things are lovely here in the kitchen

postcard to you from me: there's a fine breeze in the kitchen, kiddo's napping, dishes are washed, wish you were here.

confession #1: i didn't mean to start reading the harry potter books again. i don't know what happened, i just picked up the first one on a whim, and...it's not my fault.

special mention: thanks, brooke, for the beautiful brandywine tomato (in the header photo: the pinkish one with the charming stem).

checked off the to-do list: i finally got a curtain for the upstairs bathroom, so we can take down the pillow case we tacked up a year ago (anna, michelle and lisa will remember that little eyesore from their visits).

confession #2: i let the potted oregano plant by the west kitchen window die. the thyme also looks unwell.

fish balloon on film

balloon

tonight andrew took ben to the store and they came home with a huge, sparkly green mylar fish balloon. ben was beside himself. he galloped around the living room, yanking the string and yelling about nemo (the fish was not, in fact, nemo; it was an anonymous fish with a lot of flare). too bad the lovely moment was marred by a reference to a highly commercialized, mass-market disney character. but the joy was real.

it gives a lovely light

spent the weekend basking in the company of the whocares girls. usually we flee omaha for a weekend away, but this time new babies and time limitations kept us here. several beloved members were absent this year, but we carried on as best we could.

friday night we went to an outdoor dixieland jazz show at the durham and watched the stormy weather blow in before running over to a little gallery where some friends were hosting an art show.

saturday morning we had the standard whocares breakfast: hardboiled eggs, coffee, fruit and ali's most excellent scones on brooke's porch. then we parted ways and i ran home to fix couscous for the family picnic and playtime in the dyers' back yard. photos here. the men and youngsters were invited to that bit, and it was really fun except that ben threw up and finley skinned his knee and bled dramatically.

in the evening we returned to brooke's porch for games, victuals, libations and the odd clove. then ali fetched out her guitar and we brought the evening in "with a warble and a trill." i hope brooke doesn't get hate mail from her neighbors. the repertoir included old timey hymns, a bit of elvis, johnny cash, a few carter family songs, some white stripes (in honor of caron's beloved cover of "hotel yorba"), even a wilco tune ("california stars"). alicia and i played baby rattles and cheryl played a broom on newspaper for percussion. alicia photographed it here. the gusto and quality of the singing improved as the coffee (for some of us) and the rum and coke (for others) took effect.

today i feel "the fatigue that leads to self-knowledge," as diana krall calls it. 'twas a wonderful weekend.

first fig
my candle burns at both ends;
it will not last the night;
but ah my foes, and oh my friends---
it gives a lovely light!

- edna st. vincent millay

brain vs. heart

for those who enjoy the myers-briggs test (especially you, carla), a quote from caron on the tension many of us feel between the feeling (F) and thinking (T) parts of ourselves:

"it's when the F is resisting the T, but my T knows what the F it's talking about."

ain't that the truth.

shaking the dust of this town off my shoes

goodbye omaha, my man and i are lighting out for fairer climes. we're off to kansas city for a weekend of painting the town red. or, more accurately, we're off to kansas city to nap, eat and stroll slowly in a slightly different midwestern city than our own. this'll be our first weekend away since ben was born, and will surely be the last weekend away we take for a long, long time. hope you enjoy your weekend too, wherever you may roam.

talker

ben has two pet expressions right now. he likes to sing "dem bones" and he likes to say, "push a button." the song involves bopping back and forth and repeating, "dem bones, dem bones, dem bones" ad infinitum, which he learned from a video of folk songs. he fakes a deep voice to get the effect. it's funny.

"push a button" comes from his toy trumpet, into which you must simultaneously blow and press the fingerings to get noise. he picks it up and reminds himself that he can't just blow, he has to push the button too. which he does with aplomb.

now he's awake and the post must end. have a good day.

on work, rest and inhabiting a pregnant body

every day around noon i turn off the phone, lock the door, walk away from the lunch mess, tuck ben into his bed, and take a nap. thus rejecting my one shot each day to "really" get something done while ben sleeps. all morning, i plan to throw back a diet coke with lunch and then run around and do chores during that hour. and each noon, having struggled to get ben to eat something other than cookies, having somehow trashed the kitchen, having forgotten to drink the coke, i lumber up the stairs and drop like a rock into bed. for two minutes, while falling asleep, i kick myself for being slothful. then my baby kicks me, and i think, forget it. my body is doing extraordinary feats of strength every moment of this pregnancy, and besides i'll never sleep again once baby wally (not his real name) is born. might as well be the good little napper god made me to be.

but it's hard to live slowly in a culture that values productivity, efficiency, and speed. and not just the culture, mind you, i value those things. but i just. can't. do. them. not right now. and i'm trying, not very successfully, to make peace with my limits. my new strategy is to think of slowness as a meditation. sort of a brother-lawrence approach. practicing the presence while peeling the potatoes, literal and metaphorical, in my life. i used to try and cultivate restfulness while being very busy (in my past life of teaching) and it seems harder now to practice restfulness while being very still. weird.

being pregnant is being a shared space. maybe if i think of my slow/stillness as an act of hospitality to my child, that will silence the inner voice yelling at me to get something done. in the meantime, it's 12:19 pm and i'm late for my nap.

after meat, the vegetables

after three days of grilled meat, we declared today vegetarian sunday. on friday andrew made a special trip to omaha's bratwurst mecca, stoysich house of sausage, and made ample provision for our weekend-long meat bender. he even got sauer kraut and real horseradish. the man is a purist. by today it was time for lighter fare, so we bought a variety of tomatoes (ours aren't ready yet), a few nectarines, sweet corn, fresh mozarella and a baguette. dressed with olive oil, a bit of vinegar, basil, and salt and pepper, supper was heaven. i think my meal planning for the week is as follows: sunday supper menu, repeat, repeat, repeat.

buffalo bill, gabriel byrne, neko case

lately my brain resists all my best efforts to drag ideas together. makes it hard to write. anyway, cohesion be damned, here's a smattering of the week's stuff.

- the weather has been beautiful. let me say that again: the weather has been beautiful. not hot, not humid, not nebraska in june. so we've been eating outside, weeding the weeds, playing t-ball with ben's new set, blowing bubbles, and watching construction projects go on in two neighbor's yards. indoor chores have suffered.

- on the weeks when we don't meet to discuss books, my reading group watches documentaries. yes, you can laugh, we love documentaries, especially "american experience." this time we watched a film on buffalo bill (closest we could get to what we really wanted, a film on annie oakley). it was a fascinating study of how our collective concept of the "wild west" was constructed and passed around in the nineteenth century. and those nineteenth century showmen had some serious pantene hair. i'd kill for shiny, bouncy locks like bill. maybe i should give up hygene altogether and see what happens.

- i'm newly and fiercely hooked on the hbo series in treatment with gabriel byrne. as with the hbo shows we've watched in the past (the sopranos, deadwood), this one is a brilliantly produced, disturbing tour through the complicated psychologies of it's characters. byrne plays a psychologist, and each episode is a therapy session with one of four patients, followed by an episode in which he goes to therapy himself. the concept is simple and the cast is small, so it's like a poem composed within a strict form. the restriction on scope forces a concentrated, potent quality with nothing extraneous. sometimes it's hard to watch the characters and situations, but the show's illuminated an addictive side to my personality i may have been suppressing. :) oh yes, and like everything in the hbo catalog, this show isn't for viewers with scruples about language and situations that depict people doing bad things.

- just downloaded the new neko case record, middle cyclone, and what can i say, i love her yelling. i love the reverb. i love the loosely swinging tempos that call to mind telephone wire strung between poles, passed in an old car heading west. she's like a swift, reverb-drenched, energetic lucinda williams. with red, red hair.

- i'm dispatching this from the back yard, early in the morning. i'm going to have about a million mosquito bites. but ben's asleep and andrew left early for bible study and i woke up with a loud, chatty brain and a quiet hour to burn. so happy.