Happy birthday, Wanja!  I am so happy that TJ chose you to be the mother of my grandchildren!

30 wonderful years!

It’s been a long time since you’ve been that little guy.  I love you very much and I admire the young man you’ve become.  Happy birthday!

English Style Birthday Pudding
based on a recipe Erin at Pretty In Primal

We got this recipe and then adapted it a bit to suit our needs. We got a texture more similar to a sweet English Pudding than a cake. It’s delicious, though not the texture we were expecting. (The original recipe calls for coconut flour, which Jack doesn’t care for. We used all almond meal and that may well be the difference.)

Preheat oven to 350º
4 eggs
3/4 cup coconut milk (canned) or cream
1/2 vanilla bean
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup blanched almond flour
1/4 teaspoon unrefined sea salt
Scant 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs and the coconut milk
2.  In a spice grinder, whisk the vanilla bean and the sugar.
2. In a smaller bowl, combine the vanilla sugar, almond flour, salt and baking soda.
3. Mix dry ingredients into wet with a whisk.
4. Grease an 8×8 inch baking dish and pour in batter.

Bake for 30 minutes
Cool for 1 hour

Rod’s oldest grandsons are 8 months old now.  Aren’t they gorgeous?  I think Autuma, to the left, looks a lot like his grandfather.

The cleaning and organizing orgy continues.

I quit with one box of non-craft stuff left to sort and moved on to the fun stuff. A few days ago Jack helped me to sort the beads and bobbles, and then I started looking at photos and trying to figure out categories for sorting them. Some are easy. Some I need copies of so I can put them in several “categories” (where several grandchildren are in the same photos) and some…hmmm.

But it’s been fun! I found some very old photos I didn’t remember I had! Now I know that I have enough photos top keep me scrapbooking for another 80 years.

I guess I was “in training” for next week’s Screen Free week. I went four days without opening my computer. Oddly, I didn’t miss it … and the house was a lot tidier with no more apparent effort.  I guess I don’t really realize how much energy I spend on on the computer until I go without it voluntarily for a while.

This last week has convinced me that if my loved ones lived closer, I could live without the computer pretty easily.  But what finally got me to log in (other than a morning with nowhere I needed to rush off to)  was missing the kids.  It’s been pretty obvious here on my blog that my attention is wandering.  Part of it is that I find that there is little happening that really inspires blogging.  Sorting and tidying is satisfying in its way, but beyond the simple fact that I’m doing it and that it’s taking *forever*, I’m not sure what I could say about it.

The same would go for cooking and cleaning.  It happens, and I’ve posted about it, but really, what more is there to say?  We don’t try new recipes every day — and the only people I know for sure read here regularly are a vegetarian and a person who doesn’t think my foods look like food, so most of my recipes would be of very little interest.

Reading this over, I wonder if I’m thinking about quitting blogging.  I’m not sure yet.  Probably not.  I still enjoy writing here when I have something to say.  But maybe I’ll take the advice of a wise friend and just write when I actually have something to say.  Or not.

I wish you a wonderful celebration of the kind of birthday you most prefer!
And just as important, I wish you many contented returns of the day.

I love you!

Happy birthday, Mom!

I hope you have a marvelous birthday, and many, many happy returns.

I love you!

Valerie, and everyone else who needs a score card, clicking on this should take you through to an album with everyone labeled with their name and connection.

From The Delaney-Smith family

Please let me know if it fails to work.

You’re handsome and clever

The coolest guy ever

There’s no one as splendid as you!

And now you’re two!

Well, Ostara was Tuesday and Jack has been hunting for eggs since then.

He had two dozen +1 plastic eggs with a bit of candy in them, and 9 “stone” eggs, each with a small wrapped gift as the reward. So far he has found all but one candy filled egg and all but two stone eggs. He’s pretty annoyed with me for not being able to give him hints, but I hid those eggs before my first cup of coffee and he hunted them while I was at work. I only know the location of one of them, so I can’t really give him hints.

I may relent on Tuesday and let him open another gift even if he hasn’t found an egg. Those little gifts won’t be interesting forever so it’s probably not a great idea to make him wait as much as 6 or 8 months to open them only after he finds the eggs. What would you do, assuming cleaning the house so thoroughly you found them wasn’t an option you had time for right now?

Speaking of Ostara, the warm weather the last couple of weeks has done wonders for our baby greens. There is kale out in the back garden and the lettuce by the door is looking tiny and oh so perfect! It’s turned cold again, which is good since both kale and lettuce prefer cool spring weather. This means they will grow abundantly rather than going to seed immediately — which is what happened when I waited so late top plant last year. I can’t wait for our fiorst homegrown salad of the year!

Starting last week, I have been participating in the Spring Cleaning Get Organized Challenge in a wan hope of getting my craft space organized.

Sadly, I haven’t done the “homework” from Monday yet because I haven’t had time.

But that pretty much underlines the reason my craft room is in such chaos: no time to spend on it. If I had had time this week, I’d have spent it on Nikko’s birthday card.

I am persevering, though, because it is my hope that once I can find time to work on it, it will stay more organized if I get things sorted in a way that makes them easy to find and easy to put away.  It’s free, so I can try again next time, too … and I’ll probably need to because it’s gotten that bad.  *sigh*

On the bright side, since a lot of my busy-ness has involved waiting somewhere, I’ve been finding more time to play with my camera.  You’ll be seeing some of the strange photos I got of things that caught my eye. It’s interesting to “be where you are” and persist in looking for photos.  I still prefer portraiture, but I think this probably helps me to see things differently.  At any rate, it is fun.

Have a great “rest of the weekend”!

We’re reading David Copperfield as our bedtime story these days. It’s a gripping read, but not terribly comfortable for someone who was bullied a lot as a child. Maybe for anyone; Jack also seems to find it emotionally draining sometimes.

Our lovely niece, Jasmine, with her daughter Sienna Lee and our grandsons, Joel and Autuma.

But the experience got me thinking.

I wonder whether we’re doing our young people a disservice by not focusing on literature so much anymore these days and when we do introduce literature, trying too hard to make sure it’s”relevant”.

As we have been reading, I keep pondering all the young people killing themselves or destroying their own lives in other ways as a response to hopelessness and bullying.

Now I would never argue that bullying is OK, and that something must be done to dissuade bullies from their careers, but the fact is that bullies exist and probably always will.  There are people who thrive on the sense of power bullying gives them and they are less likely to stop than they are to get better at being more covert.

Maybe an auxiliary approach would be to help kids to understand that there is life after bullying (and other disasters, for that matter).  The characters in novels helped me a lot when I was young and feeling picked on.  “Hearing” the thoughts of characters as they dealt with the torment and “watching” them come to terms with it and find ways to get past it helped me to belive that I would be OK, too.  The portrayal of the bullies also put things into perspective.  The bullies were not the better people in literature, they were actually usually even more insecure than I was.

When it comes down to it, David Copperfield may not look relevant in terms of a nine year old girl in the 21st century, but he is a plucky survivor. He is deeply hurt by the torments he undergoes, but he never really believe that it won’t get better.  That is relevant to a young person with no model for being strong in the face of adversity. And David is not alone; most literature can model how to cope and thrive in spite of adversity.  Maybe that’s something that’s missing from the educations of many of our young people.

I’ve actually been home all day getting things done, but Jack has been in Lansing at his very first chess championship. Rod has been a darling about keeping my posted.

It was a tough day for Jack , because he ended up placed pretty far ahead of where he should have been. (It was our first time, so we had no idea where he should be.)

He was up against the best 10 year old players in the state. He’s a battler and made them earn their wins, though, and took it all in stride . He even allowed one opponent (who as rated 561) to draw a game that Jack thinks he could have won. I thought that was a very confident and generous move.

In the end, Jack won his final game against a boy who was rated 612. For an unrated player, that’s probably not too bad. It actually suggests that he might be quite comfortable in that ranking next year.

I am hoping that Jack found out his rating today at the award ceremony.  The guys should be home at about 10pm to have lamb stew and then we’ll all crash — 5am didn’t seem too early, but it sure feels like it was a long time ago now.  But not till I’ve told Mr. Jack how proud I am of him.

Jack is really fascinated by storms. That being the case, I would have expected him to enjoy yesterday’s adventures more than he did. He tells me “I’ve seen one funnel cloud in my life, last year, and that was enough for a lifetime.”

The guys were at Vera’s place, at a little impromptu “going away party” for Connor, who will be visiting his grandpa and Uncle for a few months. Rod was watching the funnel cloud form, drift, and re-form over and over, but Jack was in the basement with his friends, who were at various amperages of panic about the weather warning siren.

Rod’s funnel cloud eventually formed completely and wandered off to touch down a mile or so away. The wind changed in an unsettling way, sending Rod to the basement for a while — then it was all clear and the guys headed out to pick me up from work at about 6:45. So much for karate class, but as I understand it, a lot of people missed it because of the weather.

The long and the short of it, the guys were in the neighborhood of last night’s storms, but they’re fine. Dozens (maybe more than 100?) of homes were destroyed in a nearby community, but no one was hurt or killed. The flooding that followed has been causing more trouble in another nearby community, but not, at least, in our immediate neighborhood.

Jack got home to find his package of magazines about storms had arrived in the mail. An amusing coincidence.

In other news, I have managed to continue my walking routine for a couple of weeks now — most of a mile most of five days per week.  Where getting out to walk in circles during the work day had become hard to fit into my days — and harder to manage to care about — a mile or a mile and a half hike to meet Rod and Jack at a specific location for my after work pickup seems to be just the thing. Even better, I have found a route that takes me past wetlands that could almost make me forget that I’m in a commercial area.  The ducks seem completely unaware of it.   On more ambitious days, I am trying to shoot for two miles.  I made 1.7 miles one day.  So far I haven’t tried again.  (It’s a little too far to carry all my usual stuff — at least until I get stronger.)

I’ve been pondering how to approach literary analysis with Jack. I started with no idea how to approach it, because the one time I was *supposed* to learn about it formally, 45 years ago, the teacher had a nervous breakdown and didn’t teach anything for months on end. I read the book, and I internalized enough of it get along, but not enough to discuss it…or teach it.

In my burrowing through the Internet and raiding my friends brains, I have come up with some ideas – Teaching the Classics was suggested.  It sounds good, but it’s aimed at teachers rather than the kids, as is Deconstructing Penguins, which also sounds good, but isn’t quite what I was hoping to find.   Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide With Exercises seems closer, but rather more in depth than I was hoping to go for now.  Maybe I’ll just start by mentioning the topics on this page to Rod as we read.  That sort of indirect teaching seems to work best of all for Jack.  But if you have any resources that might work please do let me know.

250 spams in less than a week.  Does that mean my blog is famous? or that someone think’s that it’s been abandoned?

Well that’s odd.

Jack came across my Joyce Vedral book (the old one, bikini’s and leg warmers, woo hoo!) last night and cajoled me into going through the Monday routine with him. I was startled. On one hand, I can’t get into the positions she does to do the exercises properly. I am years away from as strong and limber as she assumes her readers to be. But I did my own adaptions of them, and managed to do them for the full number of reps! And while my muscles complained, they weren’t all that sore today.

Pork "dinner biscuits" with roasted vegetables.

Last time I tried these workouts, they were hell.  The arthritis made them hurt a lot more, and the muscle weakness from accommodating the arthritis for years made the reps impossible.  Next day, it was all I could do to get through the morning until I loosened up again.

This morning, I actually had the energy to do our longevity exercises — which we had pretty much forsaken in favour of sleep when we were had that cold that wouldn’t let go. I think the mile walk after work is gradually doing me a lot of good — and I feel ready to add another mile on the days when we have the time.  That, and I should introduce my pint sized personal fitness coach to the primal fitness stuff.

I’ve been making it more of a priority to get some crafting done. It’s not as much fun as sitting down for several hours to make a perfect page, but I can fit a couple of minutes in here and there to play with an idea or dig out a scrap of paper or a little decoration to add to the page and push the bits around the page until it looks like I want it to — then I use a couple of minutes to stick it all down and start on the next page. It works.

OK, the kitchen is clean, the laundry is done, and my lunch is ready.  It’s time I hit the shower.  Have a great day!

Amusingly enough, winter seems to have vacationed elsewhere most of the winter months — but now that the sun is bright and the days are growing longer, it’s decided to spend some time here! We finally have cold snowy weather! I have to say that while I missed winter from November to February, I am finding it easier to deal with in the bright sunny days of March. But I want it gone by May!

Poor old Jack. He’s not feeling well, though he doesn’t seem quite sick.

He decided that he “wasn’t up to” karate on Saturday, though he seemed fine.  If he weren’t such a devoted karate-ka, we might have insisted, but since he’s usually out of bed with a bound on Saturday morning, we let him stay home.  On Sunday, again he seemed fine, but he got up late, ate breakfast, and then went back to sleep.  I;m still not sure whether he’s on the way to a big growth spurt or whether he’s coming down with something.  As a precaution, we plan to keep him home from art class today unless he’s really anxious to go (suggesting that he’s not feeling sick.  Art class was my idea and he enjoys it primarily because Connor is in his class.)  I’m not sure whether to worry, since he’s usually so energetic, but he doesn’t seem sick.

It’s funny.  At the same time that my urge to blog came back in full strength, so did my urge to make pictures.  I’m not sure what the lull was about, but whatever it was, it seems to have been broader than I knew.  Resting, perhaps. �  It came on after a really, really busy autumn.

Blogging and photography are not the only places I feel a certain “movement”.  I am waking up and taking a new interest in my work.  I think that’s partly because I am getting  exciting new challenges and starting to see a way “forward” so  I’m not feeling as stuck as I was a couple of years ago.  Just as exciting, I am working with my dear friends, Dame and Celeste, on creating a new professional “image” for myself.  Nothing major — just mainly bringing my external image up to date with my own development — and my clothes into my new size — which, thankfully, seems to have stopped changing every few weeks for a while.  That’s kind of fun.

Oh, the photo is “Sunday morning” — bacon and eggs with biscuits and jam.  The biscuits are, of course, grain free; a variant on Rod’s dinner rolls, made taller in muffin tins so that they can be split.

I have been working  a bit more exercise into my life.  On the days when I can, I am meeting Rod and Jack about a mile from my office for pick-up.  I’m really enjoying getting out and stretching my legs and am beginning to dream of a several day walk I took in Sweden a couple of decades ago.  I’d like to do that again.  I have a long way to work up to that, but perhaps one day in the next few years I can tour Skåne on foot again.  Maybe even with my children and grandchildren!   If I wait long enough for Rod’s feet and ankles to heal, he wants to come along.  That would be a blast!

Oh, and I have been looking in to Primal Fitness as a way to get there.  It looks very doable, even starting from where I am.  (Where I am is a lot of muscle weakness from so many years of arthritic pain.)  Even if it doesn’t deliver as much as it promises, it will still leave me strong enough to consider something more challenging, but I have to say that it does make sense and I am not convinced that it won’t deliver – - just prepared.

Strange.  I couldn’t have imagined such goals when I was in my thirties, and yet I have always wanted to be the kind of old lady who leaves youngsters in the dust on walks and accomplishes much that younger folk can’t.  I never really believed I could be stronger and more fit at 60, 70, and 80 than I was at 30, but it seems like it could happen.  Pretty exciting!

I have been hearing about books about introverts for a couple of years now.  As an introvert’s introvert, I have been eager to read them, but never did get around to it.

Recently, I came across a link to a TED talk by the author of one of those books, Susan Cain.

There was a lot of pleasure in hearing someone else share experiences similar to mine.  It can be tough to be an introvert in a  world dominated by extroverts who figure something is wrong with a person who craves silence and solitude, just as (I’m sure) it would be tough to be an extrovert in an introverted world.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen the TED talk, I do recommend it, whether you are an introvert or an extrovert.

The photo was taken by our friend Stacey, at a Winter Wonders class at Leslie Science Center.  That’s Jack and Connor, listening intently.

Oh, I forgot to mention that Jack made his next rank in karate — that’s five belts now!  (Purple, if you’re keeping track.)  Better still, he wasn’t aware that he was ready to rank up yet.  He’s been practicing for the joy of it rather than working toward his next belt, which seems to have been just right because he was so pleased to be a purple belt now.  I think the acknowledgement of his progress meant more to him because he wasn’t expecting it.

On the chess front, Jack is working with John Brauker as his chess coach twice a month.  He has gotten quite a bit out of it already — he had one session with John and then went to a chess tournament at Thurston school a week later and came in third in his division.  That had never happened before and he’s gotten extremely keen to learn all he can.  I think that John’s techniques really resonate with Jack.

It’s funny.  We never introduced Jack to either karate or chess until he asked to learn about them, but those look likely to be life-long passions at this point.  Fortunately, reading also look like being a lifelong passion.  Now that I can grok. �

Oh, Rod has a fantastic grain free, low sugar ginger snap recipe.  I’ll have to find out where he got that and share it,  It’s really, really yummy!

The guys and I are a few days from done with Fellowship of the Ring, and we’ll watch the movie we’ve borrowed from the library. Ironically, for the girl who walked around all day one  day in 1977 clutching the book and grinning (the day the The Silmarillion came out), I have never seen the Lord of the Rings movies.  I am really looking forward to it — and equally so to seeing the The Hobbit when it comes out this winter.  (We read the Hobbit several years ago — but there was a long break while we waited for Jack to be old and mature enough to understand the Cycle of the Ring.  It’s really heavy, with betrayal, real evil, and many, many adult themes.  Now he’s ready and we’re enjoying it — probably me most of all, in spite of battling with the pronunciation of many place names.  (Are they based on Welsh?)

Jack is back to writing again.  I’m relieved.  This time, I keep my nose out of it.

Oh, the 365 project wasn’t entirely a success.  Oh well.  Now I am pondering a 52 Project … once a week.  I’ll most likely still miss sometimes.  Life gets insane.  But it seems more doable once a week.

Evidently I am not gifted!

I am really bad at worrying – - as with depression, I haven’t the patience for it.

I’m glad, aren’t you?

About that perpetual soup – we tried extending the time we kept the soup going and we decided that a week is about it. After that, it gets an off “over cooked” taste that new vegetables don’t hide very well.

We are still going with it, and I can see this becoming the way we keep food in the house most winters. It’s easy and cheaper and healthier than the “snackish” foods we used to keep around. Rod turns the soup into chili on Friday night and we finish it up — adding the fresh chili burger at the table just in case we can’t finish it all.
We’re pondering adding “perpetual salad” to that. Well, not “perpetual” in the same sense, but I have been eating a lot of salads lately. The brighter light makes me want my fresh crunchy greens! So I am tearing up a mess of greens and adding some olives and other things that made it yummy and keeping it in a big container in the refrigerator and then taking a handful and adding the things that won’t keep and dressing it each morning before work. So far it’s mighty handy.

Jack had an overnight Saturday and Sunday.  He had a blast and Rod and I enjoyed the quiet time together.  I have been meaning to get my craft room organized but the fact is, I simply don’t have enough storage.  There’s room — but it requires stacking things, which means it’s more time consuming to put things away, so I don’t do it until I can’t find my craft table anymore!  (Who wants to spent precious crafting time cleaning if they don’t have to?  But then the mess gets in my way and I end up spending less time crafting than I want to because it’s just such a mess in there.)

So, Rod is designing shelving to hold the boxes I am already using for storage so I can slide the boxes off the shelf an back on without juggling the ones it’s resting on.  He spent several hours of his free, childless time measuring and drawing and estimating.  I think that’s so amazingly sweet — I know he has a lecture he wants to be working on so his taking that time for me and my passions was so good of him.

This is the individual cake I made the other night. It was pretty good, but the recipe needs work. It was dry and crumbly and sweeter than it needed to be. At least for me. Note: use a large egg. A small one isn’t enough.  I’ll repost the recipe when I’ve finished playing with it and am happy with the result.  I still love the idea of a quick, individual dessert.  (The original recipe used the microwave for one minute, but I don’t like to use the nuker for much beyond heating leftover coffee.  That may have been the major difference.)

Your first year has gone SO fast!

I hope you always keep your sweet, calm temperament, your beautiful smile, and your irresistible laugh!

You were way, way too young.

This is Kody a few years ago at his wedding to our dear young friend, Tiffani.  He was a beautiful young man who left us far too soon.  Our hearts are breaking here at Chez Smiffy, but not nearly as much as at his parents home.