1. The garlicky smell of roasting pork in the oven.
2. A new sweater enveloping me from the persistent cold outside.
3. Seeing a seven-year-old’s eyes light up as she decorates a gingerbread house, making me, for the first time this year, happy for the holiday season.
4. T-shirt sheets. Holy shit, what have I been doing for the last ten winters? These are amazing. They’re stretchy like my favorite blend t-shirts and are perfect for creating a cozy cocoon. Every time I get into bed I get a twinge of delight.
5. Echostar, for inventing DVR technology which has enabled my addictions.
Chris and I went to Iowa for Thanksgiving. Despite the fact that our car had transmission problems that we’re going to have to rectify soon, we had a great time with my family. We drove up Thursday and had a chili and soup dinner, then did the whole turkey and fixin’ on Friday. We avoided the whole Black Friday nonsense and were able to run to the store and get last minute supplies if we needed them. We woke up late; my mom and grandma and I drank coffee in our robes and read the paper and gossiped. It was awesome. During the day, my mom, grandma, and sister-in-law and I played Scrabble and drank spiked cranberry slushies, which will probably end up being our new tradition. My sister-in-law is aces at Scrabble. My dad also got to go hunting; he got a deer, and we got part of the loin, which we ate last night. So good, by the way. The only bummer was that none of my friends were home for Thanksgiving, but I hope we’ll be able to meet up at Christmas. From now until the holidays, I’ll be crafting up a storm, trying to furiously finish my long-neglected classwork, working at Kitchen Conservatory, blogging, and reading in preparation for charter school programming.
How was your holiday? What are you looking forward to during the season?
1. “Do You Realize” by the Flaming Lips playing as I sipped a cup coffee and cream at the cafe and watched a happy young mother, wearing her baby on her chest, kneel down and pet and smile at her dog.
2. Not really a small thing, but the board of South City Prep are so committed and engaged and awesome and I’m so thankful for them.
3. Finding a new recipe that we love that uses a cut of meat we might not have used and uses pantry items.We made the second one and ate it on garlic cheese bread. Epic win.
4. Seeing my two crazy dogs settle down with a bone. Sharing it. I swear to you, Asher will gnaw something for a while and then nudge it over to Neko with her nose and I am killed dead.
I’ve been so scarce here as of late, and I apologize to my grandma and the seven of you who still care about this little blog. It’s not that I’ve nothing to write about; far from it. I’ve just little time or motivation because I’ve got about ten irons in the fire. God, how sick are my friends of hearing that? Everyone’s fucking busy, duh. I’m lucky as hell to be this busy doing things I really love: writing, working at a kitchen shop, and starting a school. I might be broke, but I’m lucky, lucky, lucky. Except for that dog that keeps eating my bras and glasses.
South City Prep is coming along, but not without some stumbles along the way. I’ll not get into details, only say that we’ve had two pretty substantial catastrophes in the past month that have forced us to rethink our plans. Opening next year isn’t a question, actually, we’ve just had some timelines altered and plans rearranged largely due to circumstances beyond our control. Yes, that’s cryptic, it’s just that things are still up in the air in a few key areas and I want to keep the details under wraps until those areas are 100% done deals, otherwise it’s just a big jinx and my soul can’t handle any more “surprises”, thank you very much, unless said surprise is winning the lottery.
That being said, I think we’re close to signing paperwork on a building, a building I love in a neighborhood I love, a building that could be our permanent home. We should know in the next two weeks or so if all the pieces will fall into place, so please keep our team in your thoughts and prayers. Finding a facility is our biggest challenge next to student enrollment, and we’ve got two backup options if this deal falls through. So many things can’t happen until our facility is finalized, and the time frame for completing any renovation is tight, so we really need good karma pushing our project forward. Once that happens, we can begin the process of actually getting down to the nitty-gritty of programming and recruitment, which is what I can’t wait to dive into. We’ve been so caught up in finding a building, securing financing, working with developers and architects and realtors and loan officers, running numbers over and over again, and trying to get our charter from the state that the actual work we get to do with kids has been on the backburner. I can’t wait until we get to focus on efforts on programming that will provide kids with a high-quality education. I can’t articulate how much I’ve learned, and continue to learn, through this process, both about education in general, but also education in the context of Missouri and how politics and regionalism impacts kids. The political climate in Missouri is not good for urban schools, period. I’ll save that for another day when all our deals are already done and my mouth won’t get others in trouble.
Because the work on the school is taking a lot of my time, probably more than I thought it would, and that time will only increase, so I’ve been considering where I have to scale back my efforts. Unfortunately, many of the things I love are things that don’t earn me a ton of money, so it ends up being hard decisions. I’m on indefinite hiatus from Draft Day Suit, which Sarah and Laurie were oh-so-understanding about. I love those women fiercely, incidentally, so you should continue to support the site and read their writing.
I was also quite frazzled because I was co-chair of a trivia night fundraiser for the Safe Connections Young Professionals Board, of which I am a member. It’s a little harder to plan a “real” trivia night, and by “real”, I mean, not in your backyard with your friend’s karaoke machine and your friends’ band in the garage rocking a smoke machine. Fortunately, the evening was a pretty big success in that we hit our target in terms of profits, and there were few major issues save running out of diet soda and running over on our allotted time at the rental facility because everyone was having a damn good time. But I’m glad it’s over.
Because we need money and I love food, I picked up a new gig at The Stir, writing for their food and party section thrice weekly. My first post is up, and it’s on how to cook perfect bacon because I am a whore for endearing myself to new audiences and pork usually does the trick. This all came about from a random business card exchange at a breakfast table at BlogHer in New York, which means I have actually successfully networked, although I can’t say it was intentional or skillful by any means. ANYWAY, yes, another blog I’m contributing to, but it’s well-paid and will help me stretch my writing and learn not to curse in every post I write. Huzzah!
Finally, my brother and sister-in-law came and visited for the very first time this weekend, and it was so awesome. It was the first time we’d done something just the four of us, and, outside of Iowa’s loss in football, we had so much fun that Andrew and Chris couldn’t take it and fell asleep at 11 PM Saturday night while Liz and I watched The Office and ate snickerdoodles. Most of my friends have moved away from Des Moines, so I feel like my brothers are my last little tether to my hometown, and whenever they give me a glimpse into adult life there, I get to feel home for a little bit. Sometimes, my life there feels like a dream. My sister-in-law and brother were at some social media networking event (Liz works in social media) and ran into my high school boyfriend. She didn’t know who he was, and when they met and that fact became known, I guess it was a little weird. He’s married now to another girl from our high school and has two kids and that just kinda blows my mind. Liz running into him just made me curious as to who he is now. I know I’m a radically different person than I was twelve years ago–is he? I just wonder if you change as much if you stay in town. Maybe you change more? I don’t know. I just wonder where everyone else from this different life of mine ended up on their meandering (or not-so-meandering) paths and if there’s anything left to say to some of these people who shared this common formative experience with me once a drunken buzz wears off. I guess it’s just interesting, and melancholy, to think about people with whom you share so much being strangers. Maybe I’d rather not know.
Tomorrow: this week’s Grace in Small Things, plus links to my interwebs writings this week.
1. An event I’ve been working on for a while, the Safe Connections Young Professionals’ first trivia night, happened Friday and it was a great success and I am so, so, so glad it is over because it consumed pretty much all of last week and I have some writing to do.
2. Working after a “My First Thanksgiving” class and getting to eat a plateful of leftover stuffing smothered in really amazing turkey gravy. I aspire to make a gravy so lovely, then bathe in it.
3. The hastily-picked-before-the-first-frost green tomatoes, of which we have pounds and pounds, actually ripening into a gorgeous array of heirlooms on my counter, allowing me to hold onto summer, still.
4. A simple lunch and good conversation with Rev Em on Saturday.
5. Making new outfits out of old clothes. Ladybum win.
A good chunk of my friends and I participated in the annual Tour de Moose bicycle pub crawl around St Louis on Saturday. The Moose in question is actually my friend Kevin, and the Tour celebrates his birthday, this year the big 4-0. Almost 80 people met up at Lemmon’s Saturday morning to drink beers and tune up before meandering around South City to Downtown and back. We finished the 19-mile ride at Lemmon’s, then ended our night at Double D’s, singing karaoke. My Grace In Small Things this week comes from that day.
1. Coasting down a slight decline on my bike.
2. With a slight buzz.
3. While eating a Gus’s pretzel.
4. Surrounded by friends.
5. On a cool, gorgeous, autumn day in October, leaves falling around us.
I’ve been very busy lately, and it’s prompted a flare-up of anxiety that I am trying to manage. It’s nothing serious; I just have too many irons in the fire, none of which could be described as lucrative right now, which is, of course, stressful. On top of my obligations outside the home, our home is chaotic at least half the time. Not only is Neko hell bent on destroying all of our possessions, including the house itself and the floors we worked so hard on this summer (they’re ruined; we have to do them again), but she has added escape artist to her repertoire of identities, as no amount of fence-reinforcing can prevent her from scaling the motherfucker like a rock wall and taking off to chase squirrels around the neighborhood. At this point, I think every one of our neighbors in a three-block radius has brought her back to our house, including the drunk across the street. When the dude with no legs across the street eventually chases her down, I don’t know what I’ll do. → continue reading
I know I promised more posts last week, but I had a crazy busy week. This week, I promise.
1. A clean fridge and pantry. I am participating in The Kitchn‘s Fall Kitchen Cure, where you complete weekly assignments designed to clean your kitchen and make it more streamlined, useful, and efficient. I deep-cleaned my fridge the day I heard about Kitchen Cure, and today cleaned and organized the pantry. It feels so clean and fresh.
2. Our friends Alice and Adam got married this weekend, and it was a wonderful day and gorgeous event. In between the wedding and reception, everyone went to The Bridge and I snapped this of Alice as she was getting “bustled”.
3. The feeling of content when Neko flops down for a nap at my feet, exhausted from going 100 miles per hour.
4. Scarf weather.
5. Anything with warm fall spices, like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and mace.
Happy Monday. I have a good feeling about this week. I promise, more posts this week.
1. The satisfaction that comes from checking everything off on one’s to-do list.
2. Our hardy little aloe plant, Malcolm, that survived Neko’s puppyhood with new growth all over.
3. The genius of this scene in Freaks and Geeks, from the episode where Bill’s (Martin Starr) mom (Claudia Christian) starts dating his gym teacher (Biff from Back to the Future).
4. My cast iron skillet, which is seasoned so well I’m proud every time it easily wipes clean.
5. A small chocolate flourless torte made by Kelly at work last night. Rich and velvety and slightly woody from rosemary ganache. Perfect late-night snack after work.
1. Having a knitting project on needles for the first time in a long time. It’s this apple tree blanket. I’m doing it in “pickle” with a “mediterranean” border. I love the rhythmic nature of knitting, the clacking of the needles, and the slow expansion of a project growing. When I get into a groove, hours go by as I voraciously try to finish projects, and it’s very therapeutic and focusing.
2. Dinner with friends at Blueberry Hill before a Drive By Truckers show at the Pageant followed by the debut Chill Dawgz show.
3. Dulce de leche cake.
4. Fall in St Louis and wearing scarves again.
5. Perfectly comfy gray heather sweatpants, thieved from high school track team.
