the warm wheaten smell of hearth and home.

But when the weather turns,
When the culture dies,
When the yeast expires;
When the oven won’t heat, the loaf won’t round, the bread won’t rise–
The hunger drives you back to try again.
Bread fail.

Homemade country sourdough bread.

Homemade cultured butter.

Homemade sour cherry jam.

Obsessed much?  Well, yes.  I suppose I am.

Behold–the perfect breakfast.

Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of fancy cocktails that include various and sundry “house-infused” concoctions.  The hip new place in Raleigh (Beasley’s Chicken and Honey) has one drink on the menu that includes “bacon-washed bourbon” and another with “chocolate chile bitters.”  I haven’t had a chance to try them yet, but they’re both on my agenda.  A bacon flavored cocktail?  Yes please.

Another interesting ingredient that catches my eye fairly often is vanilla-infused vodka.  It keeps popping up on blogs and cocktail menus, so it’s on my mind, and I keep meaning to try my hand at making my own.

Then this past weekend, I was chatting with my brother about his homemade vanilla extract; my supply is running dangerously low, so he reminded me that I can just top off the bottle with more vodka.  It needs to steep for about six weeks, but that tangle of vanilla beans will continue to release their flavor into the vodka, and in a couple of months I’ll have a fresh bottle of extract.

That got me thinking.  If vanilla extract is just vodka flavored with a lot of vanilla, what is vanilla-infused vodka?

Um.  It’s vodka flavored with slightly less vanilla (and steeped for just a few days, rather than six weeks).

A slightly weaker version of vanilla extract.  Who knew?

Lee has made a most excellent discovery.  As I’ve mentioned before, we’re going through our bookshelves, gradually wrapping our brains around the idea of letting go of all those books.*

Most books are easy enough to part with–I know if I need to revisit something, I can just get it on the Kindle, or check it out of the library.

But I’ve been stumbling over what to do with my old yearbooks.  I don’t really want to drag these big heavy books around for the rest of my life, but it doesn’t feel quite right to just toss them out.  And think about it–how often do you really want/need/use those books, anyway?  I try to avoid them–I don’t need to be reminded of my ’80s hair.

Lee, problem-solver that he is, has found a solution.  He got his scanned.  This company charges a penny per page–an average high school or college yearbook works out to three or four dollars.  The scanned pages are perfect; we can even read all the scribbled signatures and oblique comments penned by his classmates.

Caveat:  you don’t get the book back.  (Not that I’d want it back–that’s the whole point of scanning it, in my opinion.)  If you can adjust to the idea of having your memories online, instead of taking up space on your bookshelf, it’s an excellent service.

*The attic, I’m pleased to report, no longer contains even a single book.  All gone.

This is what I’ve been doing all week.  Tomatoes.  I bought a box of Romas on Sunday, and have been cranking through them ever since.

–A batch (the second in the last few weeks) of pasta sauce, in the freezer (recipe here).

–Nine pounds became a cup and a half of tomato paste.

–Two batches of tomato soup–one of which was (ahem) very tasty, the other of which is stashed away in the freezer.

–A gallon zip-loc full of roasted tomatoes; super-easy recipe here.

–A giant pot of ratatouille, half of which is now frozen, the other half of which is waiting for me to make some polenta so we can tuck into it this weekend.

–There was also a nice sugo crudo that we had for a quick dinner several nights ago.  Yum.

Last night I finally had to cut my fingernails down super-short, because they were turning orange from all the peeling and seeding (I’ve also been roasting/freezing bell peppers and chiles–LOTS of peeling).  I worked through a backlog of podcasts, had to buy more dishwasher soap, and the freezer?  I keep warning the children not to open it, or they may never be able to get it closed.

Tuesday afternoon, when the insanity was at its peak, Delaney walked through the kitchen–it looked like there’d been a massacre.  Scarlet juice splattered everywhere.  Skins and seeds piled in a bowl.  Flecks of tomato flesh on my face and arms and ratty old t-shirt.  Knives and various wicked-looking implements stacked up by the sink.  Pots burbling on the stove.  A pile of soggy, red-stained rags.  It was a mess.

“What are we gonna do, hibernate?”  She answered her own question before I had a chance to speak–”Oh, wait.  That’s totally what you’re going to do, isn’t it?”

Well, yes.  I am.  And I’m going to have lots of cheery tomato goodness to remind me of summer when it’s cold and grey outside.

The box is actually empty now, finally.  Tomorrow is market day.  Can I resist the urge to buy another load?  Sometimes my eyes are bigger than my freezer . . .

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in a couple of writing/critique groups.  I love my groups.  I’ve made new friends, learned a lot about the writing life, and honed my skills as both a writer and a reader.

Having said all that, though, I have to confess that I struggle with a Very Bad Habit.  I didn’t even realize I was doing it, until it started getting on my nerves when other people did it.  Now that I’m more aware of it, I’m horrified to find myself doing it far more often that I would’ve thought.

The habit in question:  resisting constructive criticism.  Specifically, I’ve found myself bristling and digging in my heels, more than once, when someone suggested that my story needed more focus, or Chapter 7 needed more tension.  I have to take a couple of deep breaths and remember that that’s exactly what I’m there for–to get unbiased feedback that will help me improve.

Lee used to go to a gym that was used exclusively by personal trainers and their clients.  Every time he went, he’d come home telling tales about the women who shrieked and moaned and whined about how their trainers were trying to kill them.  He was utterly perplexed by this.  They were paying to be there, presumably because they wanted to be pushed to work out harder than they otherwise would.  And yet they were complaining about the very thing they were paying for.

I realized recently that I sound just like that when I complain about the feedback I get about my writing.  I asked for it!  I should accept it gracefully, and be glad I’ve found people who are willing to help me in my quest to improve.

I’m sitting here at the kitchen table, watching Twitter and Facebook and all the news sites panic over Hurricane Irene’s approach.  I may regret this by tomorrow afternoon, but I just can’t work up too much energy about the whole thing.  This time last Friday I was pretty well freaked out that my husband was having another heart attack.

Hurricane?  Been there, done that.

Those of you who live in North Carolina (all three of my readers) will remember when Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina in 1996.  I blew  it off (pun totally intended) for days.  We live a hundred miles from the coast, for Pete’s sake.  Hurricane’s don’t come inland.

Um, wrong.  They do.  Fran (unexpectedly) jogged west, and hit OUR HOUSE as a category 2 storm.  It was no Andrew, or Katrina, or anything else apocalyptic like that.  It was a night of shrieking wind and heavy rain, and a morning of clearing downed trees.  Seven hours without power–not a crisis.

But that night looms large in my memory.  Every time we get serious weather around here (and we do, on occasion), I shrug, and remind everyone (including Toby, was two, and Delaney, who was still causing me morning sickness) that Fran was much worse.

Um.  I HAVE BECOME MY MOTHER.  WhenI was in high school and tornadoes cut a swath of destruction less than a mile from our house, how did my mother respond?  She shrugged, pointed out that Hazel was worse, and said we ought to just go to bed, since the power was out.

When I was sixteen, her lack of panic was incomprehensible.  Now, at forty-four, it seems pretty reasonable.  Might as well go to bed–not much else we can do.

Of course, the fact that I’m turning into my mother?  Now THAT is a cause for panic.