A Million Words

Cleaning an untreated wood ceiling

2010-04-14T14:11:00.006+01:00

I have been scouring the internet for advice on how to clean untreated wood, and I've come up dry. I found articles about cleaning wooden furniture, routine cleaning of wood floors (almost all of which have some kind of finish), and washing outdoor decks. None of them seemed suited to my problem -- an untreated, semi-post-and-beam ceiling with about 40 years worth of woodsmoke, pollen, and general household dust built up on its surface.

Last fall, I washed it with a wood cleaner, diluted in water and mixed with bleach as directed on the bottle. I slopped it on with a rag, scrubbed it with a stiff plastic scrub brush, and wiped it down with another damp rag. It looked a bit cleaner, but it wasn't significantly brighter, and now, after a winter of construction dust, you can't tell the difference.

I read that oxygen bleach is the active ingredient in most wood cleaners, so I decided to try an experiment. I found some of my sister-in-law's oxygen bleach near the laundry machine here, mixed up a cup of it, and cleaned a spot. Just above it, I gave the wood a quick whack with 120-grit on a power sander. Here are the results:

The top part is sanded, the bottom part is bleached.

....

I began writing this post over a month ago, and now the project is mostly done. After messing around with wood cleaners, I found sanding to be faster, easier, and more effective, although it was also noisier and dustier. I drafted my husband to sand the living room ceiling. I had painted the kitchen ceiling after only lightly cleaning the wood, and it took 4 coats of paint to attain a decent shade of white. The parts of the living room ceiling which were sanded, wiped down, and painted looked better than the kitchen ceiling after only 3 coats of paint.

Conclusion: If you can sand it, that is totally the way to go to revive and brighten old, darkened wood. Otherwise (as in the case of rough-cut pine), oxygen bleach or wood cleaner does an OK job.

Adventures and misadventures in Poultry

2010-04-11T12:08:00.005+01:00

I haven't posted much here lately. We've been busy with one thing and another, including various experiments in backyard poultry. My brother gave us 4 hens and a rooster at Christmas. They were theoretically his birds before that, but they spent most of the time at our house, anyway, so it wasn't a massive change. They are entertaining and low-maintenance. The biggest hassle they cause is by hiding their eggs all over the property. Nova finds them entertaining and sometimes likes to collect the eggs, when we can find them.

Around about March, things started to get more complicated. I was told that this guy, Jeff, wanted to sell off some egg-laying ducks, so I bought three of them and threw them in with the chickens. At around the same time, my brother talked me into ordering more ducks, because I'd been talking about raising some for meat. Despite pregnancy, the renovation process, a new, short-lived job, and being generally over-extended, I ordered 8 Pekin ducklings from McMurray hatchery.

We were totally unprepared for the ducklings. They spent their first week in a couple of cardboard boxes in the living room, going through at least 6 rounds of water a day, spilling and pooping everywhere, creating a godawful stink. Ducklings are way, way messier than chicks. The stink was getting to me by the time we finally cobbled together a duck house. I started the project and Mike finished it on one of the days when I was off at work, and Nova was parked in front of the TV.

Here's a picture of them at about 3 weeks old:

We had an unusually warm spring this year, so the ducklings spent most of their days outside from the time they were about 2 weeks old onwards. There was a heat lamp in their house for nights, and I put a dimmer switch on it so they wouldn't broil and the electric bill would stay under control. One of them had had an eye infection of some sort, but it cleared up on its own only to return a few weeks later, but other than that they were all healthy despite the night-time overcrowding. Their house was built on a pallet, about 4' by 3' 4", for a total of less than 2 square feet per bird. They really could have used about twice the space, but at least they got to run around outside in the daytime.

All went along at a fairly even keel for a few more weeks until "processing" time came around. Processing is a euphemism for slaughter and butchering, but I guess I don't mind the less graphic terminology. This past weekend was supposed to be processing weekend. I was going to do it on Sunday, with a bit of help from someone or other, and as the day approached the household ganged up on me. My father and husband wanted to give the ducks away, my mother said she just wished I wouldn't do it, etc., etc. By the middle of the day on Sunday, I was a nervous wreck. So I threw the ducks' feed back in and put the slaughter off until Monday morning, when my cousin Jethro and his friend Rob had offered to help (as of Sunday afternoon).

Jethro had killed and butchered chickens, but none of us had done ducks before, so it was a learning process. We had a traffic cone, borrowed from a neighbor, a couple of big pots for scalding, a table, a board to hang them from for plucking, and a bunch of other stuff. It's all a bit of a blur. We got started at 8:30 in the morning, had a long coffee break a bit before noon, the guys took off at 1:30, and I put the last duck in a freezer bag just before 3. It was exhausting, but much better than the horrible, harassed build-up and delay had been the day before. I had great intentions to document the process and the set-up, but getting the job done was more important.

I now have about 56 pounds of duck in the freezer, and a vegetarian husband.

The Family-Holiday Morass strikes again

2009-12-22T19:35:00.005Z

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 a much better job at keeping up with the tooth-cleaning, though, and she has an appointment to get some fillings on Christmas Eve. Hopefully there'll be enough excitement afterwards that she'll forget the agony and forgive us for putting her through it!

Meanwhile, we've had a storm which had us snowed in, with the power on, for a good 36 hours. We all played in it together on the first day, making snow angels and throwing the dry, powdery snow around. Nova had no interest in coming inside until she was soaking wet. This morning, I introduced her to sledding. We went down the gentle slope of hill next to my parents' house a few times, and promised to come back to it later today, or tomorrow morning.

I intend to write Christmas cards and send them out in the next 48 hours. Ha!

Renovation Update

2009-11-07T21:58:00.002Z

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.

"Shut Up!"

2009-10-29T13:54:00.003Z

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!

Beginning The Artist's Way

2009-10-21T19:23:00.003+01:00

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 napped, or find a quiet moment in the early mornings or evenings. Here, there's just too much to do, and too many people around all the time. I need my own space to write. I need a house or a cafe table to myself, where I know I won't be dragged off into conversation or into doing some minor housekeeping task for just a minute.

That's just not possible around here, not these days. I can beg a few hours here or there to write a newspaper article or go to a writers' group, but to write fiction? Forget about it. Not the kind of time I'd need to create anything substantial. I know what I need: To write or revise a novel, I need at least 1-2 hours/day, at least five days a week, for three or four months. And I can't get it. I've asked for it, and I can't get it, can't afford it, can't find it. I'm really frustrated. I have to figure what I can do, and how to deal with my stalled novel-writing career, my lost momentum.

I went down to the Bunch of Grapes on Tuesday and picked up The Artist's Way, hoping that it would help somehow. I don't know if it will or not, but I'm going to give it a half-baked try. The first chapter advises setting aside 7-10 hours a week to work through the program. If I had 7-10 hours a week, 7-10 solid hours, d'y'know what I'd be doing? Writing!!! Real writing, not just self-help journalizing! But the book also promises creative and spiritual renewal, which would be nice. So I'm going to give it a shot, at a rate of about a half-hour a day, half the recommended time, because that's all I can find in my current situation.

We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I hope to keep blogging about the miscellany of life around here.

Last Blast of the Blueberries

2009-10-10T19:30:00.004+01:00

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 blueberry bushes of our own.

Home food production design

2009-09-27T21:31:00.004+01:00

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 acres of sand without putting in more than 5-10 hours a week, max. Because in all likelihood, I'm the one who's going to be doing all or most of the work, and I don't want to be a full-time subsistence farmer.

Figuring out the cost of food and the cost of gardening is a bit of a puzzle. Because we're living with my parents, I can't get a good food-cost estimate from our current grocery bill, but when I was single here I always seemed to spend about $200/month at the grocery store. $200/week seems to be a reasonable estimate for a family of four in our very expensive neighborhood, and it lines up pretty closely with the USDA "moderate" food plan. I also looked at prices in the grocery store - $7.50/lb for the cheaper chicken breasts, $5 for a half gallon of organic milk (but only about half that price for the regular milk), and $3 or more for most of the fresh produce, except for bananas, onions, potatoes, etc. which are a bit less than a dollar a pound. I figure this is the expensive stuff, and that organic fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products have the highest markup of anything in the grocery store. Most grains and dried beans are cheap, most spices won't grow here, and growing tropical fruits here is pretty much out of the question.

So, let's assume that the annual cost of food would be about $10,000 for a family of four, because that's a nice round number and pretty close to my best current estimate (and the USDA's numbers, too). The cost of gardening and raising animals is a bit harder for me to figure.

Fruits and Vegetables:

Let's start with gardening and my pet project, the orchard. Fencing seems to be about $1/foot. We would need 200 ft. to enclose my planned garden, 300-400 feet for the orchard. So, in the interests of keeping numbers tidy, let's say that's $500 of fencing. A cheap greenhouse/cold frame will run about $500. If those last 5-10 years each, that makes $100-200/year for fencing etc. I'll say $200/year, because really, I know it will be even more than that, even if we get fence posts out of our own woods (we have a couple of locust trees). I'll also figure about $200/year for fertilizer and mulch. We make some compost, but this land needs a lot of enrichment. Another $100-200 a year would go to seeds and plants (I know this could be done for less, but I'm trying to be realistic). So, the cost of my vegetable garden should run about $500/year, no more than $1000/year.

The cost of our local CSA is on the upper end of that range. They're pretty good, but you can't choose what you get and there's usually a lot of waste. They also don't do fruits, except for some raspberries. In addition, they're only open 5-6 months of the year. My hope is that we'll be able to get close to year-round vegetable production using the techniques outlined in Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. So yes, I think I can make that work.

Dairy Goats:

I would like to keep goats, but I know it would take a lot of time and effort, and Mike thinks it's going way too far along the road to actual farming. But just for fun, let me run the numbers. Suppose we kept 2 milking does and 1 wether. They would need housing, fencing, and milking equipment, probably a solid thousand dollar's worth or more, which might be good for about ten years (coincidentally, that's also the approximate working life of a milking doe). From the look of things, they'd get a lot of forage around here, but miking does would still need grain and all that plus the odd bit of veterinary care. Let's say that's $5/day total for 3 goats (based on price of Purina Goat Chow and feed estimates at the Fias Co Farm website). That's almost $2000/year (rounding up)... I looked up some other sites and this estimate seems way too high, but it still seems like you're looking at at least $20/week for feed for a few milking goats, taking into account the fact that we're on an island and everything here is expensive, except for perhaps the goats themselves. You can buy a goat around here for about $75-$100. Total cost of keeping some dairy goats: probably not much less than $1500/year.

If we spend $30/week on good milk and cheddar cheese, that's also $1500/year, and a whole lot less work. I know that you can make goat butter, but frankly it sounds like more trouble than it's worth. The only way I think it would be worthwhile is if you could share the goats among 2 or 3 equally committed and involved households -- not a likely scenario, given what people are like. I'd also like goats to clear out some of our brush, but that's a different scenario. OK. I'm scratching goats off the list for now!

Chickens, Eggs, and other poultry:

My brother and his wife keep chickens. They seem to be pretty easy, not too much work on a day-to-day basis, and Nova enjoys them. They go into their coops at night, and forage freely during the day. I don't think they eat much chicken feed, at least not in the summer. The down side of their free-ranging is that we never know where the heck they're hiding most of their eggs, though there are usually a few in the laying boxes coops. Also, they poo everywhere.

They shared a big batch of mixed-sex chicks with our cousin, Jethro, and they all planned to use the male birds as meat. This has not been as successful as the egg end of the business. Slaughter, plucking, and gutting are all pretty nasty, and there are vegetarians around. I think it might be worth it, though.

Another option would be to get ducks, which are cuter than chickens and have nicer voices. I just ate a duck egg and it was yummy. Duck meat is awfully good, too, and quite a luxury item. They're also good at eating bugs and slugs, and so complement the vegetable garden.

I like this page for a run-down on the cost of raising chickens, and feel confident that because even the cheap eggs here are $3/dozen, it would be worthwhile for us financially. At present, our household of goes through one egg per person, per day, on average. Most of us have an egg for breakfast most days, and some go into baking and cooking. So, for my theoretical family of four we'd want 28 eggs a week, over two dozen. If those eggs cost, say, $2 less per dozen than our grocery store eggs, and we extend the laying season a bit and store some for the early months of winter, that could be a savings of $4/week, or $200 over the course of the year. Not big money, but something.

Small Livestock for Meat:

I have a book called Backyard Livestock, which I've been poking at on and off since I picked it up a few years ago. It's almost got me convinced that we could save oodles of money by raising our own animals for meat. However, there are a lot of factors to take into consideration, like our current lack of fenced pasture land, the cost of transporting animals off-island and halfway across the state to the nearest federally licensed slaughterhouse, and the fact that Mike is threatening to turn into a vegetarian. In any case, I will leave that part of the project for another year.

In Conclusion:
I'm pretty sure we can save money by growing most of our own vegetables and raising chickens &/or ducks, but the jury is out on doing anything involving mammals.

Clearing ground, and more design musings

2009-09-26T21:28:00.005+01:00

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 remedying this situation, I have made a preliminary landscape plan which calls for cutting down at least fifty to a hundred trees and killing off about a huge poison-ivy thicket. I want to replace all of that with lawn, garden, and orchard. It's a long range plan, and I worry that it might be a bit too ambitious, but if we're going to be living here for the foreseeable future, I want to enjoy the place and get the most out of it.

At the moment, I have no qualms about clearing those trees. They crowd each other horribly, and all of them of species that are plentiful around here.

Meanwhile, we're 99% done with the demolition and my father is on the verge of saying we can set a date with the tile guy. I'm shopping kitchen cabinets like there's nothing else to do, and musing on the economics of gardening and home food production. More on that in a minute!

blog lag, fiction fizzle

2009-09-20T19:59:00.003+01:00

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 hour in the morning before Nova wakes up, 15 minutes while she's off playing with someone else, another half hour while she's napping (though I can still squeeze an hour out of most naptimes) etc. I need to know that I will have that time every day, or at least 4-5 days out of the week, otherwise I just don't function well as a novelist.

So I think I am going to take a break from fiction after all, even though I don't really want to. I just can't get the time I need. I'm enjoying writing nice, short articles which get me out of the house and talking to new and different people. I am really preoccupied with our massive renovation project and all the work that needs to be done on the house and yard, not to mention the usual stuff of everyday life. I'm still writing, but it's not quite the same.

I'd better post this before Nova wakes up!

Prize-winning...

2009-08-22T19:48:00.006+01:00

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 discovered that it tasted OK, but not as good as usual. My mother, who had not tasted the way it was meant to be, talked me into entering it anyway. I figured, what the heck, it's all about the decoration. Fortunately, I finally got the frosting right. It had taken me three tries to get cream cheese frosting that wasn't runny. I had thought it was supposed to be easy. Anyway, this is the cake I took in for the fair:

I visited it later in the day, and lo and behold, it had a blue ribbon attached!

Mike also entered a couple of things. He got third place in the professional sculpture division for his angel and second in Handicraft: Metal Works for his latest sword:

We will be collecting our $12 in prize money next week! Long live the fair!

Renovations

2009-08-13T13:26:00.006+01:00

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 to wedge in a full bath upstairs, which is now framed in.

Downstairs, the plan is to re-floor the place with some kind of insulating sub-floor on the slate and concrete slab, and to re-insulate and sheetrock the walls. In the photo below, you can see some of the last of the old rough-cut pine wall. I'm sure it looked great when it first went in, but as the decades passed it got darker and dirtier, until it sucked up all the light which had managed to escape the slate floors and darkening ceiling. It was also a wicked fire hazard. I dragged my feet for a while on the plan to sheetrock, because I liked the warmth of the unfinished wood walls, but now I'm totally sold on the plan to sheetrock.

While we're ripping things out, we'll be doing the kitchen, too. Here's how it looks at the moment:
Unfortunately, I don't have any photos of the old kitchen at hand, but I'd like to unearth some for a before and after series.

I've been thinking about getting back to work on my novel, but the overhaul of the old house is sucking up most of my available brain power and spare time. For the past few days, I've managed to get over there for half-hour stretches of time to do bits of board-cracking, nail-pulling demolition. I'm kind of enjoying it.

My Birthday Dinner

2009-08-13T12:35:00.007+01:00

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 good.

Dinner began with an assortment of hors d'ouevres, including pate, clam dip, cheddar cheese, crackers, and assorted vegetables for dipping (there was a box of them in the fridge from a few days ago). There was wine, too. Soon enough, we moved on to the table, where we ate up the salads along with very good steak which my father grilled and a last-minute and somewhat under-risen and burned baguette.

We finished it off with Spanische Windtorte, which got a post all of its own.

Spanische Windtorte

2009-08-13T11:47:00.007+01:00

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 I was using a bunch of small eggs from my brother's chickens. I am pretty OK at separating eggs, but I botched at least a third of the ones I tried to use yesterday. I think that part of the problem was that some of them were fertilized, which seems to make the yolk membrane more porous and easier to break. Anyway, somehow I managed to get a cup of egg white together and whip it up, as per the instructions in the pavlova recipe.

Then came the first tricky bit: Shaping the shell. I used about 1/4 of the meringue mix in each of two buttered, powdered-sugared, and parchment lined cake tins, and hit upon this inspired idea for the walls of the cake:

That's a medium-sized souffle pan inside a 9" springform pan, with parchment paper on the bottom and around the souffle pan. You can see the buttering-flouring job better on the plain cake pan next to it. I jammed another 1/3 or so of the meringue mix into this mold. I used an improvised cake-decorating bag and my fingers for the job. I popped the meringue into the over at 250 Farenheit for half of forever, then jacked the temperature up to 275, because after an hour it was all still tacky. I suppose it didn't help that yesterday's humidity level was over 90%. Anyhow, it eventually came out looking like this:

I tacked it together and made a stab at decorating it using more of the meringue. Unfortunately, the meringue had softened a bit by this point, so it didn't hold those nice shell-shapes and stuff that you can see on the cover of Vienna's Empire. Still, it smoothed out a couple of the rough spots. Right before dinner, I stuck a few candied rose petals onto it and popped it back in the oven to stay dry.

We (meaning my mother, because I was calming Nova down after a tumble) whipped up the cream and sour cream right before serving the torte, and I mixed in most of the fruit. Nova checked to make sure the whipped cream was OK:

The final result was this:

It's not like the photo at the top of this post, but the last-minute addition of fruit and a bit of delicate balancing made it pretty enough.

As for the taste: Meringue, whipped cream, fruit... need I say more? Well, yes. There were a few twists in the end. The pavlova recipe I used called for brown sugar in the meringue, which gave a bit of a toasted marshmallow taste to things. Unfortunately, the many steps involved with making the cake into a decorated shell shape lead to about three hours total in the oven, after which it wasn't gooey inside, which was too bad. The candied rose petals went onto the meringue about an hour or two before we served the desert, and it sat in a warm oven through dinner. The scent of the rose petals (picked and candied earlier this summer by my mother) suffused the meringue. One of our guests said that it tasted "like the beach." Roses, toasted marshmallows, and fruit. Yup.

I might even make this again, and I'm glad there were lots of people on hand to entertain Nova while I was in the kitchen all day!

Regency Research

2009-08-09T19:39:00.011+01:00

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 through the early decades of the 1800s. We spent the rest of the day wandering around the city and eating a very long lunch at a nice Turkish restaurant there.

The following morning I dragged our hosts to see Spencer House, which reeked of dizzying amounts of money. Not only was the original owner of the house fantastically wealthy, but the cost of the renovations we saw was staggering. The palm room is particularly striking in that a large amount of its wall area is covered 23.5 karat gold leaf, but the other room's decorations are nearly lush. The public tour included only the state apartments of the house, which is owned (or leased on a very long term) by some branch of a Rothschild corporation. The renovations are funded by the rental income from the rest of the building. Whoever rents there, must shell out an awful lot.

Our final touristy stop in London was the Victoria and Albert Museum. I could have spent all day there, easily. I felt like I was just getting oriented when the place was shutting down for the evening. I breezed through the theatre and fashion sections before finding the area dedicated to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. There was a lot of good stuff there, but my head was all clogged up with phlegm and I didn't have time to write much down until now, so I'm afraid much of it is lost, but at least I have some visual images to turn to when I find various types of furnishings, clothing, etc. mentioned in books.

One thing which impressed me about all of these places is that the rooms were much smaller than I'd been picturing them. When I read regency romances, I often picture the ballrooms as cavernous spaces, about the size of school gymnasiums, but better-decorated. They are, of course, nothing like gymnasiums. Even the largest of the rooms in Spencer House was quite modest in size by modern standards, despite being anything but modest in its decor. Even allowing for the fact that people were smaller in those days, a small group would not have felt overwhelmed by the space. It reminded me that people then, even the very wealthy, had so much less of the miscellaneous stuff that clutters up modern houses.

Anyway, I got some "research" done on my trip to London, but I still feel woefully ignorant of the time period. I am planning to power on and finish this manuscript to the best of my ability nonetheless.

Back in Ireland and America, I furthered my knowledge of the time period and the genre by digging into as many Regency romances as I can get my hands on... well, as many as I can make time for, at any rate. I finally started reading some of Georgette Heyer's books, something I should have done long ago, and picked up two of the latest by Mary Balogh, who has been my favorite author in the genre since I first read one of her books about five years ago. I scooped up an array of about a dozen reference books and several more novels at the annual West Tisbury Library Book Sale. The novels include several Regencies by authors I'm not yet familiar with, but at 25¢ a pop, I'm not worried about wasting my money.

My goal is to read about ten Regency romances in the next few weeks, then embark on fixing my manuscript's plot, setting, language, and more. We'll see.

Catching up

2009-08-09T18:34:00.004+01:00

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 spurious claims about how things had been new when we moved in until he landed on one that we couldn't refute with absolute confidence, because it had to do with our roommates' bedroom, and using that excuse to keep back €340 of our deposit for a €260 dresser, which may or may not have actually existed. I intend to write him (and perhaps the tenancies board) an angry letter, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I spent the evening at Mike's dad's place re-packing our bags so they could all fit on the plane and be re-packed into my parents' car when we arrived in Boston.

By the plane took off, two weeks ago today, I could barely keep my eyes open. On the ferry home, I just fell asleep. Two days later, Nova had adjusted admirably to the time change while I was still barely able to stay awake for more than two hours at a go. After a week of taking it easy, I eventually got to the point where I felt a little more human and could start even thinking about all that we have to do.

Nova is adjusting well to life on the Vineyard. She is enjoying all the dogs and chickens, and now demands Nana (my mother) almost as much as she summons Mama (me). She is sleeping much better than she was in Galway, thanks to the quieter environment and much more outdoors time.

Mike has begun doing a little work with Barney Zeitz, and I have put together a new resume and mailed it off to apply for a couple of administrative jobs. In the meantime we have a huge project to work on: our house. My parents began renovating their old house a few months ago, so that we would be able to live in it. I wasn't able to much from across the water, so I've arrived mid-project and am trying to come to grips with it. In fact, on my first, very groggy, day back in the country I spent a good hour and a half debating bathroom design with my father in the moldy shell of the house. We had to call in an arbitrator to settle the matter a few days later.

This afternoon, I will be wielding a crowbar and helping tear the last mold-eaten planks of rough-cut pine from the downstairs walls. Then we just have to decide what to do with the flooring, the insulation, the kitchen, the bathrooms, etc., and then get it all done. I have a feeling this is going to take over my life for the next while.

Our trip to London: Getting there and away

2009-07-19T10:18:00.006+01:00

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 the bus, with Nova still mostly asleep. I'd had a good three hours' nap, and Mike had elected to blast through and not sleep at all. I'd packed some slightly squished strawberries to snack on. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. On the bus, Nova and I munched on a few. As the bus pulled in to Shannon, Nova threw up all over both of us.

Fortunately, I was prepared, with a clean shirt for myself and a fresh outfit for Nova. I even had a spare carrier, but getting it out proved to be too much effort. We arrived at Stanstead on time, made our way to the train, and discovered another reason it might have been better to fly Aer Lingus: the train from Stanstead to London is ridiculously expensive.

Finding a cab to take us to my friends' house seemed more difficult than it should have been, but we were all pretty dazed and confused at that point. In addition, I was developing a queasy headache. I figured that it was just because I was tired, but a few hours after we arrived I found myself running to the toilet to empty my stomach.

For the return trip, we didn't have to get out of bed until 5 AM, and no one threw up, but we were just as exhausted when we got home. Getting there and back was a bit of a hassle, but totally worth it.

Wrapping things up

2009-07-19T08:14:00.005+01:00

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 two days out to put together a grant application (unsuccessful, but I suppose it was worth something to do the exercise) and somehow managed to just pull past the 50,000 word mark on November 30th.

That landed me about 2/3 of the way through the plot. I had great intentions of plowing on and finishing the story in December, but I was just too tired. I took a break from writing and sank all of my remaining creative energy into Christmas baking.

I poked at the manuscript a couple of times over the winter, but I didn't start serious work on it again until the middle of May. I revised and cleaned up what I'd done during November, and now I've moved on to the final sequence, or close to it. I know that I'm going to have to do a major overhaul of the later half of the book, but I want to wrap up this draft, no matter how messy, by the time we fly out next week -- preferably sooner.

Meanwhile, Nova and I are battling a nasty head cold, but I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel -- swallowing is less painful today.

So, despite my best-laid plans, I'm afraid packing and cleaning the apartment is going to turn into an eleventh hour project again. I'm not worried, though. I can pack as fast as I need to.

2009-06-29T15:59:00.003+01:00

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 mentioned, the jargon can be off-putting. Still, there's a lot to reflect on in here, and despite the sometimes-goofy philosophical underpinnings I think that many of its recommendations are sound. I felt that the author did a good job of explaining the practices in her day care nursery without at any time insisting that it was the one right way. Instead, I felt that she was mostly urging caregivers and parents to be mindful and flexible in their approach to child care, and offering herself and her co-workers as an example of one way in which philosophy can inform practice.

I came away from this book thinking that yes, Anthroposophy is pretty goofy, but the practical application of those ideas has led to something useful and good, in creating a supportive environment for young children. I especially liked the structure suggested for creating a regular rhythm to the day, week, and year, and also maintaing order in the physical environment. That's all pretty basic stuff, but this book helped me reflect on it in a relaxed way.

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Getting ready to move

2009-06-29T08:12:00.002+01:00

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 miss the sorry selection of vegetables at the local grocery store. I know that the prices and selection won't be that much better at home, but we'll be able to go off-island and practically anything. I often complain about the lack of selection in Ireland's shops, whether it's food, clothes, or books, but the small size of the Irish market is probably the main culprit, not the fact that so few people here seem to have any interest in trying new things (particularly when it comes to food).

I dread having to drive everywhere, especially for the first few weeks until Nova gets used to the car again and Mike gets his drivers' license. On the other hand, although we'll be in a car a lot more we won't have to look at so many of them, or dodge them all the time when going out for any kind of walk. I'm also not looking forward to going back to work. I have no idea what I'll do, and I have a nagging suspicion that it won't be worth it, financially or personally, until Nova is a bit older, but I know that I'd get no end of grief for trying to be a "stay at home mom" over there (in Ireland, women get the guilt trip for going back to work, instead of for staying home). Living on the Vineyard is going to be a lot more expensive than living in Galway, at least for us, if only because of the need for a car and possibly health insurance.

I would say that I'll miss Ireland's generous social welfare system, but I can see that it's not a healthy thing for this society. I think it's really, really good that Ireland, as a country, doesn't let people starve, become homeless, or go without medical care (after ridiculously long waits to see specialists if you're in the public system, of course). I think it's a bit messed up, though, that a family on the dole can make more than a family where one person has a full-time job, and that even single people on the dole can be almost as well-off financially as their working peers. The system rewards people for not working, which, as everyone says, is really going to slow down Ireland's economic recovery.

There are a lot of things I'm looking forward to in America. First, I really think it will be great for Nova to be living on the family compound there. We'll have instant dogs and chickens (courtesy of my brother, cousins, and my parents). We'll be in the woods, where she can muck around with dirt and climb trees. We'll be able to have a garden, too. She'll be able to run next door and hang out with my parents almost whenever she wants to. We'll be living in a kind of extended family hamlet, which will be very different from the situation we have here with its semi-formal weekly dinners with each grandparent.

I'm looking forward to the peace and quiet. It will be good to see my friends from home again, although I'll miss Galway's constant social whirl and my friends here. I'm looking forward to a bit of warm weather and going to the beach a few times this summer, or even camping out there with Nova on hot days. Right now, I'm most excited about setting up our "own" house. That includes fixing up a bedroom for Nova, unpacking my millions of boxes of books, and setting up a kitchen where I'll have all my small appliances, pots and pans, etc. I'm also ready to get back to our much better public library system. Galway's library might be right across the street, but its collection is no bigger than what they've got at West Tisbury, the books are mostly falling apart, and you can only check out four at a time.

It's also going to be a big change of scene for Mike, and it will be interesting to see what kind of work we both rustle up in the first year there, and what we wind up doing eventually. He seems to be looking forward to the move, too.

I think the move to America will be good for us, as a family. Now I just have to pack!

2009-06-13T15:40:00.002+01:00

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 experience, which would have given us a feeling of contentment, acceptance, and "rightness." She has a few theories about the way the continuum would have us behave in later stages of life, but that early phase is all-important.

The Continuum Concept has been enormously influential in hippie earth-mother circles, and to be honest I had hoped for more. I have no argument with the idea that babies are happier and healthier when they are in contact with a responsive caregiver, and that most are better off being carried around than being left alone in a pram, stroller, cot or crib. Maybe lots of us carry deep emotional scars from being left to cry alone when we were infants, but it;s not the answer to all our psychological problems, never mind our social issues. Basically, I agree with most of the author's recommendations about how to raise babies, but I was disappointed by her sloppy scholarship and her belief that civilization has it all wrong, when it comes to helping us be happy and fulfilled human beings.

I believe that human beings are a lot more adaptable than Jean Liedloff gives us credit for, and that while our intellectual innovations often undermine our contentment, the conscious mind, as well as instinct, can help us be happier people at any stage of life.

And now, back to my bored, attention-grabbing toddler!

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Baking Bread with Children

2009-06-13T08:02:00.002+01:00

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.

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Back to normal

2009-06-09T07:57:00.002+01:00

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.

Race Village Retrospective

2009-06-06T13:48:00.008+01:00

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 have almost enjoyed it except for the incredibly annoying announcer, who said at one point:
"Now, they say we're not allowed to have any music, but you [the crowd] can make music!" He encouraged them to sing "The Fields of Athenry," which didn't really take off, but y'know what? 10 minutes later, loud music piped in to accompany the Irish dancers who were there to greet the ships.

He finally piped down a bit at 4 AM, saying something about people in the neighborhood sleeping, but there were still fireworks on and off until 8 AM, when the last of the boats arrived. By early afternoon that day, all of the racing boats had been lifted out of the water by the crane and were sitting in cradles behind the Harbour Hotel.

That first night of sleep deprivation went a long way towards souring my mood about the whole event, but I still managed to enjoy some of the rest of it. The following night brought the opening ceremony, which featured more fireworks, more Irish dancing, and an old wooden fishing boat dressed up like a swan. Here's a picture of the flares. My camera wasn't up to the task of capturing the midnight event in all its fireworks, but this is the best shot I got:

Midweek lull:
Things settled down after those first two nights, and we experienced blissful quiet from 11:30 PM until mid-morning from Monday to Thursday night. Then the real trouble started -- we got new neighbors, about thirty of them, drunk and noisy from Friday night straight through the weekend. Friday and Saturday night were the worst, with drunk carousing, screaming, and fighting right outside our doors until dawn both nights. On Sunday, they must have gone out to a club because they weren't really noisy until 4 AM, when they went through the hall loudly ripping down the signs that Mike had put up: "Quiet, baby sleeping!" The following morning, they denied having anything to do with it. Ha.

Once again, things settled down again, and even last night, the final night of the concerts, things were pretty quiet because our rooftop was crawling with police.

The Boats:
I am interested in sailing in the sense that I think it's cool and would like to do more of it, but the past two weeks didn't inspire me much, or add anything significant to my knowledge of boats and sailing as I was too busy with the stuff of everyday life. The race is a one-class event, meaning that all of the boats are almost exactly the same. They're like floating billboards, as you can see by the row of them lined up in the dock.

The Puma boat, below, was the best billboard, in my opinion:

To get an idea of scale, you can see here the crew and some other people around the Telefonica boats on the day of the in-port racing, and a guy up on the mast of another of the Volvo 70s.

I found all the other boats in the harbor a bit more interesting. First of all, there were about fifty jillion of them (over a hundred yachts, in any case). Below is picture of them crammed into the harbor parked six deep along the edges, and another of the mass exodus that happened an hour ago after the racing boats left:

It took only an hour to virtually clear the harbor of boats this afternoon. The Galway Hookers were pretty much the only boats that went out under sail power. I found the small number of these traditional boats somewhat depressing. The organizers made an effort to gather together all of the Galway Hookers in the universe, and could only muster about seven of them. They're docked on the left-hand side of this photograph, with the earlier-mentioned swan boat nearby, under the windmill.

Numbers and the Weather
The thing that really made the festival a success was the distinctly un-Irish weather we had for the fortnight: warm, sunny days, one after the other until you'd think someone had shipped the whole island 30 degrees south in latitude. The latest rumor I heard was that the whole event had drawn over 250,000 people, which is pretty good considering that the population of Galway is only about 70,000 and the yachting scene in Ireland is very small.

One more rumor capped the event: last night at dinnertime, a good friend of mine phoned, breathless with the news that U2 were staying at the G Hotel and was maybe going to play last night with The Stunning, or this midday when the president of Ireland was giving her speech. No such luck. They say you can't have a party like this in Ireland without generating U2-related rumors.

May reading

2009-05-27T08:05:00.009+01:00

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 not feel the need to run out and buy half a dozen more books on how to write, and I do intend to re-read it next year, if not before. I even read some of it aloud to Nova.

Speaking of Nova, she is becoming very enthusiastic about books. In the past few weeks, she's started demanding to be read to all day long. She'll pick up any book that happens to be lying around and hammer me with it, saying, "Book! Book!" She might sit down and have me read a few pages once I take the book, or sometimes she goes and gets another one until she's made a pile around me of every book in her reach. Her favorites are still the ones starring dogs, like Officer Buckle and Gloria and Dog, which we read practically every day, sometimes two or three times. I need to get her some new books, soon.

I am currently reading Wuthering Heights. More on that when (and if) I finish it.

Gratuitous Happy Baby Picture

2009-05-21T17:34:00.003+01:00

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:

Windmills

2009-05-20T20:52:00.005+01:00

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.

Race Village Setup

2009-05-20T08:28:00.008+01:00

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.

More race hype

2009-05-18T19:33:00.006+01:00

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 ask. The next minute she was complaining about how the City didn't understand how Important this event was, and how they'd nearly lost the stopover to Cork because they Hadn't Done Anything! True, they were supposed to take those tanks down in 2008, and it didn't happen until three weeks ago, but a mother of one of Mike's friends said that she's never in her lifetime seen the city move this fast to do anything. Perhaps the city's fastest isn't quite fast enough for the yacht racing scene.

I will be doing the odd stint down in the race village in the coming weeks. The race organizers are now saying that they're expecting 200,000 people for the event. Last I'd heard it was 10,000 at a time -- I didn't realize they expected it to add up to such a large number overall.

We'll see.

Cake of the Week: Battenburg

2009-05-16T20:01:00.006+01:00

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 full jar of apricot jam later, this was the result:

While far from perfect, it's nowhere near as hideous as I thought it would look halfway through the process. I might even make it again -- it tastes better than it looks.

Movement on the Docks

2009-05-12T16:23:00.005+01:00

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 swimmers from taking a dip, as a few young drunks did late last Saturday night.

I do sound a bit like I'm complaining about all this, but honestly, I wonder if this event will be all it's cracked up to be. The estimate that 1o,000 or more people will descend on the docks seems a bit overblown, but we'll see.

Mastitis meanderings

2009-05-10T15:01:00.005+01:00

Late Thursday night I came down with a bout of mastitis, aches and pains all over, chills and general malliase. I had a pretty good idea what was happening, so I went in to see the doctor right away. That kept me from writing on Friday, I was still pretty tired on Saturday, and by the time Sunday rolled around Nova had a fever, too. We took her to the doctor yesterday afternoon. Now she and I are both on antibiotics and I haven't done any actual writing in days.

According to the doctor, Nova has an ear and throat infection resulting from her recent runny nose and cough. Also, her two top eye teeth are on the verge of breaking through the gum. The result of all this is that she's nursing almost non-stop, more than she has since she was a newborn, I think.

Now, this is the first time in Nova's 17 months that she's had to take antibiotics, and it isn't pretty. Toddler antibiotics come in a sticky yellow liquid form, and are supposed to be dosed out by the teaspoonful. The pharmacist suggested sticking the dosing syringe to the back of her mouth so that she couldn't taste the horrible stuff, or mixing it with yogurt to make it more appetizing. I've tried both, and it's not working: the bowl of yogurt went completely untouched, and after jamming the syringe into her mouth as gently as possible and forcing the liquid in, I'm not sure she's swallowed more than a drop.

On the upside, she's less feverish and more cheerful today, and still nursing like a maniac. The constant nursing should drain any lingering mastitis from my system, so we seem to have achieved sickly symbiosis.

The Grocery Budget revisited

2009-05-06T15:47:00.007+01:00

For four weeks, from February to March, I stuffed all of my grocery shopping receipts into an envelope behind the i-pod on the bookshelf. At the end of the four weeks, I tallied them up in a spreadsheet to find out how much I'd been spending and where I'd been spending it. I wrote about the experiment here. My analysis led me into a lot of mumsy internet forum discussions about budgeting, meal planning, comparison shopping, etc.

I moved into phase two of the experiment: creating a menu plan and organizing my pantry.

I started off by making a list of all the things I like to keep in stock in the cupboards, refrigerator, etc. Well. I ended up with a list of about 150 items, including actual staples, baking supplies, spices and sauces for a variety of cuisines, cleaning products, medicines, etc. I could make a shorter list, but it wouldn't come close to including all the things we get from the grocery store. Having made the list, I never look at it, but the process of making it helped me focus my grocery shopping, so I can scan the kitchen to see what we're running low on before I go out to the shop.

Next came the menu plan. The budgeting divas of the internet swore by creating a menu plan with a regular rotation of meals, so I thought I might give it a shot. I made a list of dinners that I've made more than once in the past couple of years. Looking at my list, I felt that maybe a regular rotation would be too restrictive, or that I'd have to make a different rotation for different seasons. Ultimately, I came up with a plan that I think will allow for seasonal variation yet keep me from wasting half the day wondering what to make for dinner. Here it is:

Monday: Pizza (I've been making my own dough, which is not difficult)

Tuesday: Soup (which can be made on Monday if I have a class Tuesday night)

Wednesday: Roast or casserole. Freeze half of casserole for another week. Leftover roast chicken or beef can be used in curry/stir fry.

Thursday: Stir fry or curry... something with a rice base, anyway.

Friday: leftovers, take-away, or something from the freezer.

Saturday & Sunday usually take care of themselves -- we either have leftovers to finish off or one of our parents invites us to dinner. If not, it's a good opportunity for me to make something new and exciting or for Mike to have his favorite: cheese and beans on toast.

This is a very minimalist sort of plan, compared to most of the ones I've seen around the internet. I don't plan breakfast or lunch, and if I planned 7 dinners a week we'd have a fridge full of leftovers. It also means that, when I feel like following the plan (which I didn't this week) I only have to really cook three or four nights a week.

Implementing this menu plan and pantry-stocking list has led to the following pattern: On Saturday morning I go to the market, and on Sunday morning, when nothing else is open, Nova and I make the trek out to Aldi and Tesco for the big weekly shop... although that can also happen on Monday or Wednesday, which are also pretty quiet.

I tallied my grocery receipts from 4 weeks in April and May (after a month of not keeping receipts) yesterday afternoon. The effects of the above plan were:

1. Average weekly spending of €125, down from €150... but I'm not sure this is fully accurate because Mike has been doing more of the shopping and I don't know if I've gotten all of his receipts, and I separated out take-away this time. Really, I don't think I saved a whole lot of money.

2. Fewer trips to the store, down about 20% (54 trips, down to 41... I know it's still a huge number).

3. A cleaner fridge, and less food wasted. Doing inventory before the weekly shop, and coordinating that with meal planning, means that I actually use most of the produce I buy, rather than having so much of it rot before I get around to cooking it.

4. More money spent at the market on produce and stuff, significantly less money spent at the big chain stores (except for Aldi).

5. I don't have to think about what to make for dinner so much.

All in all, I'm satisfied with the results of my experiment, and I'm beginning to feel like an organized housewife... which a weird thing to be, but better than being so disorganized that I don't get any writing done.

On Blogging

2009-05-02T14:03:00.004+01:00

Lately I've been thinking about starting a serious blog, with regular, reasonably frequent posts and content that other people might actually want to read. To that end, I've whiled away most of the past week learning about blogs, websites, etc.

I have fallen behind the times. Sure, I knew about twitter and indexing and submitting to search engines, but the intricacies of feeds, wordpress, etc. are all new to me. I didn't even know how to set up a counter on this blog. I'm still looking for one.

I am making progress, though. Two days ago, I signed up for a website hosting account at Fat Cow, and this morning I figured out how to sign up for Google Analytics. I was surprised to discover that it was free. Why didn't I know that before?

I'm hoping to get all this sorted in the next few months, and to launch my new blog/website sometime this summer. I'll probably even announce it here, just in case anyone stops by.

bye-bye nono

2009-04-29T19:38:00.004+01:00

Noreen left this afternoon after a 5-week stay that turned into 5 months. I’ll miss her, and so will Nova and Mike, I think. She was possibly the easiest-to-live-with housemate I’ve ever had, and entertaining, too. She did introduce Nova to smoked salmon, which is getting expensive, but since it’s practically the only meat Nova will eat, it’s probably for the best. She also brought us nice cheese and good bread and bottles of wine all the time.

Now we get to live on our own as a family, at least for a short while, and it’s a bit of a novelty. I suppose it will be more peaceful, but it’ll also be a bit dull. Who will help us keep Nova entertained now? We’ll have to get a dog.

We made a cake for Noreen this afternoon before she got on the bus. Or rather, I mixed up some cake batter, baked it, and tried to roll it up into a nice roulade with some whipped cream, but I skipped a step and it fell apart into a cracked, disordered pile. Mike got out the writing icing and wrote “Go Away Nono” on the one straight stretch of unbroken cake. He had a small slice but Noreen and I basically ate the whole thing between the two of us in the space of half an hour. What it lacked in appearances it made up for in taste, now it's sitting like a lunk in my stomach.

We’ll move on, but right now I just feel sad, and it's all a bit up in the air.

And they're gone!

2009-04-28T18:20:00.006+01:00

Breaking news from Galway Harbor: the oil tanks have been leveled. Here are a couple of pictures from yesterday and today:

Now we can see the little fringe of green at the back of the parking lot, the area which is supposed to house the race village for the big Volvo Ocean Race hooha which is coming to town in a few weeks. Looks like there's still a lot of rubble to clear.

Poetry Slam and Rant

2009-04-26T15:38:00.006+01:00

Yesterday afternoon I attended my first ever poetry slam. I've been wondering about slam poetry for a few years now, but between one thing and another I'd never actually been to a slam until yesterday. I had heard that they were loud and full of hecklers, but that was in America. Here in Galway, poetry audiences are quiet and respectful, even at slams.

The slam took place at the Roisin Dubh, a pub which people frequently use as a landmark when giving directions in Galway. I'd never been in there before, and found it much like any other bar, except very crowded for 3:00 in the afternoon.

About a dozen poets participated in the slam. First up was a young woman in a short, hot pink dress who did a piece about long-post-Woodstock wannabe psychedelia. I thought it was pretty good, but I couldn't follow the narrative thread of it at times, and her performance was a bit too nervous. She was the best of the first few in my mind. The next one I thought was good was a man who gave a lively recital of a poem about TV, and the total self-involvement of television as a medium.

The smoothest performer of the lot was a youngish (about 30, give or take a decade) man from Dublin, who sauntered onto stage with his pint of Guinness. He gave an excellent reading of a well-crafted poem, but I couldn't help but feel that he was playing to a stereotype of drunken Irish performance traditions. I wasn't surprised that he won, but the second and third place winners weren't ones I would have guessed. One of those (I can't remember which) went to a thirteen-year-old boy who did a poem about Hitler, and what if he'd gone to art school instead of becoming a dictator. He did a great job, for a kid his age, but I felt that a lot of the other poets were better. The other runner-up place went to a woman who recited a poem about being a girl in a convent school in the 1980s, and the famous death of a teenaged girl and her newborn baby in a grotto on church grounds. She probably did a pretty good job with it, after all, she was one of the winners of the slam, but I had just heard a different take on the exact same story at the Over The Edge showcase on Thursday. Apparently it's a perennial favorite in Irish literary circles.

This all brought up one of my pet peeves about writers' groups, which I can now extend to poetry readings. I hate it when you go around the room and 2/3 of the writers there are working in exactly the same genre, with exactly the same setting. On Martha's Vineyard, it was always a dimly autobiographical piece set on a small island in New England. Here in Galway, it's usually about someone's grandmother, mean nuns, or the hardships of life as a potato farmer/fisherman/etc. I mean, I enjoy some of these Irish Identity poems and stories, but I get to the saturation point pretty quickly, and it annoys me when writers (and other artists) are rewarded for playing to a stereotype.

The slam included several less remarkable Irish Identity pieces including a few bits of shouting about the recession and corrupt politicians, but there were a few who broke the mold. I especially enjoyed a satirical piece about a woman and her therapist. It was hilarious, smoothly delivered without extraneous arm-flapping, and not about Ireland. No one here has therapists, or at least they don't talk about their psychiatrists the way Americans like to. I was sorry that she didn't win one of the prizes.

It was a good afternoon's entertainment. Maybe I'll go to another one some day, or even perform, but aside from the judging, it was just a poetry reading in a crowded bar.

Discouraged

2009-04-22T15:47:00.005+01:00

The Cuirt festival is on this week in Galway, and I'm thrilled that this year I'll be here and able to attend at least a few events.

I started off this morning with a workshop, which was a lot of fun but left me wondering: Am I getting old? I am terribly ageist when it comes to writing workshops. I can take each writer as an individual, but generally there are two groups in any class; those who aspire to careers as professional writers, and those who write primarily for their own amusement. The career-oriented writers are generally younger, in their 20s and 30s, while most of the hobbyists have long since gone grey and retired from their day jobs. I know that some of the older people will go on to write actual books while the younger ones lose heart in their creative endeavors, but I still felt more than a little discouraged when I looked around the table today.

The trouble was that the instructor, Nuala Ni Chonchuir (and yes, I'm too lazy to figure out how to put the accents in), is my age and well-established as a writer. Her works are in print while mine are almost all unpublished. I don't know when she started writing seriously, but her first book was published in 2003, only a year after I decided to devote myself semi-full-time to building my career as a novelist. At that point, I wasn't very far behind in my so-called writing career, but somehow this morning made me feel like I'd missed the boat.

I don't know why I had to start off writing a big, fat fantasy novel, but that happens to be where I began. Even if I'd written short stories, I would have had to deal with the American market which is harder to break into than Ireland's relatively small publishing scene. I know that I could have used my time more effectively, made better decisions about what to work on, pursued leads that I left unexplored, and so on, but I didn't.

Today, I worry that if I let it all go much longer, I'll start claiming that I only write for myself, and that I don't care about publication or what other people think. I worry that I'll stop caring so much, stop re-writing, stop striving to make my work all that it can be. I know, logically, that I still have time, but I can also see that time getting shorter -- quickly.

I'd better stop blogging for the day and take a look at some real work!

The Princess Bride

2009-04-20T16:28:00.002+01:00

I've read another book already! The Princess Bride is a good bit shorter and lighter than the last two books I read, and it's good... but not as great as I thought it was at the beginning. In the final third of the original story I became impatient with the narrator, and in the hundred page added-on section at the end, Buttercup's Baby I just wanted to be done with it.

That said, I'm thrilled that I've managed to read a whole book in less than a week, and it was highly entertaining a good 3/4 of the way through. I also enjoyed all the commentary on life as a rich and famous wrier, even if the narrator was a jerk.

The news from Galway harbor

2009-04-15T17:10:00.004+01:00

Well, it's been a long time since I wrote about what's happening outside our windows. Oil ships and scrap-metal barges have come and gone on their regular rounds, a few yachts have wandered in and out, and we keep hearing rumors that the Volvo Ocean Race is coming to town, and that it will be a major event.

Many things are supposed to have been happening in preparation for this race stopover, but until today I didn't actually believe that they were going to move the oil tanks to make room for the race village. The tanks were supposed to have been removed in December or January, but on they stayed in all their galvanized splendor:

Throughout the morning I heard the occasional thunder of crashing metal, without realizing what was going on. I looked out and saw that our scrap metal heap, the usual source of such noises, was nowhere to be seen. The sound was coming from the old, empty oil tanks. Perhaps they are coming down at last.

Nova's growing vocabulary

2009-04-15T14:20:00.002+01:00

A few months ago I reported on Nova's early words in the post Nova is Walking! For months after I wrote that post, her vocabulary remained stagnant, and even shrunk a bit. I don't think she used the word "baba" once between September and March, then all of a sudden, about three weeks ago, it was back.

More words followed. Last night I attempted to compile a list of Nova's current words, including those that I'm not 100% sure of (followed by a ? in the list bellow)

Baba (baby)

Ball

ballaballap (balloon)

bubum (butter)

bye-bye (also used to mean, "let's go already!" when I'm taking too long to get out of the house)

book?

blue?

buttbutt (button, including especially bellybutton)

dada

down

dat (that)

dog (Nova's favorite word)

dark (not very precisely pronounced)

duck (a very popular word these days, second only to "dog." It includes all birds.)

eye

hat/head/hair (not sure if she's distinguishing between these yet)

hi/hiya

hide?

hot

lamlamnun (salmon, the smoked kind, her favorite food)

lo (light)

lolo (flower? yellow?)

mama (of course!)

mellummellum (not sure what this means, but it's often something like, "Give me that!")

nana (banana)

Nana (grandmother)

nose

Nono (for Noreen, our housemate)

That's pretty much the full list for the moment, but it's growing fast. Nova is also walking very well at this point and climbing better than is really good for her. She's got long curly hair and still loves dogs despite having been knocked over by them a few times. She's getting more interested in books and is still very social.

The Elimination Communication is going pretty well, but is by no means perfect and we're still going through stacks of diapers, usually between 6 and 10 per 24 hours. The biggest recent development happened about two months ago. Nova started taking herself to the potty when we were around the house. These days she will usually go to the potty when she needs to if she's at home and not wearing a diaper, but it's not 100% and falls apart completely when she's tired or has been eating a lot of oranges. Now that I know she "gets it," I've gone very lax about taking her to the potty when we're out of the house, especially at playgroups, and have pretty much given up on nighttime pottying. She clearly knows what the potty is for, and I trust that she'll soon be ale to communicate her needs more verbally (so I can understand her better when we're out of the house and I'm distracted).

Nova's feet are growing almost as fast as her ability to communicate, leaving me shocked at the price of decent children's shoes.

Resolution Slide

2009-04-14T15:53:00.004+01:00

I have never been an especially fast reader, but I used to be able to get through a book in a week or so, most of the time. So, when I made my new year's resolution to read one good novel a month, I thought I should be able to manage it. Three and a half months into the year, I'm starting to slip.

Well, my book for March wasn't a novel, and I didn't get properly started on it until well into the month. I finished reading White Mughals around midnight last night, and I must say it was worth the effort and more. I picked it up as research for the historical romance that I'm supposedly working on. I wanted to learn a bit more about the East India Company around the beginning of the 19th century, as background for the male lead in my story. It gave me what I was looking for and greatly broadened my perspective on that period in history. In addition, it had a compelling plot and was excellently written.

I had checked the book out of the library, but made such slow progress that I had to renew it three times. I am frustrated by my apparent inability to average more than 15 pages of reading in a day, but I'm glad that I found a copy of this book and now own it, so I can go back to it at any time.

Next up, I am going to read a nice, light 20th century novel, one that I might be able to finish in the next two weeks.

Easter Dinner

2009-04-13T15:16:00.005+01:00

I expected that we would go up to my mother-in-law's for Easter dinner, but as it turned out she was going away for the weekend so I wound up doing dinner here. I made deviled eggs (no recipe, though I looked at a few), asparagus (sauteed in butter), pot barley, and a half shoulder of lamb with this marinade. I also threw in a few baked potatoes, because it's not a real dinner in Ireland if you don't have potatoes. I cooked them according to the directions on How to Bake a Potato.com. Amazing, the things that have their own websites. I found the results excellent. The lamb also came out well despite the fact that I didn't start marinating it until an hour before baking, and didn't have a food processor so the ingredients weren't as mashed up as they're supposed to be.

When my mother was here for a visit, we went out to more fancy restaurants than usual, including Sheridan's, which is just on the corner. There, my mother ordered something that involved rabbit and barley. I had a taste of it, which inspired me to pick up some barley at the health food store last week. It takes half of forever to cook (close to an hour) but it's got a nice chewy texture and tastes really nice. It's my new favorite grain. I wonder why it ever fell out of favor -- it's one of those ancient grains that used to be a staple crop but now is relegated to hippies, foodies, and animal fodder. People are really missing out. Barley is great.

For desert we had carrot cake, and although I'm thrilled with the cake part of this recipe, I'm still in search of the perfect cream cheese frosting. The one that in the recipe is too runny, as was the one I tried yesterday.

Yesterday felt like a holiday, completely un-rushed and relaxing. Dinner was the only real event of the day, apart from a mini easter egg hunt on the deck, and cooking it was practically stress-free.

The Grocery Budget

2009-03-06T15:10:00.006Z

For the past month, I've been keeping track of my grocery spending by keeping receipts and writing down any miscellaneous expenses like market purchases and take-away meals. Yesterday, I tallied it all up and found that we've been spending a bit less than €150/week. I'd hoped it would be more like €100. Oh well.

I wondered how this compared to what other people spend, so I posted a poll on one of the Irish forums. 44% of the respondents (over 100 so far!) claim to spend in the 100-150 range.23% spend less and 30% spend more. I don't know the demographics of the respondents, but I'd guess that most of them are stay-at-home mums, and because they're looking at the finance forum they're probably more budget-conscious than average. In the discussion of the poll, I learned that some women with six or more children spend less than we do, while I'm sure some couples with only one child spend even more.

Am I over-spending, or are we doing just fine? I don't know that I really care, but having opened the question I found myself whiling away the entire afternoon looking at these finance, menu-planning and home-management discussions in various mumsy forums around the internet. I got a lot of frightening 1950s housewife ideas about menu planning, etc. I do like the idea of simplifying cooking and reducing trips to the grocery store, but I don't want to get bored, either.

For my next non-writing project, I'm thinking of devising a regular meal rotation that will save money and keep all of us happy and healthy. We'll see how it goes. Meanwhile, I can waste more time looking up other people's menu lists. Is this useful, or merely a frivolous waste of writing time?

Oliver Twist

2009-03-03T11:27:00.004Z

For my February "good novel" I chose to read Oliver Twist, a classic which is more often quoted than read. I learned just now that it was Dickens's second novel. I have also read Great Expectations and Tale of Two Cities, and it's clear that Dickens wasn't at the height of his craft with Oliver Twist. I found it slow going in parts, and was occasionally annoyed by the young Dickens's tendency towards melodrama. Still, the characters were memorable (if not multi-faceted) and there were moments of brilliance, particularly his descriptions of London and one chapter close to the end, entitled "The Flight of Sikes."

I chose to read Oliver Twist largely because I thought it would help me with two of my own writing projects, a romance set in roughly the same time period and a fantasy novel which features a cadre of young thieves. It certainly helped me see areas in which those stories need work, but for the most part I'm just glad to have finally gotten my teeth into another classic.

For my next bit of self-improving reading, Mike insists that I read Watchmen before the film comes out on Friday.

Cassoulet and other cooking

2009-03-02T19:34:00.003Z

I have been sinking altogether too much creative energy into cooking lately. The past week featured pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, a re-heated lasagne, a not-very-good aloo gobi, and finally a "Shortcut Pork Cassoulet" which we brought up to my mother-in-law's for dinner on Friday night.

Cassoulet is a big project, even the shortcut version. I would really like to do a full old-fashioned version, but I wasn't sure where to get duck confit and I wasn't ready to make it without being assured of a very appreciative audience at the end of the process. I would make it again, but only in cold weather, with a lot of guests, and using a slightly bigger casserole dish. It didn't make me homesick, exactly, but it did make me wish for a better-equipped kitchen.

Last night I made Irish Beef Stew and One Hour Shrimp Paella. The paella was a bit of a disappointment. I used basmati rice instead of arborio, which didn't do the texture any favors, and got the cooking time of the "shrimp" a bit wrong, because I was using a frozen seafood mix and didn't adjust the cooking time correctly. Still, I'll give it credit for being a quick and easy recipe and will probably try again.

The beef stew is for tonight, so I don't have to try to cook before rushing off to my creative writing class. It's the third time I've made it, and I'm pretty sure it will be up to scratch, and it's the kind of thing that should sit on the back of the stove for a day or so anyway.

Pancakes

2009-02-18T14:38:00.004Z

Last night, Mike came home thinking that it was Pancake Tuesday, which is what they have in Ireland instead of Mardi Gras. He asked if we could have pancakes for dinner just as I was rolling out the pizza dough (I tried to spin and stretch it out the first few times, but I've switched to rolling lately). I felt bad about missing the opportunity to participate in an important cultural observance.

The good news is, yesterday wasn't Shrove Tuesday. The big day is next week, so I have plenty of time to prepare and stock up on eggs.

As a result of this pancake scare, I just spent about an hour looking at pancake recipes on epicurious.com. I wonder, is this too obsessive? Have I gone over into the dark side of competitive housewifery? Will I suddenly take out a subscription to Martha Stewart Magazine? Shouldn't I be writing instead?

But just think of the food that could be made! I want to make Turkish Zucchini Pancakes and Buckwheat Pancakes with Smoked Salmon in addition to the usual Shrove Tuesday Pancakes. I know I should probably stick to just one kind of pancake and not juggle untold complications of batter while Nova wants to be held on my hip and take part in all the exciting hot-butter frying. I don't know what I'll do, but at least I'll be prepared when Tuesday comes!

Meanwhile, Nova is still napping. I'd better at least look at my writing while I have the chance.

Ramping up, or just dithering?

2009-02-05T15:40:00.004Z

I wouldn't say that I have writers' block, it's just that I'm having a hard time getting back into things.

November was a very intense and stressful month at our place, but I still managed to crank out just over 50,000 words of a rough draft of a novel in those thirty days, along with a grant application. It was really too much. In December, I made myself unnecessarily busy with holiday baking and things, and I'd just begun to recover from all that when my hard drive died beyond hope of recovery on January 11th. I'd backed up most of my work, but not all of it, and not often enough.

I've had my computer back for two weeks now and have reconstructed what I could, but I still haven't gotten back to work in earnest. I had planned to finish the rough draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, but I lost my scene list and besides I've been away from it for too long to just pick up where I left off. Instead, I decided to re-work what I have already. I've gotten as far as re-reading it and making a few notes, but I'm dragging my feet at the prospect of digging into the hard work of revision and re-writing.

I wonder, is this really what I should be working on? Do I want to write potboiler romances? Should I get back to work on those short stories I was planning to write instead? I really don't know. But I suppose I might as well start.

The books of 2009, January

2009-01-31T17:13:00.002Z

I made a small New Year's resolution: to read at least one good novel every month. Last year was not a good year for reading, for me. The first half of the year was simply chaotic, with a transatlantic move, living with a whole lot of other people, looking after a very young baby, getting married, and wrapping up loose ends from years past. I read less than two books in those six months, South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami, and the later parts of What's Going on in There, which I'd started reading in November or December.

2009 is getting off on a better foot. For a while, I've been wanting to read The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch. I had heard that it was good. The first fifty pages or so were fantastic, and the author's world-building is awe-inspiring, but as the story wore on I started to get bored. By page 200, he hadn't even introduced the main antagonist, and I was so thoroughly bored by the cleverness of it all that I closed the book and moved on to the next one.

I had actually started reading The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, early in December, before our trip to the US, but I picked it up again as soon as I shelved Locke Lamora. It took me a while to get into the style -- very short chapters punctuated by bullet-point-like asides -- but after a few chapters I was well into the flow of the story. It's an excellent book. I highly recommend it, and I don't feel like recounting the plot since I just finished it and I'm still a bit teary-eyed.

I don't know what I'll read next, but I'm thinking that I might go for an older book this time.

Holiday Baking

2008-12-31T13:35:00.006Z

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.

At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.

For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps, an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies. The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling. The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious.

Then I decided it was time to try my hand at a proper yeast bread, and I made Oatmeal Wheat Bread, which was pretty good except that I accidentally left the salt out and had to add it later in the process, so it wasn't quite right. Also, I made it the day before our departure to the US, so we hardly even had a chance to eat it. I hope out flatmate had some and it didn't all go to waste.

On arrival in the US on Saturday evening, I had a bad cold, but it was only a day or two before I found myself back in the swing of compulsive baking. We made pizza on Sunday night and I accidentally made two batches of pizza dough. My parents were out to one of their never-ending rounds of dinner parties, so we got to have a night with just the "young people" (of which I am by far the oldest). My cousin Jethro and his girlfriend Cleo came over from next door and helped assemble the pizza, and we enjoyed some of their cider. A few days later I used the second batch of dough to make a test run of sticky buns, drawing on various recipes.

It wasn't exactly baking, but I also made a batch of these Beet and Carrot Pancakes one night, which were delicious. I will definitely make them again when we're back in Ireland, as they include no hard-to-find ingredients. I celebrated having a cast-iron skillet at my disposal by making a German Pancake one morning (no good recipe to link to, sadly. It's basically eggs, milk, and flour with a little butter whisked in, then baked in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes, rather than fried on the stove). Yesterday, I went into town with my mother and bought a cast-iron skillet to take back to Ireland so I can make this over there.

The biggest project of all was the Gingerbread House. It was a lot of work, probably 8-10 hours altogether, not including shopping trips, spread out over several days. Making the dough was straightforward enough, but after that it got interesting. I browsed the internet for templates, but in the end I spent a morning making my own, doing sketches on graph paper, trying to figure out how to fit the houses onto my 6 pieces of gingerbread, making models out of cardboard, and finally using those cardboard models as templates.

Rolling out the gingerbread dough was tricky -- I don't think I got it to quite the right thickness -- but it worked well enough in the end. It was also difficult to transfer the pieces onto the cookie sheets without having them stretch all out of square. They came out of the oven with edges slightly rounded, so I needed to trim them again before assembly.

Assembly was another challenge. I took the advice from other users on epicurious.com and used caramelized sugar, rather than royal icing, to stick the pieces together. This worked well, but my fingers suffered. I got a big burn on the pad of my right middle finger, which took a solid week to heal up, and a lesser burn on the pointer finger of that hand. It was worth it though, really.

I had envisioned decoration as a group effort, but Nova is still a bit small for so much playing with sugar, and everyone else was busy. My mother and Mike stuck on a few pieces, but mostly it was up to me, wrestling with an obscene amount of royal icing, which is basically a plaster made of egg whites and powdered/icing sugar. The peeps snowmen were my favorite props. Here are the results, two houses (the second picture is actually of the bigger of the two houses):

Last night, we had a demolition party. My cousin Ben's daughters, aged 2, 4, and 7, were here, and led the way. The gingerbread still tasted good, even after being in house form for a week, and went well with red wine.

Since making the gingerbread house, I managed a few smaller projects. Christmas is just not complete without cut-out sugar cookies. My mother didn't come up with her standard recipe quickly enough, only said that it was "sort of a shortbread," so I turned to the computer again. I wanted to do Christmas Cutouts with Vanilla Icing, but my mother thought that the Holiday Sugar Cookies sounded better. I made the sugar cookies first, but since I'd softened a whole pound of butter I thought I should use it, so I made up a batch of the Christmas Cutout dough, too.

The packs of dough languished in the refrigerator while Mike, Nova and I went off to Cambridge overnight, where we managed to fit in two separate trips to Toscanini's. I let Nova try some, because it's so much better than any ice cream she's likely to meet elsewhere.

We got back home around 6 on Christmas Eve, and I put together the dough for Rich Rum Sticky Buns. I would have done the maple syrup topping from another recipe instead, but I was too tired and scatter-brained to do anything involving combining different sets of instructions. We had the sticky buns and a frittata for breakfast on Christmas morning. I can't even remember what I put in the fritatta -- I think it was eggs, red and green bell peppers, potatoes, garlic and herb chevre, and maybe a couple of other things, with some slightly tired shredded parmesan on the top.

We rolled out, cut and baked the sugar cookies on Christmas afternoon, and I made the vanilla icing from the recipe I'd picked out. Decorating the cookies was a rushed and haphazard job, but that didn't seem to slow down their consumption, any. The Christmas Cutouts with Vanilla Icing were the clear favorite, nice and moist because of the touch of sour cream, but the other ones were good, too.

It is only as I write it all down that I realize quite how much baking I have done in the past two and a half weeks, but it's been fun to use a fully equipped kitchen for a change. My mother has all the gadgets -- a full array of baking sheets, a kitchenaid, a cuisinart, and an almost infinite array of small kitchen tools.

Also, I have here a well-stocked pantry and an audience that appreciates a little liquor in its cooking, so the other night I topped it off by finally making the topping that was meant to go with Nova's Birthday cake, from this recipe. I made a half-batch of Lemon Chiffon Cake, because it was easier than halving the Orange Chiffon Cake recipe and I didn't have any oranges on hand when I started cooking (although they turned up in time for the topping).

I am looking forward to having a bit of a rest when we get back to Ireland!

Nova's First Birthday

2008-12-01T07:31:00.007Z

Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.

It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over. We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.

At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep. She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic. Her favorite teethers are mobile phones. She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range. In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room. She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.

She's a very sociable baby, but with all the moving around lately she's starting to show signs of occasional clinginess. Her hair has gotten long enough that it gets little dreadlocks in it if it's not combed often enough, and she still hates baths.

NaNoWriMo

2008-12-01T07:23:00.002Z

It's over, and I came in a winner, pulling past 50,000 words yesterday afternoon. I didn't really think I'd make it for a while there, but I had signed up for the regional word war, and that gave me the motivational boost to stick with it and recover my losses.

In the end, I'd say it wasn't actually that hard to write 50,000 words in a month, but they were 50,000 reckless, adverb-heavy words of a fluffy romance novel which will need lots of further work before it's fit to read.

In the final eight days of the month, I put together a grant application, made Thanksgiving dinner, baked a cake for Nova's first birthday, and wrote over 16,000 words while our now-ex-flatmates moved out, leaving us with no salt, coffee table, or wireless router, among other things. It was kind of crazy, but I won.

What desk?

2008-11-09T17:47:00.002Z

I was just looking at Sherry's blog in which she shares the following tip:

"Clean up your desk."

It reminded me that I do not have a desk at the moment. Our apartment is small and frequently over-populated. My files are in boxes in closets and my current writing projects are mostly tucked into folders on the living room bookshelves. In October when I was working on four different projects and doing a lot of revision the lack of a desk was driving me crazy. I wanted to convert the "spare" room into a study/nursery so I could have a fixed place to work and spread out my charts and marked up pages.

October passed and no room-re-arranging happened. Now it's November and I just finished day 9 of NaNoWriMo. Things have changed. All I'm doing is writing -- adding words to a single document. I hardly even check my plot notes or the minimal research I've done. Not having a desk is a distinct advantage at this stage of writing.

16k and counting!

Baby Cthulu

2008-11-01T10:05:00.006Z

Mike has been after me for months to make Nova a Cthulu costume, and last night it finally came together. Mike made the wings, and I frankensteined the rest together from a cheap pair of boy's pajamas. Here she is:

NaNoWriMo

2008-11-01T09:49:00.002Z

I am signing up for the annual insanity of NNWM, National Novel Writing Month, a pledge to churn out 50,000 words by the end of the month.

I got up at 6:30 this morning, and it was near 7:30 by the time I had the document open on my computer. At 8:15, when Nova woke up, I'd only written about 500 words.

If she takes a nap today, I might be able to do another thousand, but I'm not optimistic. Still, I'm looking forward to it in a sick sort of way. I'm planning to write a regency romance and take a break from my never-ending fantasy series. We'll see how it goes.

Nova is Walking!

2008-10-05T20:04:00.002+01:00

Nova pulled herself to stand at 6 months and 3 weeks, and cruised almost immediately thereafter, but she didn't crawl at top speeds until a month after that, shuffling the normal order of infant skill acquisition. Now, at long last, after months of warm-ups she's finally walking on her own.

She took her first independent steps almost a month ago, and by this time last week she was stringing four or five steps together at a stretch. Then, in the last few days, she's finally started to use this new "walking" skill to get from point A to point B.

Meanwhile, she's had a runny nose and possibly an invisible tooth coming in and has completely gone off solid food, so she's nursing like a newborn, but it's all really very exciting.

My mother says that at this age I had about a dozen words. I'm not sure how many words Nova has, or what counts. She hasn't said "baba" (arguably her first word) in months, so I don't know if she still has it or not. She also says dog, dada, mama, and bird pretty reliably, and occasionally book and blue, or some sounds in that general direction. She also says "Dat!" often, which I think is "that" as in, "I want to see that," and, "What's that?" So, that's seven words or so, unless there's something I'm forgetting... like "ball" and Nana... nine words?

And if there were an Olympic event in raspberry-blowing, Nova would get the gold!

Almost Walking

2008-09-20T20:37:00.003+01:00

Just now, Nova took two steps in a row, totally on her own. Last weekend she took a step on her own, then sat down, and all week she's been crouching and standing and crouching back down to crawl.

This step towards walking comes about a month after she first stood up on her own from the ground, without using anything for balance or support or to pull on. Now I really do think she'll be walking soon.

My so-called vacation

2008-09-02T20:54:00.007+01:00

I have not been writing. I should have known better than to expect an uninterrupted half hour a day at my computer while visiting my parents. I'd had great hopes for getting through the next few of my new draft while here, but the constant social whirl has gotten in my way. In the week and a half I've been here, there has been only one night that my parents haven't had guests or gone out to some social event or other, which I am also required to attend.

When I complained, my mother said, "It's only the evenings!"

You might think so, but it's amazing how a dinner party can cast its shadow over the entire day. Last night, for example, we had a few relatives around for dinner. When all was said and done, that meant 11 adults and Nova. My mother and I spent a good while in the middle of the day figuring out a menu, whether anyone else could be counted on to contribute, and going shopping, all the while speculating about whether certain people would or would not come, and whether we would have to set up an extra table. I'd estimate it as 2-3 hours, what with all the phone calls and back and forth. Then we started cooking around 4:00. I think everyone was gone by a little after 9. That's about 7 or 8 hours of dinner-related activity.

These dinners can happen four or five times a week around here, especially in late August.

The long and the short of it is that I haven't done any writing at all in the past few days, and I'm throwing in the towel until I get back to Ireland. I have, however, read Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, which was probably a useful writing-related activity, even if I didn't do a single one of the exercises. It's a pretty good book, and got me thinking about a few different issues in my current project. I found the discussion of outlining systems particularly interesting, and the appendixes are a good touch -- I'll be able to photocopy them and not have to lug the whole book back across the Atlantic.

I've also done a bit of sewing and set up a photobucket account. Here were the two main projects, a podegi and a mei tai:

I've been using these new carriers instead of my ergo since I finished them sometime last week. I like the pod because it's pretty, and the simplicity and flexibility of the design are appealing, but the lack of a waist strap means that when you take the baby out, you have to immediately do something with the carrier, too, which is a hassle. I'm used to leaving the ergo dangling around my waist for hours on end, and I can do that with the mei tai, too.

The other things I like about the mei tai are that the strap fabric is much nicer and it seems to be especially good at getting Nova to sleep. The difference in strap fabric is what I get for shopping on line. When fabric.com said heavy twill, they meant HEAVY. That yellow stuff is super stiff! The indigo denim, on the other hand, is nice and soft, just sturdy enough without being too heavy.

I'm using some of the rest of the yellow twill to make hats. More photos coming soon!

A Very Active Baby

2008-08-28T18:36:00.003+01:00

Nova is nine months old tomorrow and she's working on walking. When she was younger, people often commented on how alert she seemed compared to other babies her age, and even in the womb, in the long weeks of gearing up for labor, her activity level drew comment whenever I had monitors strapped to me.

I attribute her frequent kicking and subsequent explorations in part to the constant stream of caffeine I send her, first through the umbilical cord and now through breastmilk, but I think it's also just her personality. Still, it didn't seem important until recently, when she's gotten much more mobile.

We've met up with several babies her age lately, and she enjoys their company but she's crawling circles around them, poking at their eyes, grabbing their noses, and sometimes even stepping on them. Many other babies her age, especially boys, are still inching around on thier bellies. The differences are getting a lot more noticeable. She's generally happy and quite sociable, so it never occurred to me, until recently, that she might be more demanding than the average baby.

She already has a well-established taste for electronics and anything sharp and mechanical (unless its engine is running) and is trying to help me type, so I'd better go take her outside to chase the poor dog again.

Enchantress of Florence

2008-08-16T13:50:00.002+01:00

I finished reading Enchantress of Florence yesterday afternoon, while Nova was taking her second nap of the day. It was a good day for napping and reading, dark and rainy as Ireland's reputation, and much colder than August should be. I am proud of myself for having finished the book in less than a month, which shouldn't be much of an accomplishment but it's the most I've read in a single month since Nova was born.

Enchantress of Florence is by far the best book I've read this year, with the possible exception of Good Night, Gorilla. I also enjoyed it more than other Rushdie books I've read, namely The Moor's Last Sigh and the first 2/3 of Satanic Verses. I loved the juxtaposition of Mughal India and Renaissance Florence, and the fluid boundaries between art, life, and death that characterize the story's world. It was, of course, beautifully written, but I never felt like the plot got lost in flowery description.

I should get around to finishing Satanic Verses, and read Midnight's Children one of these years.

About the Scene Checklist

2008-08-14T11:24:00.003+01:00

I recently started a new draft of a novel, and I'm trying a new approach with this round. I've always written through start to finish, and then edited the whole manuscript in one go, or in blocks of about three chapters. This time, I want to make sure my scenes are working, to analyze a bit as I go. I plan to use this checklist primarily as an editing tool. Many other scene lists are designed to be used before the scene is written, and I've tried that and found that it doesn't work so well for me. I need to discover what's going on as I write, and I prefer to write without looking over to double-check my preconceived plans as I type.

The scene checklist below is designed to catch some of my most common slip-ups, especially lack of tension and my tendency to rush through things too quickly. I looked at three scene checklists before writing this one: The Big Twelve, a scene list from The Scriptorium, and another one I can't find the link for anymore, which was for film, more than novels. Although my list incorporates a lot of the same elements, there's more emphasis on setting because I think that's what makes fantasy special as a genre.

I feel that this draft is fundamentally different from the ones that have gone before, but then, I always feel that way at this stage.

Scene Checklist

2008-08-14T11:10:00.002+01:00

Character-Conflict-Change

Scene protagonist:
Who is he/she?
What does he/she want?
How does he/she feel?
What actions does he/she take to reach the goal?

Scene antagonist:
Who is he/she/it?
What does he/she/it want?
How does he/she/it feel?
What actions does he/she/it take to reach goal?

Other characters:
Role in scene?
Is each necessary? Distinct as an individual?

Is the conflict strong and/or clear enough?

What is the worst thing that could happen in this scene?

Scene-Setting-Senses-Story

What does the reader learn about the story’s world in this scene?
Do they need to know that information at this point?
Can any information be held off until later?
Is any necessary information missing?

Does the reader get a vivid, multi-sensory sense of the setting?

Does the setting contribute to scene tension?

Are the character’s senses and emotions engaged?

Does the scene stop at a point with forward momentum?
Do you want to turn the page to the next scene?
If not, can you end the scene at a different, probably earlier, point?

What has changed at the end of the scene?

Is this scene necessary to the larger plot of the novel?

Telling Ages

2008-08-10T11:25:00.002+01:00

One should never trust a woman who tells her real age. If she tells that, she'll tell anything.
--Oscar Wilde

Once upon a time I knew a woman who lied about her age. She said that she was “almost thirty” when in fact she was a decade older. I always kind of wondered how she got away with it. I certainly never guessed until someone told me about it, and her other lies had begun to catch up with her.

Now I have a birthday coming up this week, the once that will push me over the edge from mid- to late-thirties. I can see 40 on the horizon, but it looks like a pretty benign signpost from here. I’m married now, and have a baby, which makes it easier to look at the future without anxiety. If I were still alone, I think 40 would look pretty lonely, but I like to think I wouldn’t get too wound up about it.

What I can see, now, is how easy it would be to just drop a decade and turn 28 this week. My old acquaintance looked a little weather-beaten for a 29-year-old, but she had none of the material trappings of adulthood except an unreliable pick-up truck. Like her, I don’t own a house or have a serious, respectable career. Heck, I don’t even have a car. I could pass for someone in my 20s, particularly since everyone I hang out with these days is so much younger than I am.

But of course I won’t. I can’t be bothered, and lying is not a particular skill of mine (to put it mildly). I already have enough to re-invent myself around with new motherhood and shifting between continents. I could do it, though, and my old acquaintance’s revision of her own history no longer looks like the daring feat it seemed back then.

All it would take would be a little re-figuring of dates, a short rehearsal, and a knack for avoiding the probing questions that hardly anyone ever asks. Then I realize another problem. I don’t want to be 28. I was fairly miserable at that age. Youth is not all it’s cracked up to be. I might have had a bit more physical resilience then, but emotionally I just didn’t have it together. I find that I’ve gotten steadily happier as I’ve gotten older. I wouldn't trade that for looking like a weathered 28-year-old.

Writing Update

2008-08-02T20:15:00.004+01:00

I haven't looked at my blog in a week and a half. I'd like to say that I've been busy writing, but that would be only half true. I've been busy thinking about writing instead of actually doing it -- what I should be working on and whether I'm up for this rewrite.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make a living as a novelist. I've known a few people who've done it, so I know it's possible, but I also know that very few writers ever make it to that level. I understand that hard work is more important than talent, and that connections can be handy but won't carry anyone all the way, and that luck has almost nothing to do with it.

I figure that about 1,000 living writers are making a living as novelists in the English language market today. I know a couple of them, a handful of writers who have published novels but won't be quitting their day jobs any time soon, and many, many more who are steadily working at their craft and may or may not get published eventually. The odds are not good.

I would like to be one of that club of a thousand or so, but I think I'm going to work on some non-fiction, too, just to hedge my bets a bit. We'll see how it goes.

Nova: 8 Months Old

2008-08-02T19:46:00.007+01:00

At 8 months old, Nova is crawling, climbing stairs, standing with support, and pulling things of shelves. She's speeding ahead as usual, but the last week has been tough, with a head cold, two new teeth cutting in, and immunizations to top it all off. She's getting sticky and dirty and occasionally a bit bruised and scraped from her crawling and climbing adventures, but she's still having a good time.

She's also enjoying "eating"and I think some of the food has started to go in. So far, I'm having mixed success keeping her off salt, sugar, wheat and dairy, since that's all most people eat around here. She's still enjoying her carrots, apples, bananas, pears, porridge, avocado, rice cakes, etc. It's nice being able to set her up with her own tray of food when we're all eating dinner, so we don't have to take turns holding her while we eat.

She's also getting a lot better at keeping herself entertained, especially when she has access to shred-able paper, sharp objects, and expensive electronics.

I am tempted to say that she has four words, but really, it's more that she's working them up gradually. The sounds she sometimes uses as words are mama, baba, dada, and dog. She doesn't have a solid grasp of any of them, but she will soon.

Another Draft

2008-07-21T11:21:00.003+01:00

The weekend before last I had my flood of inspiration, and for most of the past week I've been planning my next re-write of Scrapplings. I drafted this version of the story at the 1369 in November-December 2006, re-wrote it and edited it during the first half of 2007, then sent out 59 queries and submission packs as Nova got ready to be born. A steady stream of rejections trickled back to me, and some are still out there, unread and un-responded-to.

As I sit down to write again I find myself hesitating. What makes me think that this time will be different? I've written, re-written, and pitched this novel, and the second one, so many times that it seems to be futile. Earlier this year, I was thinking that the premise, the whole idea that my fantasy world was built on, was fundamentally un-salable. Now that I've seen the plot from a new angle, will it make any difference? Should I really sacrifice all this time and energy for a story that has always let me down in the past? Is last week's flood of optimism misplaced?

Then again, I don't really feel like I have any choice. I have this book, this story, and I know it can be good, really good. Even as it is, I think it's better than a lot of what's already published in the genre. But I have to start. Yet again. I wonder how long it will take this time, and if it will be different in the end.

Babywearing Hyenas

2008-07-16T10:41:00.002+01:00

I do not get it. I have fallen through the rabbit hole for the second time into an online world that puzzles me: Competitive shopping.

The first time, it was diapers. I was looking for something practical and reasonably attractive for Nova’s bum, and discovered that there’s a whole world of women making diapers that very nearly qualify as art. That much, I thought was pretty cool. What I find odd is the whole culture of shopping, where women hover over their computers to get on waiting lists for the most sought after diapers.

There are lots of nice diapers out there! You can make your own, even! Why the fixation on a particular brand? They’re not that much better than the others!

The babywearing scene is just as bad, if not worse. Hundreds or thousands of women all over the planet are sitting at their sewing machines, making baby carriers. Making a good one takes some skill, some design testing, some good materials, but again, it’s not all that hard to make a nice, functional carrier. That doesn’t stop people from trying to get the most fashionable thing. But you know what? The average person on the street doesn’t care how “hard to get” your mei tai was. The only people who are likely to be impressed live in on-line forums.

Scandinavian mei tais were, apparently, 2007’s biggest fad, but I’m not clear on what’s supplanted them in 2008. Some people on thebabywearer.com were raving about Octis, which I suppose are the new hot thing. To get one, you have to join a yahoo group and get on a waiting list, but they do look nice and are reported to be very comfortable. A few of the “Scandi tais” are still very sought after, too, like the Kleinsmekker, which I admit are gorgeous, but sorry, you can't get one if you don't live in the Nordic countries (except that people do, and that's where the whole competitive shopping thing comes in).

So, at the moment I have an ergo carrier. It is so un-hip. It is black, with a tan lining and hood. It fastens with buckles and you can order it from Amazon.com or any of about a million other places. The people with the fashionable mei tais look down their noses at me, just as I look down my nose at the poor people who think that baby carriers are uncomfortable because they’ve only experienced the Baby Bjorn, which is suitable up to about 10 lbs. and might throw your back out even then.

I also have a hotsling pouch, which, because it’s soft and has a pretty print on one side, may be a little bit cooler than the ergo. I used to use a moby wrap, which probably qualifies as cool because it’s a wrap, and therefore takes a lot of skill to use, but I phased it out once Nova was big enough for the ergo. I guess I'm not above having a collection of carriers, but I don't understand the need for dozens. It's like having dozens of shoes or handbags, except that you'll only be able to use them until your youngest child gets too heavy or independent-minded to carry, maybe around age 3 or 4 at the latest.

So I only want one, or maybe two. Two more, that is, and I'll probably make them myself. Then I'll join the frenzy and sell off the ones I'm not using.

I read another book!

2008-07-14T10:03:00.002+01:00

I didn't manage to read to the end of two books in the month of June, as I'd resolved, but this morning I turned the last page of Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids by Christina Katz. Writer Mama is a pretty good book, a focused program for building a career as a non-fiction writer in whatever time you can snatch from the daily round of child-rearing and housekeeping. It advises starting out small, with short articles and local publications, then building up to the better-paying markets and feature writing, followed by the possibility of a non-fiction book deal.

I could do this, I really could. I know what to write, how to query, and where to send it. The trouble with Chirstina Katz's program is that non-fiction doesn't really fire me up. I might write an article here and there, but I always feel like it's a distraction from my serious work, fiction. The trouble with fiction is that the career path of a novelist is formula-resistant. Authors sometimes land book deals with lots of short story publications under their belts, but writing short stories and writing novels don't always go together.

So, having formulated a plan to get myself started on freelance journalism, I am turning back to fiction. Financially, it's probably a self-destructive impulse, but I can't be sure until I've done it all over again, the writing and rewriting, the critiques and query letters. If I don't hit the mark this time, I might give it up. I said that last year, too. I'm starting to suspect that giving up on this fantasy fiction series is not in the cards.

Telling Stories to Babies

2008-07-12T10:47:00.004+01:00

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.

Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on. Goodnight Gorilla already sports quite an array of toothmarks. I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice. People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go. The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla.

One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha! I can read Nova Scrapplings and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002." So last night, as I lay there just this side of sleep, with Nova latched on, I tried to tell her the story of Darna's journey to Anamat, because Nova wouldn't sit anywhere near still while I turned the pages of Guess How Much I Love You.

Well. That was an interesting exercise! I spotted several flaws with the overall story right away, things I hadn't been able to see a year ago when I was last working on it. The story is about Darna's struggle to find friends, even as she tries to pretend that she doesn't need them. At the moment, as it's written, that's not really what the book is about. I spend too much time on the most superficial external conflicts, all of which are a bit cartoonish in their good/evil contrast, which isn't what I want at all.

I need to go back to the beginning. Large swaths of the text are probably salvageable, but I might be better off starting again from scratch. I also really do think that this is the right place to start the series, that jumping right in with Priestess would set the wrong focus.

"Darna is a sort of under scullery-maid at the far end of the universe," I began, "but she listens, and even there in that outpost keep she hears stories of other places, places that are better and more interesting. She thinks she might belong there, that she might be happy there, so one night, when there's a big party going on, she steals some money and runs away."

From that point forward, I'm afraid that Darna and I have a long way to go.

Naptime

2008-07-05T11:53:00.003+01:00

A few weeks ago, I resolved to write during Nova's naptimes. She often naps for an hour or two in the morning, and sometimes for an hour or two in the afternoon, as well. If she did nap for three hours, that would theoretically be three working hours in a day -- a perfect amount of time.

But today is like many other days. I start off the day with my cup of tea and Nova amuses herself and practices standing and crawling for an hour or so while I make myself breakfast and perhaps check in with the world of the internet. While she's nursing, I play scrabulous and surf around innumerable time-wasting sites devoted to the hippy fringe of parenting, or go off on a tangent and look at fabrics on-line. Sooner or later she nods off. Some mornings it only takes 10 minutes of nursing until she nods off, this morning it was well over an hour (with a short interruption, when I thought she was asleep).

The real problem, though, is me. Once she's safely settled in her slumbers, I get online again. I know better, but often I'm tired and unfocused. Lactating can make a person pretty sleepy. An hour of nap passes, and I've done some laundry, eaten my breakfast, and surveyed opinions on straight vs. angled straps on podegais. No writing. When I finally open up Word, or even blogger, up she pops!

I now have Nova wriggling in my lap, eating my watch.

First Word?

2008-07-01T10:31:00.002+01:00

I know it's early yet, but I think Nova may have said her first word at seven months on the dot. This weekend, when the three of us were wandering around town, she said "baba" every time she saw someone in a stroller, or a kid under the age of ten. She also said "baba" a few times in between, and it is her most frequent babbling sound, so I thought maybe it was just coincidence, but she said "baba" again yesterday at an appropriate time, so I'm starting to think it's a word.

She also says "mamamumumum" when she's tired and hungry, and is beginning to connect the sound with me, I think. This morning she made a "papa" sound, so there's hope for Mike, too.

Coal Barge

2008-06-30T10:41:00.002+01:00

Crash. Whirr, creak, rattle, CRASH! That's been the story since sometime between 3 and 5 AM and now, getting on towards 11. When the barge pulled up along our side of the docks on Saturday, I kind of knew that it wasn't here for the scrap metal. I half hoped it was just here for a restful visit to Galway, maybe a little pub crawl for the crew, then quietly off over the horizon of Galway Bay.

But no. It's here on business. Loud, just outside the window business. Shortly after the barge arrived the other day, a giant, rusty funnel was set beside it. Now all morning trucks have been lining up underneath it and the local crane has been scooping and dumping with rattles and crashes, waking me up at every turn.

Much as I love our view of all the activity on the harbor, this is one of those times when I think that a little quiet would be nice.

A miscellaneous meme

2008-06-23T16:54:00.002+01:00

It's late in the afternoon and Nova is having a nap of epic proportions, 2.5 hours and counting. She's probably tired from our weekend's adventures in Donegal, which I plan to write about at some point, once we get the video up on youtube. Helen did the following meme, and filling it in is about as coherent as my writing is likely to get today.

What were you doing 10 years ago?
In June 1998, I was moving from Lowell Street in Somerville into the dorms at EDS, and starting my dreadful summer of Clinical Pastoral Education at New England Baptist Hospital.

5 things on your to-do list for today
Organize for tomorrow's sling meet (lots of steps to that one)
Wash diapers
Sew diapers
Trim Nova's fingernails
Write something.

What would you do if you were a billionaire?
Buying a house would be high on the agenda, and not just any house but a historic mansion or even a castle. I would restore it and fix it up so that we could have massive house parties. Mike could have a workshop out back and make whatever kinds of spiky metal things struck his fancy and I would sit in the tea room with my computer, writing. We would also have an aikido dojo somewhere on the grounds, and I would hire an au pair to hang out with Nova a few hours a day.

What are three of your bad habits?
Nose picking
Web sudoku Scrabulous, etc.
Browsing the internet when I could be doing something productive!

What are some snacks you enjoy?
Meringues
Apples
Cheese
Trail Mix
Tea!

What were the last five books you read?
What’s Going on in There? by Lise Eliot
South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
The Empire of Tea by Alan Macfarlane
Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born by Tina Cassidy

What are five jobs you have had?
Real Estate Broker
Personal assistant
Gardner
Architectural Drafter
Dishwasher

What are five places where you have lived?
Martha's Vineyard
Cambridge/Somerville
Guza, near Kangding, Sichuan, China
Portland, Oregon
Galway, Ireland

Nova is awake now, and tomorrow I might fill in about this weekend.

I read a whole book!

2008-06-17T09:19:00.006+01:00

Last night, I finally finished reading What's Going on in There, which I started in December or thereabouts. Since then, long weeks have passed in which I did not read at all, or picked it up only to read one or two pages. Between January and mid-May, I don't think I read more than ten pages on any one day, and usually much less than that.

When Nova went to sleep earlier than usual three nights ago I set out to read 15 pages and wound up reading nearly 40. It felt so good to really get into a book and feel my brain stir to life again. I nodded off with only one chapter left to read (the second-to-last, because I'd skipped around). The following night I was too tired to pick it up at all, but last night I read those last 15 pages. I have now read a full-length book with Nova at my side.

What's Going on in There was pretty good, but like many books, it dragged in the middle. I found myself more interested again towards the end when it started talking about language development and the stages of growth that are just ahead for Nova. I probably should have read it when I was pregnant, and the whole story was ahead of us, but maybe it's just as well I didn't, because my mind was a sieve then, too.

The final chapter was called "How to Raise a Smarter Child" and I regret to report that we're already failing Nova here and there, but I hope her genes will make up for our lapses as parents. Although I talk to her a fair amount, I don't think I keep up the endless stream of chatter that she would need to be extra-precocious verbally. I probably should have started reading to her already, but at this point I don't know how to get her to sit still long enough for a 5-minute picture book... unless she's sleeping, which I won't interfere with!

I am looking forward to reading more books soon, but I don't know if I'll reach my goal of finishing Crossed before the end of the month.

Cake Day

2008-06-12T17:01:00.005+01:00

Last Friday, June 6th, was our Cake Day. Mike and I performed many feats of bureaucratic contortion and form-filling in our quest to get married, and June 6th was the final day set for our Irish wedding.

Here is an abbreviated version of the saga:

Last fall, when Nova was still snug inside my belly, Mike and I started to talk about getting married so we could all live together in the same country, but I didn't want to rush into it, and didn't want to tie the knot while my brain was addled with pregnancy hormones. We planned, tentatively, to get married without family or fuss at Cambridge City Hall in December.

Well, Nova was supposed to come out in early November, but she was actually born on November 29th, which meant that by the time she and I had recovered from childbirth, Christmas was upon us and so was the end of Mike's 90-day visa to the US. We planned to get married after our return from a visit to Ireland in early January.

Mike didn't get a visa to come back because of some short-sighted bureaucrat at the US Embassy in Dublin, so we started to try to get married here in Ireland. The lawyer Mike's mum recommended to us told us that we would have to appear before a judge in the family circuit court to get a waiver for the three-month waiting period, then go to the Health Board which regulates and performs civil marriages. I arranged my flight back so that I would be here for the next sitting of the circuit court, but the lawyer didn't make an appointment for us, saying that we had to go to the Health Board first, on March 6th. That was supposed to get us a wedding date on March 27th, according to the lawyer.

Well, we got to the Health Board, Registry of BirthsMarriagesDeaths and it turned out that we hadn't decoded their piles of forms correctly, and that the lawyer's advice was not in accord with the Health Board's current rules, and that we actually needed to go before the judge first and then go back to the health board, but we had needed that first meeting to get a date set for the judge to put in his letter. So, the date was set for May 1st, which I thought sounded like a fine day to get married.

But no. The circuit courts of the world conspired against us and I had to go back to the US to testify in a trial, and it looked like we wouldn't be back before the 1st of May, so we had to re-schedule. That was when the June 6th date was set, after yet another meeting with the women at the Registry of BirthsMarriagesDeaths. I rescheduled our restaurant reservation and cake for the day.

Thanks to yet another pile of paperwork Mike was allowed to accompany me back to the US on my unpleasant errand to the circuit court there. Once my business was concluded, we got married with haste and great rejoicing.

And so we returned to Ireland, legally and officially married with no further need for the bureaucrats of BirthsMarriagesDeaths. But we did have a cake to eat, and that's what we did last Friday.

Galway Harbor Blockade

2008-06-12T16:44:00.003+01:00

This past Monday, June 9th, about twenty fishing boats lined up to blockade Galway Harbor in protest. I was not 100% clear on what they were protesting, but one thing they wanted was for the government to stop taxing gasoline. Here are some pictures from the day:

Many of the fishermen are still here, flying banners which say:

"Save Our Livelihoods"

"Brussles Betray, Costal Communities Decay"

"Third World starves while Ireland forced to dump dead fish"

"Fishermen demand fair and effective laws"

etc.

Most of these signs are spray-painted onto sheets, and are accompanied by big placards from Sinn Fein urging people to vote against the Lisbon treaty.

Watching all those boats line up to blockade the harbor was a good morning's entertainment, but I find myself strangely unsympathetic to the fishermen's plight. I don't really know the issues very well, but it seems to me that the fundamental problem is that a century of industrial fishing has depleted stocks to the point where making a living as a fisherman is going to be extremely difficult. The government can't fix that, not in time to revitalize the industry that caused the problem. Sure, I'd like to see fish populations rebound to where they were a century or two ago, and fishermen have a good living, but it's going to be a very slow process if it happens at all.

Reading

2008-06-02T18:07:00.002+01:00

I'm fully enjoying motherhood, but one of the things that's beginning to drive me crazy is the fact that I'm having an awfully hard time reading anything longer than a short article. Since December, I've been reading What's Going on in There, and a few weeks ago I started reading my friend Nicki's book, Crossed. I had hoped to finish at least one of them by the end of May, but no dice. I resolve to finish reading both of these books in the next few weeks, or at least by the end of June. Wish me luck. I'll need it.

Elimination Communication, an update

2008-06-02T16:51:00.008+01:00

It's now been about three months since I started practicing EC with Nova most of the time. I didn't realize until today that I hadn't blogged about it since late March. At that point, I was washing roughly 18 diapers every day, was bleary-eyed and confused and only half settled in to our new home.

On our trip back to America in late April, I started to discover how far we'd come. Once I got out of the urban environment of Galway and into the woods, it became much easier to respond when Nova seemed to need to pee. We just had to be in a place where it was all right to just stop and tinkle into the bushes. I didn't have to work so hard at finding places to pee because the whole outdoors was at our disposal. The warm, sunny weather helped, too.

Back in Galway, where the environment around us is all people and pavement, we need to make special detours to find places to pee -- pub toilets, occasional parks, and home are nearly the only options. I started keeping a log of Nova's elimination patterns, which was pretty easy once I got going on it, and scheduling stops around times when I thought she would need to go. Between that, our improved diapering system, my "catch rate" went from around 25% to about 75%, sometimes as much as 90%. I slowly gained confidence, and I'm getting better at picking up on Nova's signals and using my own intuition. Now I sometimes even know when she's about to go when someone else is holding her and I'm doing something else on the other side of the room.

It's crazy, but it seems to be working. We had about two poopy diapers in the week after we got back from America, and another one last week, just before Nova's first tooth pushed up through the gums. Other than that, every single poo has landed in the toilet or potty (or other appropriate, easily cleaned receptacle). She's starting to tell me when she needs to go, or at least I think she is. I still try too hard sometimes and have to remind myself to relax, but now that we're seeing some results, now that I know that this isn't futile, it's easier to be laid back about the misses and dirty diapers.

Last week I bought Nova a pack of tiny undies (the 2-3 year size, which are baggy on her but still fit) to wear around the house and they're the cutest thing ever. And for now, I'm doing a lot less laundry. I still have doubts and misgivings about EC, though, which mostly have to do with the fact that I'm the only person around here who seems to be doing it. I think that consistency is important, and I hate to leave her with someone who would leave her in a wet or dirty diaper for even a little while. I can't imagine finding a caregiver around here who would be willing and able to help her use the potty. It's one of the major factors in my lack of interest in returning to work, although admittedly breastfeeding is also a major factor there.

It's strange to me that something so sensible, so obviously healthier for babies and the environment, can be so profoundly counter-cultural. The average age of potty training used to be between a year and 18 months, now it's over 3 years. And then there are all those enormous children riding around in buggies looking bored, and well able to walk. I'll leave that for another day.

To Work, or not to Work?

2008-05-30T13:37:00.003+01:00

To work or not to work, that is the question that plagues me now as I watch Nova sleeping in her car seat, which rocks her back to sleep when she startles. I feel lucky even to have the choice. As Nova crests the 6-month mark, I am considering whether to get a regular, paid day-job. I would like to get out a little more, have a little more grown-up time, and make some money, but when I run the numbers it just doesn't add up.

It seems like most of my peers in America are compelled to go back to full time work six weeks after their babies are born, or three months later if they're lucky. Here in Ireland, most wait until six or seven months, about Nova's age now. The little ones go into daycare at rates that cancel out ordinary wages, but if you're a well-paid professional you come out a little bit ahead financially and, more importantly, stay up to date in your career of choice. The babies are generally fine, but a whole load of natural parenting options go out the window, particularly on-demand breastfeeding.

My years in the working world have been too haphazard to amount to anything that could be called a career. I've had a string of variously-paid day jobs and minor business ventures which have only lost small amounts of money. In 2002, I quit my regular day job (which was only half-time, anyway) to devote myself to writing more or less full time. I've had other day jobs since, but my focus stayed on writing until the chaos of new motherhood, new relationship, and moving countries got me so flustered that writing went pretty much out the window. The upshot is that I have no career to derail. Another six months or a year out of paid, resume-worthy employment won't make me significantly less employable.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, I could find full-time daycare for Nova, and a reasonably paid full-time job. Half my wages would go to pay for daycare, some of the remainder would go to taxes, we would probably lose the government benefits we get now (mostly the medical card, which buys me piece of mind more than anything else) and there would be all sorts of incidental expenses like more professional clothes for me, and more take-out dinners. Purely in terms of money, it works out to about 50 € a week, maybe a hundred if things are very efficient. It's even worse for part-time work, which I would prefer.

Aside from finances, the other big question is Nova's care. She's still very small, and although she has a big, friendly personality she can't communicate very well. She's also primarily nourished by my spicy ol' boob juice, which is what everyone who's anyone (WHO, AAP, etc.) says is best for babies in their first year outside the womb. I could send her off to daycare with expressed milk, but that's a drag, and not as good as having it fresh. She's better off being able to nurse on demand. I think she has a good start already, and I wouldn't worry about her taking a bottle every now and again at this point, I just hate to downgrade her food source in return for so little. Even trusted family and friends couldn't provide her with that, even if they were available to cover my working hours consistently.

Mind you, I don't want to keep Nova at home for ever, or even until she's ready for school. I believe she'll be ready for day care long before that, but probably not this year. I want her to have some more independence and better ability to communicate before I trust her to relative strangers for any length of time. Here are the things I'd like her to have going for her before I leave her to others' care for more than a few hours a week:

1. Mostly weaned.

2. Mostly toilet trained.

3. With enough command of spoken language to communicate her basic needs well.

I realize that's a tall order, and far more than any baby less than a year old could accomplish, but I believe Nova will be well on her way, if not already at that point, by this time next year. Meanwhile, I'll be trying to write and work from home, not expecting huge success financially, but hoping to be able to contribute a little here and there.

Under other circumstances -- if I had a stellar career and if I weren't breastfeeding or doing EC -- I think I would be fine with sending Nova to day care. Now that I've started with breastfeeding and EC, I am extremely reluctant to shortchange either process. So I'll wait. And maybe I'll get something published in the meantime.

106 books I mostly haven't read

2008-05-23T12:33:00.003+01:00

This is is a list of the top 106 books that lie unread on people’s shelves, by LibraryThing. I saw it on Helen's blog, and thought I would have a go at it because I actually read a few pages of real book this week, not just drivel on the internet. You have to bold the ones you’ve read of your own accord, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish, and are supposed to underline the ones you had to read for school or university, but I can't figure out how to underline on this so I'm just making a note afterwards.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude I can't remember if I finished it or not.
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The [A] Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses I read most of it, then had to give the book back. It's long enough ago now that I would have to start over.
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles or was it for school?
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved (for school, I think)
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (for school)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon twice!
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (for school)
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I've read more than I thought I had!

Making diapers for fun, not profit.

2008-05-20T16:09:00.011+01:00

For the past month and a half, I have been obsessed with cloth diapers. It started with what I thought was a simple idea: I would make Nova some training pants, trim cloth diapers which could be pulled down or snapped closed. I didn't even think about buying them, really, because the ones that were available ran about $15/pair, which seemed like too much. Besides, I like researching random obscure information.

And so it came to pass that I fell through the rabbit hole into the strange and puzzling world of cloth diaper makers, as found on Mothering.com and in the Diaper Sewing Divas group. Meanwhile, a woman I know here brought it to my attention that some people collect diapers, and will pay hundreds of dollars for a single diaper. The current "hot diapers" are by a group called Good Mamas. I've seen some, and frankly I don't understand what all the excitement is about. Sure, they're nice, but not that nice.

Meanwhile, I was making my own. I looked at dozens of free patterns online, and even bought a pattern. I made a few testers from cheap material I found around here, reacquainting myself with the sewing machine. I ordered enough fabric to make about two dozen, I thought. As it turns out, I could probably make almost three dozen from the fabric I've bought, twice what I've made so far. Here are some of the results:

Each of the diapers has three snap settings, which you can see on the two in front. This is supposed to mean that they'll fit Nova for the next year or so. These are designed specifically for our situation: no tumble dryer, and practicing EC. I didn't go for a whole lot of absorbency, because I intend to change her as soon as possible after she's wet, rather than going hours between changes. The other big issue was drying, and I'm happy to say that they fit the bill. They dry twice as fast as our old prefolds, and the bamboo/cotton "fleece" inner (a much thinner fabric than I'd expected) stays soft despite line drying.

These are pocket diapers, so most of the absorbent material comes out for drying. At the moment I'm mostly using our smaller prefolds and some birdseye flat diapers, cut in half. Those dry in a flash. They get stuffed through an opening on the front seam.

The diapers work quite well during the day, for excursions, but tend to leak at night. I don't know if that's because Nova is lying down or because there's simply more fluid to deal with. I think it has more to do with position, though, because the fleece ones seem to work better in that situation. They haven't been pooped in yet, either, so I don't know how well they'll work with that.

The picture above shows the diaper in action. I need to take some better photos.

Several people, seeing these diapers, have suggested that I make them to sell. I don't think I will, at least not in any serious way. I used to make pottery, so I feel that I've been there, done that when it comes to crafting as a business. I know how much needs to be invested, a hundred dollars here, another hundred there, not to mention a few hundred hours before you regain your investment, if you're lucky. I don't know how all the women making diapers for fun and profit justify their work, but for me, it could never be more than a hobby.

Still, I love the design development aspect of it, and I still have some extra fabric, so if you have a diaper design challenge, call me!

Nova leaps forward

2008-05-10T19:56:00.001+01:00

This week, Nova sat up on her own, rolled back to front, and started babbling.

We went out to dinner last night and she tore the restaurant apart.

I haven't been writing much, but I might start again soon.

Photos of our Vineyard wedding

2008-04-26T21:49:00.005+01:00

The truly impressive thing about this wedding, if I do say so myself, is that the party came together on 48 hours' notice -- including ordering a gigantic cake.

We had planned to get married here in December or January, but Nova's late arrival, followed by the usual busyness of Christmas, then Mike's getting stuck in Ireland, fouled up that plan. Next, we had a date in late March all lined up in Ireland, but the lawyer had given us bad advice regarding the byzantine workings of Ireland's Health Board, which governs civil marriages over there. They told us that we didn't have the papers in order for a late March wedding, and gave us a date of May 1st. We were all set for that when the news came in that we had to be back here to deal with a legal issue. This sudden trip derailed that plan, so we were re-scheduled for June 6th with the bureaucrats at Shantalla.

The issue which had called me back was finally resolved on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning, which freed me up to plan a wedding. For Friday! It's been a pretty chaotic couple of weeks, but this was a very happy way to wrap up our visit to America. We're heading back to Ireland in a couple of days, ready for all the bureaucracies of immigration etc.

We still plan on having another party, over in Ireland, but this one was great. Our friends, relatives and neighbors set us up with a great potluck dinner, and the short notice meant that there was a lot less pressure in some ways. I'm sort of sad that my further-flung friends and relatives, especially my grandmother Nancy, weren't able to be there, but I'm also glad that we're married at last.

a whirlwind engagement

2008-04-25T13:12:00.002+01:00

We're getting married today!

All the way to America

2008-04-19T14:32:00.003+01:00

We all made it through immigration, so now I'm back "home." It's strange being here where everything is so familiar

Regarding my previous post, I realized that I am still carrying way more than I need. We didn't use the spare outfit but I still think it was a good thing to have. I didn't use the blanket at all -- for the third time in a row. Airplane blankets work fine, and you don't have to jam them back into the bag at the end of the flight. I didn't take a towel after all, but I did bring a washcloth and a shawl which was good to put on the changing tables. Halfway through the flight, I forgot to take the shawl to the toilet with us, so I used the Ergo carrier. That was much handier.

For the next flight, we'll pack even less.

Transatlantic Baby

2008-04-14T18:54:00.003+01:00

Nova is about to embark on her fourth transatlantic flight since she got out of the womb. I wish we didn't have to go back and forth so much, but that's just how it's turned out.

The first flight was on New Year's Eve, when she was just over a month old. She surprised me by sleeping almost the whole way from Newark airport to her grandmother's house in Galway. On the next two flights, I traveled alone with her, and honestly it wasn't so bad. The flight attendants on Continental pretty much ignored us, and offered me no extra help. Aer Lingus was a different story, with the flight attendants all offering to hold her and walk up and down the aisles, or sit with her if I needed to go to the toilet.

Each time, I've brought a little less with us. This time Nova's equipment will consist of a stack of disposable diapers, a small towel, a blanket, a change of clothes, some cotton wool, a teething ring, baby tylenol and bum ointment just in case, maybe a toy if there's room. It all weighs about as much as my laptop and all the miscellaneous paperwork I'm carrying along. A car seat might be handy, and I understand why people would bring one, but it's just so cumbersome. Travel also must be much harder for people who bottle feed.

The main thing I've eliminated since the last flight is our changing kit, which I at first thought was great. Now I've realized that we just don't need it, the towel or shawl will do for a surface, and serves a half-dozen other functions.

Soon the pile of stuff will grow again as Nova needs more toys, but it's OK. I really should get her a frequent flyer number.

Diapers versus Screenplay, and more writing plans down the toilet

2008-04-09T10:45:00.003+01:00

Writing with a baby is not impossible, but I've had an awfully hard time doing it. It doesn't help that every time I turn around we need to make another trip across the Atlantic. I don't want to get into the reasons here, just now, but next week we'll be flying back for another few weeks in the US. Of course my parents will be happy to see Nova, and I'll be glad to see what friends I can, but I'm unhappy about hurrying off just when we were starting to get settled in.

I had a script-writing project planned for the month of April, which got off to a flying start on the 1st and 2nd, then fell by the wayside. I don't think I'll be able to do it now, my brain is just too scattered.

Meanwhile I've picked up another baby-related project. We're working at the limits of our current nappy supply, so I've decided to make some diaper/training pants. I have since discovered a vast on-line community of diaper-makers. I had no idea how complex diapers could get! I read about all kinds of materials, bamboo, cotton, wool, microfiber, polyester, spun and knit and woven into drill, terry, velour, fleece, and more. Then there's the form of the diaper itself, pull-up, snap-sides, velcro/aplix/touchtape, even tie-on, an all-in-one, two-in-one, with pocket, snap-in, or lie-in inserts, in every configuration and combination imaginable.

Working out the spatial and technical questions of diapering is drawing me away from the screenplay, and it doesn't take nearly as much concentration. I'm looking forward to going home and being able to use my fancy new Singer sewing machine on all the fancy fabrics I've ordered. My current plan is to use Malden Mills fleece and breathable PUL for the outers (some of each, not both on the same diaper), bamboo fleece for the inner layer, and a pocket stuffed with flat cotton diapers.

Now I just have to actually make the things!

Elimination Communication

2008-03-27T10:59:00.005Z

When I was in college, I spent a semester in Nepal. I lived with a family in a small farming village on the edge of the city of Kathmandu. A lot of things were different there -- among them a lack of indoor plumbing and, outside of the city, a general absence of diapers. Years later, when I taught English in China, I again noticed the lack of diapers. Babies wore split-crotch pants and their little bums hung out into the cold. They seemed quite comfortable that way, more comfortable than a kid in a dirty diaper back home.

I knew that I didn't like diapers as a way of dealing with waste. After all, would you want to sit in your pee or poo a large part of the day? Of course not. Although it's not culturally acceptable to have kids running around here with naked bottoms here in the postmodern west, there is a small fringe movement aimed at keeping babies' bottoms clean by helping them use the toilet, potty, or sink instead of their pants, at least some of the time. Elimination Communication (EC, for short) is supposed to be good for the environment, and good for babies.

Sadly, it does not decrease the need for diapers, at least not yet. I go through about 18 cloth pre-fold diapers a day, along with an occasional disposable, even though I'm now catching several pees and poos every day, too. I read that the average baby uses 8-12 diapers/day. Are they wet most of the time? I'd guess so. The upside is that since I started trying to practice EC, Nova hasn't had even a whiff of diaper rash. At home during the day, she's usually bare-bottomed or wearing a pre-fold with no cover, which is usually dry.

For now, we don't save on laundry, but I hope that we will in the long run. We do produce less solid waste, though, with many fewer diapers going into the landfill, and I'm convinced that EC combined with cloth diapering is cleaner for the baby (that's Nova) and better for the environment than the more popular alternative of disposable diapers.

Galway Harbor Report #1

2008-03-13T12:12:00.003Z

It's a quiet day under a grey sky. The seascape is dominated by rain and hail, lightened with occasional sunshine through the clouds. At the moment there are no large ships in port, and the lock is closed. Last night someone was welding on one of the smaller boats berthed along the near edge of the harbor. The pilot boat is parked by the lock. Stillness.

Ireland: One Month and counting

2008-03-11T11:02:00.002Z

We have officially been in our new place for a week and a half. I am getting used to the view, and also getting used to spending most mornings around the house waiting for the plumber/electrician/tiler/landlord/NTL installer. The list of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo which we have to deal with never seems to get any shorter, no matter how many items I cross off the list. Piles of boxes still clutter the apartment.

Still, some semblance of routine is creeping in. Nova and I spend most mornings here, doing laundry and having breakfast, then wander around town socializing and maybe doing a few errands until Mike comes home a little after five. Sometimes I manage to write a little. I've been to aikido a couple of times in the evening. I'm getting used to line-drying the cloth diapers. I have a pretty good idea of where to find 80% of the groceries I want. I am spending much less time with Mike's mum, which is good for my sense of independence.

I think that this week I will write more, in between all the visits from tradesmen and the trips to government offices.

The chaos before the calm?

2008-03-07T09:57:00.000Z

This week has been a total loss in terms of writing. Not only were we moving, but we didn't have an internet connection until yesterday afternoon, and we've been dealing with the byzantine Irish bureaucracy so we can get married. There has also been a stream of tradesmen coming and going from the apartment, fixing the hot water and the showers, the heaters and fans, etc. I think I've spent half the week waiting to let them in and texting the landlord about what has or hasn't been done.

And then, there is the laundry. It's not so bad, just a load or two every morning, but I think I had become accustomed to the help of Nova's grandmothers in that area, not to mention the convenience of having a dryer. Here, we have lots of light and air and I've bought an enormous clothes drying rack which would hold probably three days worth of diapers at a stretch, but because there's always something else to wash and they do get stinky lying around, I've been washing nappies every second day.

Nova is in good form, but she went through a needy couple of days early in the week, days when she screamed in protest every time she was put down. I'm sure she senses the change, and she doesn't like it much when I have a lot of other things to do. She was grumpy when I was packing up to leave the US, too. That said, Nova's grumpiness would probably pass for a good day with most babies. She's very cheerful on the whole.

Another great thing about being here is that I can now cook. We're not totally set up yet, but on Wednesday night I made dinner for our new household for the first time. I cooked rice with black beans in the dutch oven we bought last weekend, and Donal fried the sausages. There were also some carrots involved -- they were meant to go in with the rice and beans, but I wound up just steaming them on top.

I'm hoping for a bit more calm and productivity next week, and to be able to report on the scene from our window.

Rental Accommodation

2008-02-29T11:12:00.000Z

Today is our official moving day, because supposedly it's lucky to move on a Friday. The rain is blowing all around and I don't feel like going in to clean the new place, but it has to be done. It's not filthy, but it's not what I'd call clean, either. We're going to go to the shop in a few minutes, where I will attempt to find the Irish equivalents of Murphy's Oil Soap, Windex, and a few other things.

The last time I looked for a place to live was in late September, 2006, when I was planning my move to Cambridge. At the time, I scoured craigslist for a room in a shared apartment. I found a place near Central Square, sharing with two other women, all of us in our 30s. We brought in our own furniture, kitchen utensils, etc. The place was bare, clean, and freshly painted when we arrived.

This apartment in Galway is a little different. It has a similarly good location, a better view, two bathrooms instead of one, and substantially less square footage. In it, we have a variety of low- to mid-quality furniture, lots of kitchen stuff, and whatever the previous tenants left behind. The leavings include a bottle of cheap pink champagne, some cassette tapes, and a UV nail drying device, among other things. We'll have to fill a garbage bag or two, I think. The landlord claims to have repainted one of the bedrooms last week, but I can't tell which one.

One of the general differences I've noticed is that in apartments here, the bedroom doors lock. It would never have occurred to me to lock the bedroom door in the other places I've lived, but here it seems to be routine. I suppose it comes partly from the practice of accommodation agencies renting accommodation out one room at a time, instead of having people band together to rent whole houses or apartments as a group, screening each other for trustworthiness, tolerability, vegetarianism, etc. We're moving in with friends, so I don't expect to use the bedroom door lock very often, but it's strange having it there.

The other thing is that we're signing a year's lease. I think this is the first time any of my new housemates have signed a lease, but I've usually done it when moving into a place. Mike tells me that rental accommodation here is seen as very temporary, only for students, and that anyone with a family is virtually required to get themselves a mortgage as soon as possible. I think it would be nice to own a place, but I'm not in any great hurry about it. Most people I know back home seem to buy within a couple of years of having children, but it can be either before or after the fact and no one's much bothered about it.

All right. Off we go to explore the cleaning products section of Tesco.

Photos

2008-02-25T17:11:00.001Z

Here's a picture of me and Nova, a few weeks ago,

Mike, Nova's father.

and one of Nova on her own, trying to figure out her toys.

I wasn't able to post photos earlier, for some reason, but things seem to be working now.

Ten Signs A Book Might Be Written By Me

2008-02-25T16:50:00.000Z

Helen has tagged me for a meme. This is the first time I've done one of these, so I might borrow some thoughts.

1. It is between 70,000 and 100,000 words long. I do not write doorstoppers.

2. The main character is in her (or his) early adulthood.

3. The setting is a fantasy world which is often new to the main character, as well as to readers.

4. I will describe the food. So far the cuisine of my fantasy worlds is heavy on filled breads.

5. Early in the story, the main character meets a group of people who are also new to town.

6. There is usually more than one viewpoint character.

7. The story usually features a long journey.

8. Romances are unconventional and not always successful.

9. No one in the story has a regular job in the modern sense, and many of the characters are unconventional in their careers even for their world.

10. The main character has a bit of a self-esteem problem, and certainly doesn't start off thinking that he/she can change the world.

Wow, I didn't think I'd be able to come up with ten things. It's a bit difficult to think of this in general terms because I've been working almost entirely on one series, with a single set of characters, for the past six years, but I have written a few other things which do have some things in common with my big fantasy series.

And now, I'll steal a few more minutes of Nova's nap to look at my first few chapters yet again.

Week two (sort of)

2008-02-25T16:12:00.001Z

It's hard to believe I've only been here two weeks. I'm so preoccupied with the business of getting set up and oriented to Galway that I hardly have time to think of home. The big news this week is that we've signed a lease on an apartment at the docks in Galway, with a fantabulous view of the harbor and Galway Bay.

I spent a day or so researching local childcare options. It seems that the going rate for childminders or babysitters is about 10 euro an hour, and creches (daycare centers, to us Americans) run about 5 euro an hour, meaning that going back to regular paid employment would cost me about as much as I'd be likely to earn, assuming I could even find care. So it looks like I'm going to be taking care of Nova full time for most of her first year of life. I'm happy with that, but it's awfully strange not to be out there trying to earn money. I don't like the loss of independence, but on the up side I should be able to spend at least some time on my writing.

Meanwhile, Nova has learned to roll over front to back and seems to be enjoying life most of the time. She's plumping out, too, getting rolls of fat on her thighs and a broader face. She eats often, every two or three hours in the day, practically every hour in the evenings, and sometimes once or twice in the middle of the night. I do enjoy talking -- vocalizing, anyway -- with her, but lately I've noticed my language skills descending into babytalk, and I think I need a little more intellectual stimulation.

Speaking of language, what is it about motherhood that makes women refer to themselves in the third person. I find myself saying cracked up things like, "Mommy will be right there!" and I hear Nova's Irish grandmother referring to herself as "Granny" all the time. Why can't we talk sensibly around babies?

Ireland, Week One

2008-02-18T11:18:00.001Z

The sun is shining, crocuses and snowdrops are in bloom, and even the daffodils are well on their way. It seems that spring starts in February, here, unlike on Martha's Vineyard where it won't get rolling until sometime in May. This time last week I was back there in the cold, frantically stuffing half-dried cloth diapers into already over-stuffed suitcases. Nova, who is getting rapidly on towards the 3-month mark, was relatively unperturbed by the whole process. We brought along a few small things but had to leave behind anything remotely like furniture.

I suppose I should introduce myself, for those of you who don't know me already. I set up this blog a bit over a year ago, hoping to write about writing. The title comes from a quote from David Eddings who said something about a writer's apprenticeship being their first million words. I'm fairly sure I'm almost there.

This time last year I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making a daily walk up Pleasant Street to the 1369 where I sat with my MacBook, Moleskine and a medium chai, working on my never-ending, as-yet-unpublishable fantasy series. Round about mid-February I went to Boskone and came home with a young Irishman. I got pregnant. As I was 36 years old and had been wanting to have a baby for a while, this was hardly a disaster, but it was a disruption.

I stayed in Cambridge for a while, writing and wandering around and generally failing to make a living as a real estate agent. At the end of the summer, I moved back to my parents' place for a little while, because I was broke and my roommates weren't so keen on having a baby knocking around the place. In the fall, my boyfriend came over from Ireland, and we sat around waiting for Nova to make her appearance. We waited. Her due date came and went. Another week passed, and another. Finally I went in to the hospital for an induction which took four days, on and off.

There's Nova now, waking up. She was born on November 29th, three weeks after her supposed due date. The people at the hospital were a little alarmed by her lateness, but apart from wrinkly hands and feet and an excess of phlegm, she was fine. We took her home two days later, and she quickly recovered from her newborn sleepiness and charged on ahead. At three weeks, we took her to Boston to get a passport. At four and a half weeks, she was on the plane to Ireland for a 3-week visit.

The visit was all well and good until US immigration got a look at Mike, my boyfriend/fiance, and his three visits to the US in the past 12 months. They said that he wouldn't be able to come back as a visitor, but only as an immigrant. Never mind that he didn't want to live in the US permanently. We could have challenged the decision, but that would have taken months, and I was getting sick of the back and forth. That's how Nova and I have come to Galway now, rather than later in the year as I had planned.

For now, we're staying with Mike's mum. I think we've found an apartment, which we'll be moving into in a few weeks' time. I'm looking for a cafe to write in, a place where I can sit Nova in a pram or something and be as pretentious as I like on my computer, but I don't think I'll be able to top the chai from the 1369.