The chip "game"

I always hated the quiet game as a kid. Such thinly veiled manipulation was an insult to my intelligence. But now I'm all grown up, and here I am insulting kids' intelligence with my own version of the quiet game.

Except my game is vastly superior to the quiet game. It started when I was student teaching back in college and my mentor teacher would put a few cheerios on her students' desks and allow them to eat one when they were quiet. Surprisingly, it worked. Turns out kids will do a lot to be allowed to eat food that's sitting right in front of them.

Last summer sisters #2 and 4 and I took the four Littles to the beach for a week. The young crew is new to road tripping, so we had a few unpleasant moments in the car. That's when I brought back the food game, except this time I didn't have cheerios, so I gave each one of them one chip, and every minute or so I'd tell a kid he or she could eat a bite. They'd take small bites to make their chips last longer, and we had a good hour of silence in that minivan. Brilliant. It shouldn't work, but it does.

So last weekend during a six-hour drive in a packed minivan, when the kids were getting way too fussy for my own good, I asked them if they wanted to play the chip game.

They were ecstatic.



I mean, when else can you take tightly regulated bites of a food item you would ordinarily be given freely?

So I handed them each a Pringle, and they were happy. And the car was quiet.

Then they realized their chips were running out, so they decided to break them up into small bites so they wouldn't accidentally eat too much.



With two minutes of silence per bite, that's an awful lot of silence right there. Brilliant.

Of course, the game does have a downside: namely, that the Chip Game Officiator has to say, "You can take a bite" every minute or two. So no sleeping, or reading, or deep conversations, or any other meaningful activity. But sometimes silence is worth the sacrifice.

Holidays' end

New Year's Eve was perfect, everything a New Year's Eve should be. There were sisters and friends and champagne and sparklers and midnight kisses all around. Then my sisters and I headed back to my apartment in Denton to sleep for a few hours before getting up to take #3 to the airport at 8 a.m.



We managed to wake up. It wasn't nearly enough sleep, and we all smelled like campfire, and some were still a bit dizzy, but we got up and loaded the car and even had about three minutes to spare. Then I asked #3 to bring up my keys so I could lock my 2nd-story apartment, and she asked if she could just toss them up, and I said OK, and so she did.



And they landed on the roof.

Neither one of us reacted. We didn't laugh or scream or cry or moan or anything. We just stared at each other. Then a choice word came out of my little sister's mouth and we went into oh-no mode. Keys stuck on the roof, spare car key at our parents' house in Dallas, no one to drive us anywhere, flight in under 2 hours.

Our options were tremendously limited. I brought out a broomstick, but it didn't come close to hooking over the edge of the roof. Number 4 stood down by the car and told us the keys were near the edge and that if we could just get onto the roof we could get them easily, but we had no ladder, and this roof wasn't exactly designed for easy accessibility.



I called the apartment office, but it was closed at 8 a.m. on New Year's. Go figure. Then I called a tow truck, which didn't make much sense, but that's who you usually call when you can't drive your car, right? "Our keys are stuck on the roof and we need a ladder to get them down. Do you offer that service?" I asked. "No ma'am, we don't," said a very cross tow-truck man.

After that I called a couple grad school friends, hoping that all of them had their phones off and wouldn't be disturbed, but also wanting to prove to my sister that I would go to any lengths to get her to her flight in time. No one picked up. A certain sister who shall remain numberless suggested we stand on each other's shoulders to try to hoist one sister onto the roof. That idea got vetoed pretty quickly. Not really a Sydney Bristow among us. Plus, changing a flight seemed much preferable to calling an ambulance. And all the while a neighbor from across the parking lot sat on his balcony watching and shaking his head.

After about 45 minutes we finally reached the acceptance stage of our morning. Those keys were just not coming down until the world woke up. Number 2 went inside to go back to sleep, and #4 and I sat in the apartment and wondered again what just happened. Number 3 went walking around the complex in what I assumed was frustration.

Then I heard scraping on my roof. Turns out she'd found one of those 20-foot pool nets by the empty apartment pool and had lugged it back to my place. It didn't quite reach the keys, but it came close. Then the neighbor who'd been annoying us by his careful observance all morning came over bearing some sort of child's toy, which he duct taped to the end of the pool net. Since he was stronger he maneuvered the contraption while we stood in the parking lot and guided him. "Yes, you're almost there! Just an inch away!" "You touched them for a second; go back!" Hopefully we didn't wake any neighbors with our cheerleading. After a few minutes the keys fell to the ground.

We drove fast, and when we pulled into the airport terminal #3 hopped out and ran to check in without any farewell hugs. She made her flight, though. And thus ended our holiday reunion.

Doctor visit number three

This morning I went out for a 15-mile run. My foot was hurting -- it has been for the past few weeks -- but I figured I could tough it out. Then on mile 5 the pain turned from throbbing to shooting, and I couldn't breath for a second. So I limped out another 4 miles, decided I was doing my body more harm than good, and went to the doctor.

Now before we go on with this story, let's just stop and look at that last sentence. Not the first part, because I've never been one of those nuts who will sacrifice her long-term health for athletic achievement. No, the "went to the doctor" part.

It's no secret that I hate doctors. I've been to the doctor twice since I graduated from college. The first was three years ago, when I had bronchitis. I was about two months into teaching then, and I was still determined not to miss a day of work. Ever. I went to an in-service day with a 103 fever, but by the end of the day I was pretty much delirious. So I went to Care Now. I couldn't sit up by then, so I lay curled up in a ball on the table while the doctor did whatever he needed to do to me. I really don't remember. I know he shot me full of steroids and gave me a prescription and I paid the $25 copay and tried to get a few hours of sleep before teaching the next morning.

The second time was almost exactly a year later, when I again had bronchitis, this time during my second year of teaching, and in Mexico. My principal made me go that time. I wrote about it right here.

That's it, though. I really don't like doctors. I don't like that they doubt you and suggest that everything's in your head, and then sometimes they can't find the answer and you start thinking it really is in your head.

But I figured a foot injury would be different. With a foot injury, they take an x-ray of it and can see exactly what's wrong. Just a simple your-foot-is-hurt-or-it's-not.

So I went to Care Now, because doc-in-the-box doctors are my favorite type (no, I don't have commitment issues). I didn't bother changing or showering or stopping by home first. Running clothes, salty skin, no grading to distract me from Madagascar or whatever movie would be playing. (I still have memories of "I Like to Move It," repeating again and again in the waiting room while I lay shivering on a chair delirious with fever.)

The office wasn't as anxious to get this done as I was, though. They told me to leave and they'd call me in 45 minutes. So I went to my parents' house, which was only a few minutes away, and told my sister she could go out for a run while I watched the kids and showered. Twenty minutes later, halfway through my shower, my phone rang. They were ready. I threw on some clothes, told the boys (who are old enough to be home alone for short periods) that their sister would be home in ten minutes, and told the four-year-old she was coming to the doctor with me.



Boys settled down with school work, shoes found for the little one, and we were ready to get in the minivan. But there were no car seats. The kid probably weighs close to what I do, but new laws require that children are in car seats until they're about 20. I searched around, and I thought of my slot that was probably being given to someone else, then I decided screw it, we were only a couple minutes away anyway, I'd drive slow.

So I did, and the kid did great, and I got x-rays of my foot that prove that it suffers from no more than a strained tendon. Usually I'm afraid of an "it's just" diagnosis, because it means that all my complaining was for naught. But this time I'm pretty glad. I got instructions to ice it and avoid running for at least a week (BUT WHAT ABOUT TRAINING?!?) and a prescription for pain meds that I won't fill. And that's that. Problem solved.

This morning

-My apartment smells charred because I heated a tortilla directly on the stove.
-Every pair of dress pants I own is scattered around my bedroom, evidence that I really need to go shopping for some smaller clothes now that I've started running.
-I got back from tutoring last night at 10 p.m. and watched 20 minutes of a documentary on Prohibition before crashing.
-The sink is full of dishes.
-Sticking a half-drunk bottle of wine on the counter gets rid of fruit flies and is faster than actually cleaning.
-I'm writing a quiz ten minutes before class.
-I can't find my flats, and I won't wear heels until my knees stop hurting.
-I don't have the time or the food to pack a lunch or dinner for this 14-hour day

Also:
-It's currently 53 degrees, with a predicted high of 85.
-My apartment floor is clean, at least.
-No lunch or dinner means a candy bar from the vending machine.
-I can wear a scarf without suffocating.
-I feel incomprehensibly rested.
-I've got my hair/makeup/clothes routine down to 10-20 minutes.
-Eggs taste good.
-I have friends all over the world, and family only an hour away.

Life. That's what this is.

It's (not really) a hard-knock life

I haven't gone grocery shopping in nearly two months. Eating through your pantry, they call it.

The reason behind my grocery-store boycott is simply because the summer term stopped paying me in July and this new semester doesn't start paying me until October. So I decided to cut out my grocery budget, because who needs food, right?

I thought it was going to be hard. I thought I would grow thin and bony and my ribs would poke out and my concentration would be nil and I would waste away to nothing. I imagined reading books about starving artists and finally being able to empathize. "Ah, yes," I'd tell the characters in those books. "Our lives are so very hard." Maybe I'd even be able to write my own book about my experiences or something.

Turns out, though, you can eat through your pantry pretty comfortably for quite a while. Bummer. There goes that bestseller.


Even after two months without the grocery store, my pantry's still pretty full

I've come up with quite a few go-to meals that fill me up and don't make me gag. (Those are the two requirements, of course.)

Oatmeal: The old stand-by. Oatmeal, mixed with brown sugar and raisins, or maybe peanut butter and cocoa powder if I want some protein. Filling.

Toast: I've got zillions of half-eaten loaves of bread in my freezer that I was saving for the ducks. (Sorry, ducks). If I stick them in the toaster and smother them in peanut butter, I don't notice they're freezer-burned and stale.

Smoothies: Like the bread, the fruit would always go in the freezer once it got too old to eat. So now I'm eating it. Stick it in the blender, mix it with a bit of water and some honey, and you're good to go.

Pasta: I don't know why I have so many boxes of pasta in my pantry, but there they are. Sadly, my pasta sauce is pretty old and nasty, but beggars can't be choosers, right? Plus, a bit of wine and some freshly grated parmesan help to make it bearable. Yeah, I know; I'm really roughing it.

Peanut butter and banana shake: My favorite meal of all. Frozen bananas and chocolate protein powder and peanut butter and ice. It's like a milk shake. And it fills me up for half the day.

And of course, because I can't go more than about 10 hours without something sweet, I've got a list of go-to desserts as well:

Reese's pretzels: Pretzels, dipped in melted peanut butter and chocolate chips. So delicious.

Reese's Grape-Nuts: Peanut butter and Nutella (Yes, I have Nutella. Hard life.) melted together. Grape-Nuts stirred in. Crunchy goodness.

Graham crackers with Nutella: You can probably figure that one out.

I have plenty of other food too. Tortillas and energy bars and protein shakes and goat cheese and jam and popcorn and applesauce and cereal and baking supplies that I can't use because I don't have eggs and milk. And plenty of vitamins that I'm actually remembering to take for the first time ever. This little experiment has made me realize just how much food I have and how picky I usually am.

I'm a bit tempted to find out how long it would take before I actually started starving. But I don't think I'd have the patience to wait that long.

On teaching: 3rd grade vs. 13th

I've been teaching college writing for about two weeks now. Which makes me an authority on the differences between elementary school and college, of course.

Harry Wong says that the first week of school is the most important, and I imagine that's true whether the students are eight or 18. The first few weeks are about setting up classroom procedures, going over expectations for the year, establishing a safe learning environment, and laying a good foundation. This looks a bit different in college than it did in elementary school, however.

As I reflected at the end of the first day, I realized how glad I was to be done with some of those annoying first-day procedures.

I noted that I hadn't had to march my students in a line around the school to practice hallway procedures. Instead of making our own class puzzle to illustrate how we all fit together, we just introduced ourselves. I didn't collect any paperwork from the parents telling me how their students would be getting home from class. We didn't practice taking bathroom breaks or discuss why it's important to keep the bathrooms as clean as possible. I didn't pass out name tags or assign a place for backpacks or tell students what they needed to do if they wanted to blow their noses. In fact, I didn't even set up a classroom procedure for blowing noses. Hopefully that won't come back to bite me later in the semester.

Some differences are a bit more inconvenient, though.

For example, today I needed my water bottle filled. I nearly asked the students if one of them would mind running down the hall to refill it for me when I caught myself. They probably wouldn't be as honored by that grown-up task as my eight-year-olds were.

Last week two boys started whispering during class. I started thinking of possible discipline options -- keep them in from recess, make them write me a paragraph about why talking in class is wrong, phone home to parents, take a conduct point away, lunch detention. None of those seemed like effective options, though. What did prove effective was staring at them until they were quiet. That never worked too well with my third graders.

Today I assigned a homework assignment that is worth almost nothing for the students' grades; it's merely participation points. I was trying to think of a way to motivate students to do the assignment and nearly told them that I would have stickers for everyone who brought it in completed. Then I remembered that they weren't eight and just told them that the assignment was due on Thursday. Period.

While third grade and college have plenty of differences, they have a few similarities too.

The students still ask pointless questions. I even had one ask whether to use a pencil or a pen in class. I'd thought I was done with that question for good. They still don't realize that showering before coming to class is a good idea, although now they don't have mothers around to force them to do it. They still prefer talking and playing games to listening to lectures, and they still love a good story.

So then, third grade versus thirteenth? The verdict is still out. I'll keep you posted.

Four hours of wonder

In the deep darkness of the 5 a.m. morning last Saturday, I heard a strange sound. I had to dig into the far-back recesses of my memory to figure out what it was, the part of my mind where I keep those fuzzy memories of being in the church nursery as a baby or of blowing out the candles on my third birthday cake. It took a while, but I eventually pinpointed the sound: rain!

Texas has turned colorless this summer. The skies are pale, the grass is dead, and the flowers just don't exist at all. For the past two months we've had 100+ degrees of stillness, with not a drop of water falling from the sky and not a hint of a breeze rustling the leaves. Between the drought and the heat, Texas seems to be falling apart.

The earth is splitting:



The bricks are cracking:



The foundations are shifting:



We need rain.

That's why this Saturday, when that strange sound woke me at 5 a.m. I got up to watch the miracle that is water falling straight from the sky onto the cracked earth. I postponed my run to sit around my apartment and listen to the rain. At 6:30, I went to the park to run for an hour, and I don't think I stopped marveling once during those 60 minutes. The cold rain hitting my skin, the water collecting in puddles, the drops sitting on the blades of glass -- incredible. Sixty minutes of pure childlike awe.

The rain lasted till 9 a.m., and I sat on my porch watching it until it stopped. Texas had returned to normal by Sunday: 105 degrees, no breeze, no clouds, no rain. Now the earth is still split open, the bricks are still cracked, and the foundations are still shifting. The ponds still smell like rotting fish, the grass is still sharp enough to cut a bare foot, and I still have to drink 75-90 oz of water a day. But at least I have the memory of those four hours of rain. That's something, right?

The Toyota oven

If you know a Texan, you probably know it's been a bit toasty here. You probably know because said person has been mentioning the weather every few minutes and posting way too many car thermometer photos on Facebook. There's a reason for this. 110 is hot. It's hard to think of anything else when 110 is on the other side of the door. Simple, really.

Texas is making this the hottest summer on record, and the days of 110 degrees aren't about to end soon. So we're finding ways to make it work. We're exercising at 5 a.m., we're taking cold showers three times a day, we're keeping the blinds closed, and we're baking cookies in our cars.

ERCOT claims DFW is about to go off the electric grid and is threatening rolling brownouts. Please use less electricity, they're begging. Fine, who wants to use an oven in this weather anyway? We'll just use our Toyotas.

A crowd of neighborhood kids came over for the activity. Since I'm a teacher, I had to start them with a bit of educational hypothesizing. I sat the squirts down in the living room and asked all sorts of questions, like whether they thought we should use a large car or a small one, a light one or a dark one, how long the cookies would take, and what would their texture be when finished. Questions answered and time estimates given, we were ready.

Thing 2 helped me put the cookies in the oven. It was tough being in the heat for those 30 seconds, but he powered through. The other kids were too chicken and stayed inside.



Then began the waiting. Most of the kids guessed that cooking time would be around 30 minutes. It was a pretty logical guess, really. Since cookies take around 10 minutes in a 350° oven, the kids figured they'd take around three times as long in a 150° car. Unfortunately, they were wrong, and the afternoon wore on, kids came and went, piano lessons were taken, pet hamsters were played with, books were read, and the cookies still had not finished.

Finally, after about three hours, the cookies were done. Since it was 6 p.m. now, and a whole two degrees cooler, a larger crowd went out to retrieve them.



As my little students predicted, the cookies were soft and chewy instead of crispy, and the chocolate chips had sunk to the bottom of the cookies. They still tasted pretty good.



After supper, we finished up the day with some car-baked cookies topped with ice cream while I introduced the kids to the creepiness that is "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." Lollipops, anyone?

Losing my loyalty

I returned from a vacation in Washington and British Columbia to find a broken air conditioner. Now, if you're from Texas, you've probably experienced a broken AC in the summertime before. It's one of those experiences that make Texans who they are -- like crawling onto a pile of fire ants at least once during infancy, or buying that first pair of cowboy boots. As a kid, I looked forward to the AC shutting down. That meant we'd go into survival mode -- milkshakes and smoothies and mornings at the pool and afternoons at the library. The adults were never as excited, though.

I guess I've joined the realm of adults, because when I walked into my apartment late on Friday night, felt that wave of heat, heard the overheated smoke alarms beeping, and saw the needle on my thermostat maxed out at 105, I just wanted to be back in Seattle.

I didn't pick the best week to come back to Texas, either. This is the forecast for Bellingham, where my grandparents live:



And this is the forecast for Denton:



That's hot, folks. That's the type of heat that can knock you over. It smothers your breath before it has a chance to escape. It turns blue skies gray and green grass brown, and it makes the whole world shimmer like it's trapped under water.

I love visiting the Northwest. I love everything about it, from paddling Lake Union in Seattle to hiking Grouse Mountain in Vancouver, from drinking single malt scotch with my grandfather as we watch the sun set over the bay to eating salmon and halibut and sablefish by the water. The best part, though, may be all the things I don't do while I'm there.

-I don't drink 1072 oz of water each day to keep from getting headaches.
-I don't get up at 5 a.m. to run before the temperatures hit triple digits.
-I don't hear my smoke alarms beeping all night because my AC quit on me.
-I don't put said smoke alarms in the fridge to cool them off when the 97-degree night air won't do the trick. (Is cooling smoke alarms in fridges even legal? I tried googleing it but got no hits.)
-I don't stick my head in the freezer to cool off.
-I don't take cold showers or eat copious amounts of ice cream or sprawl out on the tile floor or do anything else to lower my body temperature.
-I don't ever confuse myself with a vampire. I go out during the day. I open windows and blinds during the day. I don't hide from the sun. In fact, I love the sun.

Suffice to say, if the temperatures insist on staying in the triple digits for a third and fourth month, this Texan may just be bidding farewell to her native land.

Training in Texas

I'm training for some sort of running event again, either a half or a full marathon depending on how the knee holds up. It's scheduled for the end of September in Bellingham, WA. I'm training throughout the summer in Texas. Advantage much?

My first problem was finding the perfect time of the day to run. Temperatures have been well above 100 degrees lately, and for all of you who don't know what 106 feels like, it's hot. If the sun is out, running's a bad plan. So I either get up at 5 a.m. or wait until 8 p.m. when the day has cooled to a brisk 97˚F.

I run at a nearby park, about half a mile from my apartment. I usually walk there to give myself some warm-up time, crossing through a back alley used for smoking breaks and through a Brookshire's parking lot. I smile and nod at the smokers. Thanks for the secondhand smoke, I tell them. I much prefer that to oxygen when running. Then I walk past an Applebee's, where middle-aged men wave to me. I generally smile and nod at them too, just because it makes me laugh when I hear them tell each other, "She grinned at me," when they think I'm out of earshot. After that it's a few BBQ joints, a taco stand or two, and a donut shop while passersby in trucks honk and I roll my eyes.

The trail at the park is about 2.25 miles, which is great for short runs. The longer runs can get monotonous. It's not a bad park, though, especially in the evenings -- a good mix of Spanish and English, ponds fringed with people fishing in lawn chairs, a couple of playgrounds, and an ice cream truck. I run around and around, dodging dragonflies the size of sparrows while little boys holding fishing poles in one hand and cans of worms in the other dash by on their bikes. Running in the morning is a bit more unpleasant, since the smell of ribs smoking behind the BBQ joint about four feet from the trail makes me slightly nauseous when running 10 miles. But I power through.

The sweat's not fun. I never knew I could sweat like that. But I'll spare you the details. The thirst isn't too enjoyable either. Neither are the gnats that fly into my mouth or the 85% humidity that makes me feel like I should have donned a suit and tried swimming the designated mileage. But again, I tough it out.

Then I walk back, through the "hello"s and "hola"s and "mornin'"s and evenin'"s, and I slap the mosquitoes off my legs and I wonder how much of my skin melted off in the heat. And then I do it again the next day.

Why? Easy. Because it makes me feel like this.



Except that she doesn't look particularly sweaty, or covered in bites, or nauseous from the smell of ribs smoking, or frightened by nearly being impaled by a kid with a bike and a fishing pole, or annoyed at trucks honking at her. Guess she's not in Texas.

Dear future husband, concerning our suppers

Dear future husband,

If you are hoping for small cozy meals by candlelight, please be forewarned that I am not the girl for you. If you want extravagant meals full of exotic and expensive ingredients, nope, I'm not the girl for you.

See, I cook meals that can be served out of a large pot or a casserole dish. Exclusively. Blame it on high school years spent cooking for a large family and a fluctuating and unpredictable number of guests who wandered in our ever-open door. ("Our door always swings in," was the parting statement my dad gave to whomever he met.) Crock-pot meals were cheap, hearty, could be kept warm for hours, and could be frozen or refrigerated easily.

Cooking for one has been a challenge. I use my freezer a lot. But when I go back to my parents' house and cook for the crew there, I feel right at home. This weekend I went back to play mom to the kiddos while my mother was out of town. After dropping off my bags and hugging the children, the first thing I did was scour the kitchen to see what I'd be serving for supper for the next few nights. I didn't want to make a grocery trip, so I was stuck with whatever I could find in the pantry, freezer, and garden. I emerged with brown rice, a bit of chicken, zucchini, carrots, and squash. I can work with this, I thought.

Saute the chicken and carrots in a dab of butter, add the rice and veggies and some water, later add some basil. And viola! Dinner is served.

OK, so maybe this huge pot of food won't win me any award on Top Chef, but the three-year-old did ask for four servings, the sensory kid who can't handle new textures learned that he likes squash, the whole family ate their fill, and I didn't have to make a Walmart run. That's a successful supper in my book.


(The meager leftovers.)

So then, future husband, if you want large, inexpensive meals that serve huge crowds, I'm all in. If you want those gorgeous little Bon Appétit meals, though, I hope you enjoy cooking.

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!