A Million Words

I haven't gotten around to doing anything in the past few weeks. Ever since Thanksgiving, it's been one unfocused, vaguely hectic day after another. Nova has been struggling along with her teeth. She has horrible decay in her front top teeth because of my tooth-cleaning negligence combined with night nursing, and her bottom back molars were coming in. Nova had her 2nd birthday, and I made two cakes for two separate celebrations of the occasion. The first, a Chocolate Brownie Torte with White Chocolate Mousse and Caramelized Bananas was a bit of a flop, but tasted good. Nova enjoyed blowing out the candles and eating it. The second cake was equally mediocre, but held together better. It was a basic chocolate cake with orange frosting and chocolate-frosting decorations. I tried to decorate it with the traditional pastry bag and tips. Nova ate the bits of chocolate off the top. Obviously her diet is not as tooth-friendly as a dentist would wish for, either. We have been doing

I haven't been posting much lately, and don't have much excuse, but I'm logging on today to report that there is visible progress in our house renovation -- the floors are in (mostly): In addition, we spent the entire day Wednesday on an expedition to Ikea to pick up the kitchen cabinets, which are piled in the basement, waiting for the plumbing, wiring, insulation, drywall, and painting to be done.

A few days ago, Nova started saying "Shut up!" loudly, emphatically, and frequently. We were puzzled and troubled by this development. We don't say that around here, at least I don't think we do. Where had she picked it up? Who was she telling to "shut up"? Well, along came this morning's batch of pancakes, and Nova started the shouting again. "Shut up! Shut up!" And then we took it out of the fridge: Syrup!

I don't remember when I first heard about The Artist's Way , by Julia Cameron. It must have been over a decade ago, but I never felt the urge to try out the program until a few days ago. It's just not my style, not what I really needed. I was pretty confident about my creative direction and the work I was doing. I was writing novels, revising them, sending them out, getting rejections, and starting the whole process over and over again. The accumulation of rejections, without a single expression of interest in my fiction writing, was moderately discouraging, but not unusual. I was prepared for it. I kept going, knowing that persistence was the key to success. I could have kept going like that, but since our return to the US almost three months ago, I just can't find the time. You might think that with all the other adults around to entertain Nova, I should have more time to write than I had in Galway, but it doesn't work out that way. There, I could write while she

In the early 1980s, perhaps in the summer of 1983, my grandfather, Professor Henry Clay Smith, took it into his head to plant about fifty blueberry bushes in front of his house. He had the idea -- suspect even at the time -- that these blueberry bushes would provide for his grand-children's college tuition. Even with today's rising food prices and this year's excellent blueberry season, the patch could produce at most $1000 worth of blueberries in a year. In retrospect, we think that the blueberries-as-college-tuition idea might have been an early sign of my grandfather's future decline into Alzheimer's disease. But it was a spectacular season. When we arrived here in late July, the front bushes were producing a good crop, and only four days ago, in the first week of October, I took these pictures. Most of the bushes look like this: In the last row, two final bushes were still loaded with berries: Next year, as part of my orchard plan, I hope to put in a few blue

Mike has a fondness for talking about the zombie apocalypse. He figures, since he can live on beans and packet noodles, he's in better shape to survive it than I am, with my gourmet tastes for a ridiculously wide range of foods. My brother and his wife are living off the grid (except that they hop over here to use the shower, washing machine, and internet connection) and have a truly lovely vegetable garden. I want to get in on this apocalypse-prep game, but my way of doing it is to skim about fifty million web pages and a few dozen books on the subject before I do anything that requires physical work or much investment of money. Besides, I don't really think that the apocalypse (zombie or otherwise) is coming anytime soon, and in the meantime none of us are making much money (to put it mildly). So, I have spent the past four or five days calculating our food needs, projecting costs, and figuring out how that all lines up with what kind of food we can produce on our three ac

So, we have moved back to the Vineyard, back to my parents' house, and are renovating the house that I grew up in, summers, and lived in for a few years here and there in my earlier adulthood. It's all on one big lot. My parents built the original house in 1971-'72, but in the mid-90s, they decided it just wasn't big enough to serve as their primary residence... especially since it had (horror of horrors) only one bathroom . So they built this house, which is about two or three times the size of the old one, and has three and a half baths. The two houses share roughly five acres, most of it covered in scrubby oak and pine. People have always said to me that they think this is a beautiful part of the island, but I've never been enthusiastic about the landscape immediately surrounding our house. I find it dull and a bit closed in. The trees loom over the house, making it feel dark except when the late-afternoon sun hits its more open northwest side. In hopes of remed

Somehow, a month has slipped by without a blog post here. I suppose I must have been busy. I certainly haven't been working on my novel, or exercising, or getting a real job. I have, however, landed a pretty regular (so far) paid writing gig, doing short articles for the Martha's Vineyard Times , Calendar section. It's been kind of fun. I've written one or two assigned articles a week for the past three or four weeks. They've been on a range of different subjects, but the substance of most of them is doing a few interviews and setting people's quotes, and the information they give me, into a sensible, readable narrative. I have to say it's a lot easier than writing fiction. At least, I find it easier. However, as I remember from last time I did this, I have a really hard time switching gears. In order to make good progress on a novel, I need a solid 1.5 - 2 hours, at least five days a week, to work on it. A reliable 1.5-2 hours, that is, not a half hou

This is the weekend of the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair . It's the biggest event of the year in West Tisbury (barring presidential visits) and although some curmudgeons avoid it like the plague, I've gone almost every year for as long as I can remember. The exceptions were 1986, when I was in Japan, and 1991, when I was in New Zealand. This is the first year in a long time that I've entered anything. I decided that if we're going to settle down here again, I'd better start participating. So I went the category I've been working on most lately: baking. For my entry, I decided to make carrot cake. I used fresh local eggs, laid by my brother's chickens, and carrots from the local CSA. I spent about an hour peeling those tiny little roots, put everything together as planned, and stuck it in the oven. Ten minutes later, I looked up and noticed that a key ingredient was still sitting on the counter. Ooops. When I took it out of the oven, I

When I was about Nova's age, my parents built a house in the woods. We lived there summers and weekends while I was growing up, and later, when we moved further away, other people rented it in the winter. The place has housed quite a menagerie over the years, and it's held up OK, but decades of wear and tear and sweating slate floors have left it almost uninhabitable. When I arrived home in late July, the house smelled of mold and abandonment, so much so that it was difficult to breathe inside. Some of the mold was the result of recent water damage, but it had been growing over the years, especially during winters when the house was unoccupied. In any case, the work was already well underway. In the photo bellow, you can see the new dormer: In the former upstairs, there were three small bedrooms, a nice library nook, and a virtually windowless storage nook. The dormer creates a whole bunch more space in two of those bedrooms, and gives them closets. My parents also wanted

Yesterday was my birthday, and I thought I'd celebrate by cooking up a whole mess of things I hadn't tried before. I spent most of the day cooking up three different salads. I was particularly excited about Octopus Salad . Copping up the octopi was strangely fun, but I was sadly disappointed when they came out of the boiling water 45 minutes later at about half their original volume. It was fairly tasty when done, but much, much smaller than I'd hoped for. My mother was supposed to make this tomato and mozzarella salad , but she had strep throat, so she couldn't cook. I think I probably had the strep the weekend before we left Ireland, and chances were she caught it from me. Anyway, I wound up making this, too, with some last-minute help from my cousin Jethro. We had a huge load of green beans from the local CSA, which went into this salad: The recipe called for hazelnut oil, but I couldn't find it at any of our local shops, so I just used olive oil. It was still

When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that

Two weeks before our departure from Ireland, Mike, Nova and I jetted over to London to visit some friends of mine. While there, I fit in a bit of research. We visited the Soane House Museum , Spencer House , and the Victoria and Albert Museum . There was not enough time for any of it, and I was struggling with the early stages of the head cold from hell, but I managed to glean a few general impressions. Here's a picture of us on the Tower Bridge. We were there, honest, even if my memory is a bit cloudy: We visited Soane House on Saturday morning, with Nova in a very fussy, tired mood.  She didn't like the closed-in, crowded rooms, so Mike took her out to find some ducks while Meg and I looked around. It was quite an eclectic collection of stuff, and interesting to see the house of a moderately well-off architect in that era. I also picked up a book from the museum shop called The Soanes at Home , which is a fantastic resource on daily life in their era, from the late 1700s thro

We arrived in the US two weeks ago today, after several exhausting weeks. During our final two and a half weeks in Ireland, we visited London, packed up the apartment, and tried to keep up with the normal round of daily activities. Meanwhile, I wrapped up the rough draft of the Regency romance I'm working on and battled one of the most exhausting head colds I've ever had.  Nova sprouted her final eye tooth during a whirlwind trip to Edinburgh to visit a friend, and started putting words together.  Mike sorted through his entire collection of games and books, and shuffled everything over to his father's new attic.  Our final day in Ireland was spent cleaning the apartment and dealing with our landlord. He had seemed like a decent enough landlord up until that point, but he walked in that afternoon affecting a "very angry" mood and roaring that the place was "very dirty" (it was a hell of a lot cleaner than it had been when we moved in), and making up spur

As if we didn't have enough to do in our final weeks in Ireland, I decided that I wanted to fit in a bit of travel before we hit the road.  So, at 3:20 AM last Friday (over a week ago) Mike, Nova and I jogged to the bus stop to catch the citylink bus to Shannon, and the 6:30 AM Ryan Air flight to Stanstead.   This was my first experience with Ryan Air, and I'd heard some pretty bad feedback. My main problem was the booking process. The online booking system automatically assigned us to the 06:30 flight. I clicked the option to select the early afternoon flight, for a few euro more.  I went on through the booking system. Lo and behold, at the end of it, I was still on the blasted 6:30.  I was not pleased. It took me four days to get back in to the booking system to change the reservation. Then they wanted to charge me 170 euro, more than the original ticket, to make the change. I decided that we would just have to suck up and take the 6:30. So there we were, trotting to catch t

A week from today, we will be on the plane back to the US.  I was going to chronicle our oh-so-organized process of sorting through our things and packing up, but so far it's just happened around the fringes of my attention.  Mike has made great progress sorting through his collections of books, games, art supplies, and dice, while I occasionally throw a few books into a box, or clothes into a bag. Mostly, I'm trying desperately to finish this draft of my cheesy romance novel before we take off.   I began plotting this novel in late October or early November of 2007, shortly before Nova was born. I knew that I wouldn't have the energy and brain power to do NaNoWriMo that year, but a year later, in the midst of ridiculous amounts of household stress, I decided to give it a go again.  I started writing on the first and plowed through a few bumps in the road before losing two days to a vicious stomach bug (first me, then Nova, then Mike... or maybe Nova was first).  I took tw

Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I

This time last week, we were on our way to Dublin for Mike's immigrant visa interview. His stamped passport arrived back to us on Friday morning, and I booked our flights to America. I have mixed feelings about moving home. I've made some great friends here. I also enjoy Galway's literary scene, which is younger and more active than what we have on the Vineyard. Living in the middle of the so-called city, with no need for a car, has also been great. I love being able to walk to the library and the grocery store in less than five minutes, and wandering down Shop Street with Nova, saying hello to all the dogs and babies and listening to the buskers. I'll also really miss our view of Galway harbor and the bay beyond, all the way over to the mountains in Clare. I will not, however, miss the constant noise and light pollution that comes with our view. Right now, for example, something is beeping out there as a crane piles clattering scrap-metal onto the heap. I won't

The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost by Jean Liedloff My review rating: 3 of 5 stars My first and strongest impression of this book was that I knew the author. Although she came from the generation before mine, I feel like I knew dozens of people like her, privileged, intelligent, half-educated and profoundly dissatisfied with their home culture. I felt that I was a bit like her, but less starry-eyed. The author's central theory is that human evolution has primed us to expect certain experiences which are necessary to our fundamental sense of well-being. She argues that tribal/primitive cultures which have evolved slowly over millennia and are resistant to change provide more of these "continuum" experiences. The most important of these is the in-arms phase for the infant, from birth until the baby begins to crawl. She blames many of the ills and discontentments of modern society on the fact that most of us missed out on that essential early expe

Baking Bread with Children by Warren Lee Cohen My review rating: 4 of 5 stars I got this book on loan from the local Steiner/Waldorf playgroup, and didn't have time to work my way through the whole thing, but what I did see, I liked. I was mostly interested in the bread recipes, because my daughter is too young for wordy stories, but I'd like to look at it again in another year or two. The recipes included a lot of very different breads; bagels, soft pretzels, and chapati, along with the usual range of loaf breads. I tried two of the recipes, a basic whole wheat loaf and the Roman Army bread. I made enough modifications to the first recipe that I couldn't really judge it, but the second one I tried was very good. I look forward to getting another copy of this book in the future and doing more of the bread-related story telling and perhaps even make the outdoor oven, which looks like a fun project. View all my reviews.

The race village is almost gone, traffic patterns are back to normal, and this morning we once again have an oil boat parked outside. Sadly, the wind turbines came down yesterday, and no, they did not power the entire race village. I happened to run into one of the engineers from the company early in the festival, and he told me that each one generates enough electricity to power about two houses. The two at the end of the harbor were wired up to pump electricity back into the grid, but they were by no means keeping all those race village lights and loudspeakers going. It's really too bad the Galway Harbour Company didn't want to leave them there. Oh well.

Two weeks of festival and sunny weather, crowds all day and drunks all night, are finally drawing to a close. Living in the middle of the Volvo race stopover fairgrounds has had its moments, but I'm glad that it's over. Nova fell asleep every night to the sound high-decibel music, most of which was pretty good. I didn't adapt quite so well, and have been awake past my bedtime every night for fourteen days running. I had intended to blog about the festival as it was happening, but when the time came I couldn't stand to look at it any more than I absolutely had to. I enjoyed some of it, but annoyance won out as often as not. Here's an abbreviated log of the two weeks as seen from our apartment. Arrivals and Opening Ceremony: I didn't get any pictures of the arrival night, but boy, was it a long one. The band played until 11pm, I had settled down to sleep by midnight, and then at 2 AM it started up again as the first boat came across the finish line. I would

May has been a good month for reading. I read Mort , by Terry Pratchett, , which was good fun, and I finally knocked another item off of my to-do list: Read Strunk & White. Many years ago, I read that every writer should read The Elements of Style , by Wm. Strunk and E. B. White , study it, and re-read it every year. This struck me as such fine advice that I went out, bought the book, and read the first ten pages. With less then 90 pages to go, it shouldn't have taken me another six years to get to the end, but somehow it did. I got caught up on the mysteries of colons and semicolons, two punctuation marks that I have never fully understood. The book slipped back onto my bookshelf and has stayed there ever since, near the front of the pile but rarely opened. I am now happy to report that I have finally read the whole thing. I felt its influence on my writing immediately, as if I could tighten sentences better than ever before. I felt my critical eye sharpen as I read. I did

I realized the other day that Nova has looked uncharacteristically sad in all my recently-posted photos of her. Here's one where she looks more like her usual self:

I looked at the official festival brochure yesterday, and sure enough, these windmills are supposed to power the whole race village. That's what the brochure says, anyway. It's a "green" event... sponsored by an automobile manufacturer. I'd bet they get at least some of their power off the grid, if not most of it. I'm not as cynical as my husband, though, who thinks that the windmills are purely for show. As I was taking these pictures, there was a guy walking past who looked like he might know something. I said: "These sure look pretty permanent for something that just went up two days ago." "They won't be there long, don't worry," he replied. Too bad. I kinda like them.

Well, the tanks are gone, the docks have been scrubbed clean, and with three days to go until the boats start arriving, this is what the docks look like. First, there's the main race village: On the wall in front of the dome, there, you can see a sort of mural has been painted. I would have hoped for something I liked better, and expected a closer copy of the Green Dragon logo. I imagine that in an ad agency somewhere, a graphic designer is weeping. As you can see here, "non-food retail" tents have taken over a lane of the road in front of our apartment, obstructing the flow of traffic. A matched pair of windmills appeared earlier this week, on either side of the lock. Perhaps they will power something.

If you don't live on the Galway docks and aren't obsessed with round-the-world sail races, you may not know that there's much happening this weekend. If I didn't live right in front of the stage, I would hardly have noticed until a few days ago, but this week on Shop Street you can't turn around without hitting a Volvo Ocean Race banner. Now, I'm not particularly all this corporate-sponsored racing, but I am curious about it. Most people in Galway are only dimly aware of this race stopover event, despite a huge publicity machine and a full program of music and miscellaneous other shows. The organizers, however, are expecting this to be the biggest thing since Jesus... or at least since the Pope came to Galway in 1979. There's a bit of a disconnect between the hype inside the organization and practically everyone else I've spoken to. A business woman I talked to said that they're charging €6000 to set up a tent, and thought that was an awful lot to

When Mike was working full-time at a miserable, hazardous job, I thought it would be a good idea to celebrate every Friday by buying or making a cake.  So far, I've made chocolate cakes, carrot cakes, and miscellaneous cakes.  By the time we went into unemployment a few months ago, I had become quite attached to the idea of the Friday Cake. Last week, I decided that it would be fun to try to make a Battenburg Cake.  I'd spotted one at a friend's house, and thought it was interesting. After all, we don't have Battenburg cakes in America.  A week later, and on Saturday, I've finally gotten around to it.  The process was messy.  I used this recipe except that I bought the marzipan rather than make it from scratch.  The batter was gloppy and had to be thinned with lots of milk, and I didn't get it quite even in the pan. The cake came out all lumped up in the middle and didn't look like it would make two neat checkerboard cakes in a million years.   Well, a ful

The Volvo Ocean Race stopover advertises itself as a major event for Galway, but you never would have known it was happening until a two weeks ago when the oil tanks finally came down. I mean, they'd said that was supposed to happen in December.  Now, the ground where the tanks stood has been more-or-less cleaned up and they're starting to set up the race village, and temporary floating docks are being dropped into the water where the racing boats will park: The race people are also setting up a fence around the perimeter of the docks to keep hapless festival-goers from tumbling into the cleaner-than-usual water.  From my angle, the best thing about these fences is that they're a sign that we won't see the scrap-metal barges for a good few weeks. So, although I'm sure there'll be plenty of race-related noise at least it will be replacing, rather than adding to, the usual things that wake me up at 5 AM.   I doubt, however, that these will prevent any determined s