St. Paddy's Day

I've been busy this week. Papers, reading, grading, the last week of training before tapering for a half marathon, dealing with insurance after my car got bumped in a parking lot, my sister visiting, a friend visiting, and a nagging in the back of my mind that my little brother is getting his tonsils out this weekend and I really should be doing something to help out with the other kids.

In other words: I don't have time to bake. Oh well.

I meant to make car bomb cupcakes for St. Patrick's Day this year, but I spent the holiday in Chicago, with this view.



I don't quite understand why anyone would want to dye their water that color, even if it is for a holiday. But oh well. Their city; not mine. It looks kind of cool, I guess. And since I don't live in Chicago, I got to walk along Michigan Avenue and enjoy the neon water, knowing that the sparkling blue lakes of Texas were waiting for me when I returned. Yes, they're sparkling blue. Really.

Because I couldn't make the cupcakes on St. Patrick's Day, I made them a few weeks later, once Texas had turned cold and rainy again and using the oven sounded pleasant.



Oh yum. Guinness cupcakes, with Bailey's and chocolate ganache filling (I didn't have whiskey), with Bailey's buttercream frosting. Half marathon, you may suffer a bit.

Texas gardening

I've moved every summer for the past six years. But this year, I'm staying put, so I decided to plant a garden. You know, grow some roots or something.

Bright and early on Friday morning (well, bright, at least) I pulled into a feed store, where the accents were about as thick as the Texas summer heat. Maybe even thicker.


(I didn't have my camera with me, so this picture is from Denton RC.)

I squeezed my little Honda into the row of pickup trucks filled with mulch and fertilizer and walked up, noticing that I was the only customer not wearing either overalls or a long floral dress. Farmers and ranchers were ordering supplies while old couples planned their flower gardens and a man on a forklift loaded bags of soil into trucks. "Where'd you get them freckles," I heard, and I looked up to see a man with a belly so big his overalls wouldn't button around it. He helped me make my plant selections and told me how to get my tomatoes to grow on a patio. "The mainest thing is your soil," he said. So he helped me pick out fertilizer and compost.

After I'd chosen fertilizer, compost, six plants, and four pots, I went inside the musty little feed store filled with seeds, coyote traps, sulfur fertilizer, and old John Deere signs. An old man was sitting behind the counter offering farming advice to customers and scratching out sums in a little notepad. Dennis was his name. "Now, you can buy that compost at Calloway's, but it'll cost you 18 bucks," he was telling a woman. Another old man in worn out overalls sat sprawled out on a bench across from the counter talking with the customers crowding the building (because who wouldn't want to sit and chill in a feed store?).

"Where d'ya want us to load your bags?" Dennis asked. "Oh, out there into that car with the dog in it," said the customer. So the assistant hauled the bags over his shoulder and carried them out to the car with the dog.

"How's Merwin's finger," Dennis asked a lady a little farther down the line, and all I thought was, "Thank you, Lord, that you orchestrated my steps so that at this place, at this time, I'd be standing right here to hear that sentence." The other customers gathered around, and each chimed in with advice for Merwin's finger. The man on the bench recommended a special ointment he had. "It looks like water, but it acts like medicine," was the glowing praise.

Dennis answered the phone right as I was stepping to the counter, so his assistant started jotting down the prices of my purchases on the back of a feed catalog. My two unpriced buckets confused him. "How much are these two little'uns?" he asked. I thought he was asking Dennis, but he must have been asking the public at large. "They's half the size, they oughta be half the price," one customer volunteered. "How 'bout two dollars?" another suggested. "$2.50?" "$2.75?" The whole store had convened to help solve this puzzle. I began to think that I ought to jump in and say something if the prices of my pots were going to be decided democratically.

And just so we're clear:



Not half the size.

Fortunately, Dennis got off the phone at that point, and he was called upon to settle the dispute that was throwing the whole store into a frenzy. "Hell, I don't know," was his helpful response. "How 'bout $1.50?" So 1.50 it was. After that he made a few scribbles on his notepad, gave me the total, and his assistant helped me carry everything to my car.

After a trip to Home Depot to get a spade and morning glory seeds and a few hours of mixing soil and planting, I ended up with this cute little patio. Hopefully things will grow.

Grad class, possums, and golden cockroaches

After I stopped teaching third grade, I thought my days of drama and thrill in the classroom were over. And while it's true that grad school classrooms lack the little adventures of elementary school like kids puking on textbooks or bursting into tears for no reason ("Sergio, why are you crying?" "I don't know!"), they're not completely devoid of excitement.

Last week's adventure started when one grad student announced to the professor that another student would be late because she was catching a possum. Yes, a possum. About 15 minutes later, in walked said student, carrying with her a banker's box emitting suspicious scratching sounds. "There's not a possum in there?" the professor asked. She said yes, there was, but it was just a baby. She perched the box precariously on top of a desk, and then our discussion of psychic space was suspended while we heard the story:

Apparently, animal control had come and removed a family of possums from campus, but they had forgotten this one lone baby. She saw it and knew it would die and decided that she could catch it and raise it as her own.

Now, I'm a compassionate person. I like animals (from a distance). I hate ending the life of even an ant. I went frog gigging once, but just the remembrance of that spear piercing the poor frog makes me shudder. As a child, the only way I could keep from crying when an adult killed a cockroach was by telling myself that murdered cockroaches would turn into pure gold and travel to their own special insect heaven. But possums, well, possums are just gross.

I mean, look at that.



I don't care if it's a cute tiny baby; it's still gonna grow into that disgusting creature. Possums are the type of animals you fight to keep out of your yard. I remember neighbors setting traps for possums. One took to standing on the edge of his yard and waving golf clubs at them. Armadillos may be responsible for leaving huge claw-sized holes in yards, but possums are the only greenbelt animal I can remember learning to hate.

And there we sat in class, trying to discuss Lacan and Foucault and the colonization of psychic space while this disgusting animal scratched and scurried and poked its whiskery nose out of the handles of the box. I don't think I can be faulted for not focusing much on our discussion.

Baby girl

This is my little girl. Today she turns six.



Three years ago I didn't know she existed. Two years ago I watched her open gifts from the foster care agency. A year ago she had forgotten how to smile. And today she turns six.

This girl is the bravest, most beautiful, most forgiving person I know. They say that children are resilient, and they are right, but that doesn't make Caitlin any less incredible to me.

Caitlin is gorgeous. With the best smile that crinkles her nose just right.

She can't wait for her four big sisters to be married and have babies. We tell her she'd better be patient.

She wants her toenails painted, her lips shiny with lip gloss, and purple eyeshadow covering her eyes. She'd really love to have a boyfriend right now.

She believes in fairy tales and princesses.

When I see her she jumps in my arms. I wonder how she's still so great at loving.

If I have any say in the matter, I'm gonna lock her up between the ages of 14 and 17. Lock her up in a high, high tower. That always goes well, right?

Happy Birthday, Baby Girl!

Teacher Reality Show

The Bachelor, Toddlers and Tiaras, American Idol, Jersey Shore -- reality TV shows are all the rage. I've never been too into them, but last night I thought of one I wouldn't mind having on my DVR.

First of all, I'd gather up a few politicians, reporters, newscasters, and other public figures who believe that education funds should be cut and that teachers have too many benefits. I'd put them each in a room with 20-25 children who speak several different languages, come from a variety of cultures and backgrounds, and are at different levels developmentally.

They would have to:

-Keep all students safe -- safe from falling off the monkey bars, being bullied, eating markers, skinning knees, and getting their feelings hurt.

-Organize 25 desks and chairs, five computers, 50 tissue boxes, 200 text books, a TV, both a Spanish and English word wall, a classroom library, teacher manuals, math games, a hamster cage, a calendar center, workbooks, student supplies and jackets, and 75 bottles of Germ-X for an optimal learning environment.

-Provide emotional stability for the student whose father is abusing him, the one whose mom walked out on her, and the one who has everything except someone to tell her "no."

-Ensure that all 25 students eat at least two healthy meals a day, which means keeping a snack box on hand for the child who missed breakfast, monitoring lunchtime to tell students to eat their fruit before their dessert, and keeping track of all student lunch numbers so that they can order food.

-Observe all students carefully for developmental delays. When a handicap is recognized, convince the parents, arrange for testing for the child, fill out the appropriate mountain of paperwork, and provide the student with suitable resources.

-Teach students honesty, how to walk in a straight line, which containers can be recycled, diligence, what clothes to wear for each season, courtesy, how to organize their desks, appropriate methods for expressing anger, nutrition, how to eat with utensils, how to clean the floor, table manners, respect, patriotism, conflict resolution, and how to wash their hands.

-Maintain three-inch-and-growing folders on each child recording grades, behavior, testing scores, interactions with parents, free-lunch paperwork, permission slips, doctors notes, and school photos.

-Plan lessons, grade papers, design bulletin boards, display student work, maintain good relations with parents, and attend professional development seminars. And all within a 45-min planning period and a 20-min lunch.

-Know each student well enough to recommend the perfect book at a moment's notice, tailor a lesson to his or her needs, and know the best discipline strategy for that child.

-Challenge each student academically -- from the student who has known how to read from the age of two to the student who just moved to the U.S. and has illiterate parents.

-Get each child -- no matter the language, no matter the background, no matter whether that child was part of the group who came to the class not able to count or the one who is ready for algebra -- to score between a 75 and 100 on The Test.

The participants who merely fulfill these requirements will probably be kicked off the show for lack of dedication. The truly dedicated ones will be the the ones who tutor after school and on the weekends, who attend soccer games every Saturday, who lie awake brainstorming ways to help a particular child succeed.

For meeting all of these responsibilities, for coming into work an hour before and staying three hours later than they are contractually obligated, for the constant stress of knowing that these young people, their families, and this country, is counting on them doing their jobs well, the participants will be paid 45k plus benefits.

Then we'll try asking them if teachers are being paid too much or if class sizes should be increased.

Now that's one reality show I could really get into.

Flying my flag

On Wednesday I woke up before my alarm with that tickly excited feeling that you get when you know it's a special day. Wednesday, as you fellow Texans know, was our Texas Independence Day, but that wasn't the sole source of my excitement. No, March 2nd is an important day not only because of Texas' birthday but also because it marks my half-birthday.

After my morning run, I checked fb and my text messages for well wishes from family and friends. I wasn't disappointed. Number 3 had written on my wall, "texas independence day? check. half-birthday? check. what a great day to be alive!" Numbers 2 and 4 wrote me later that day, and my mom sent a text message.

The celebration of half-birthdays has a long and rich history in my family. My dad wanted more birthday cake than he could have with only four kids. OK, so maybe it's not too long or rich, but I still like it. "It's either celebrate their half birthdays or have more kids," I remember him telling inquisitors. (Years later, my parents would adopt four more kids. Hmmm.)

The half-birthday celebration was always simple. We got to choose what Mom made for dinner, the sisters would make us homemade gifts (like the pipe cleaner jump roping figure I made for one of them one year), and we would fly our flag.



Starting with our third birthday, my mom embroidered a patch for our flags each year. We'd fly the flags on birthdays and half-birthdays. Seeing that flag hanging in front of the house meant that I was the queen, the most important person in the world, at least in that house, at least for that day.



I didn't have my flag with me this year, but I still took myself out to tacos for lunch and spent the day imagining that my flag was flying high, letting the world know that March 2nd is my day.