Happy Valentine's Day

It's the little things.

I'm not kidding.

Every year on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, I feel a little bit irate at how the shops jack up the prices of their flowers.  I have informed my husband that I do not enjoy flowers that cost three to five times what they would normally cost. Such flowers bring me no pleasure.  I say, "Get me a dozen roses on a random, unexpected day, when they are $12 a dozen at the grocery store.  This will earn you many, many points.  Do not get me flowers on a day when they are $30-$50 a dozen.  I will be mad."

The net effect of my having made this statement is that I receive flowers neither on random days, nor on days when they are prohibitively priced.  If I have fresh flowers, I generally buy them for myself, on sale.  This is not the end of the world, and I am happy to say that I have never been yelled at (or even criticized) for buying myself flowers.  There seems to be some sort of understanding that my husband and I share concerning these things.

However, today being Valentine's Day, a.k.a. The Day of the Rose, he pulled a creative stunt.  Knowing that I would not be pleased with a pricey bouquet, he went to the Dollar Store and bought me a $1 cluster of fake roses:

They are pretty cute.  And they did more than bring a smile to my face.  They made me laugh, hard, for a good long time.

Happy Valentine's Day to my valentine, and yours, and God bless us everyone.

Cleaning and packing

If there is anything I am not good at, it is cleaning and packing.

I assume that I was bad at teaching because I was in such a fog the entire time, I barely knew my name.  The worst of it was not being able to cook, or clean, or read my Bible, or blog, or go to the grocery store, or, essentially, do any of the things that were my former life.  On the bright side, I had plenty of students to talk to, and the drive time was a good opportunity for prayer (and believe me, I was in need of prayer).   I had some overwhelmingly intense mornings cruising down 481 with the radio off, watching the sunrise (one morning it was blood-red like a Victorian mystery behind the naked black tree branches), praying my heart out to God.

Being an introvert, I also found that teaching drained me.  Even when I arrived back home, exhausted, I could never just go to bed, not only because I had hours of grading and lesson planning in front of me, but also because I needed "down time" by myself to decompress.  It's a weird thing, being an introvert, because I like people.  I even get lonely when I never see people.  Still, constant contact absolutely drains me, and I need to be alone to gather my wits in the aftermath.  This is one more reason why I think that teaching probably is not for me.

But now I am trying to clean and pack, which is not any easier for me and may--in fact--be harder.

The last time we moved was 18 years ago.  I had a five-year-old, a four-year old, a two-year-old, and I was pregnant.  I killed that move.  Seriously.  In a good way.  Organization and efficiency were my hallmarks.  I went through everything in the house and purged.  I gave away pots, pans, dishes, bags and bags of baby clothes, our bikes, and my favorite heavy gray wool coat, among other things.

I miss that coat.  I've wished for it a number of times.   It was a classic.

I also lost my orthodontic retainer in that move (probably why I ended up having to get braces a few years ago).

Besides my retainer, I lost a gold necklace that Shawn had given me in 1985, after we had dated for six months.  The sweetest thing... best gift I ever got, possibly.  I was totally unaware that we had been dating for six months, so it came completely unexpected.  He smiled and pulled this tiny wrapped package out of nowhere, and I cluelessly opened it.  It was a gold heart, the outline of the heart, and there were three tiny leaves of Black Hills gold along one side of it, a pink, a green and a yellow.  The heart hung on a very delicate gold chain.  I loved that necklace.  We moved, and I never saw it again.

Perhaps this is part of my hang-up.  Perhaps I am afraid of losing things that are important to me.

When we moved from Minnesota to New York right after college, I lost a crystal bowl and the butter dish from my fine china, neither of which had ever even been used.

I don't like losing things.  It makes me sad.

Back at Christmastime, we were receiving a lot of Christmas cards and such, and along came my birthday card from my parents, with a birthday check in it.  I set it aside in a safe place so it wouldn't get lost in the piles of Christmas mail... and I never saw it again.  I had to call my parents and tell them, because I knew they would wonder why their check was never cashed, as it never will be.

Yes, I think I have a profound fear of the things I will put in safe places and never see again over the course of this move.  I also fear the things I will discard and later wish I had kept.  I have a real knack for keeping the wrong things and divesting myself of the other wrong things.

On a happier note, I was going through old insurance paperwork and found a check for $271.  This should be an encouragement.

Failing

I expect that I ought to address the fact that I quit my job.

There are so many factors involved here, accompanied by so many issues which I cannot discuss on a public forum, that I am not sure if "ought to" really means "ought to."

I had thought that I might be a good teacher, that teaching might be "my thing."

It wasn't.

The students were great.  Mostly.  All except approximately two, and I will leave to your imagination just how figurative or literal I may be with that particular number.  Suffice it to say that the kids were mostly great, and a high point of my day, each class with a certain flavor of its own.  Study halls perhaps not so much, but even there, the vast majority of the students were respectful and pleasant. (Note: majority does not include everyone, and there are a few detentions that I should have handed out, which I didn't, and probably to the detriment of those who earned and did not receive them; but nobody is complaining, and one thing I learned in spades: it is best not to make waves.)

I like students who smile and expect the best, love them, in fact.  Miraculously, this was quite a lot of them.  I like students who stay awake, but even students who fall asleep do not bother me tremendously... except in that they hurt my feelings, because I try very hard to be interesting.  However, I know that my own offspring sleep through the occasional class, and I know that it can be very hard to get proper sleep at night when you are a budding young adult, so I tried to be patient with the occasional sleepers; the chronic sleepers, perhaps not so much.

I like students, and explaining literature to them, and I love finding out that somebody has learned something.

After I started, I realized that I knew basically nothing about grading. The computer grading system they had there, Renweb, terrified me, and was in no way a high point of my career.  After I gave a few tests and assignments, I noticed that the grading spread fell about as I would have predicted it would, so I took that as a note of affirmation and proceeded forward to the best of my ability.  My heart never stopped racing while I sat and entered grades and pushed the buttons to see how Renweb calculated them.  Each student felt like my own kid, and I silently cheered for the ones who did well and mourned for the ones who did not, unless they did poorly merely for lack of turning in work, at which I felt as frustrated and disappointed as if they had been of my own flesh and blood.  In brief, there was not much I liked about grading.  I did learn that it takes vastly less time to grade a perfect paper than to grade a terrible one, unless it is a totally blank test.  A totally blank test is even easier to grade than a perfect one, just less reassuring.

The worst part of teaching was the mean parents.  There were not a lot of mean parents.  Let me just say: it only takes one mean parent to ruin your day.  Or week.  Or month.  It only takes one nasty, irate, scathing message to make a teacher dread opening any ensuing parent emails.  My husband always told me that you catch more flies with honey, but now I know firsthand what that means.

We are moving to the Midwest.  Had I mentioned that?  I bring it up, because I was thinking of lesson planning.  Lesson planning was very hard for me, mainly because there was so much of it, and so much of the material was basically unfamiliar to me.  When I realized that I would never again be coming back to reuse the lesson plans I was agonizing over, the lesson plans that kept me up past midnight most nights of the week and forced me to completely desecrate the Sabbath on weekends, I realized that something had to give, especially since I also now need to sell a house, buy a house, pack a house and move a house, as well as orchestrate the graduation celebrations of both my sons this spring.  (And figure out what is wrong with my body, but that is a whole separate issue.)

Back in the day, I used to teach a Bible study.  It was a study for ladies, on Tuesdays, and we studied the Bible.  I worked all week to prepare for Tuesday morning... not constantly, of course, but daily.  On Tuesday morning, I went to church to teach.  My friend Sandra had arranged a refreshment schedule, and each week she appeared laden with fresh flowers and other various decorative items to bedeck the refreshment table which was soon spread with fruit, baked goods and egg casseroles, as well as coffee, tea and juice.  Ladies snacked and socialized, then we studied and prayed.  It was lovely.  Cumulatively, I did about 10% of it, and what I did was really the Lord working and not me, anyway.

Somehow, from that, some people got the idea that I would be a good teacher, and they told me that I would be a good teacher.

But I was not a good teacher.  Preparing all week to teach one lesson does not begin to translate to needing to be prepared to teach four lessons five days a week (that would be 20 lessons).  This second load was beyond my scope.  Add to that: I am familiar with the Bible,  I have read it a few times, and I've sat under great Bible teaching for years.  I was not familiar with the tenth grade curriculum of World Literature.  It may have been a good course, but it was not material I had ever studied. My background was English, not World Literature.  I had no idea what I was doing half of the time; maybe 90% of the time.

When I taught Bible study, if I came to something tough, I could be honest with my ladies and say, "I don't understand this," or, "This means that we need to have the mind of Christ, but I am not there yet.  I'm praying for wisdom and pleading with the Lord to help me grow in faith, but I am not there yet."  I could say those kinds of things to my ladies.  But you can't stand in front of a classroom of junior high students and say, "I have no idea what I am doing.  I just read this last night, and I am not sure that I understand it myself, and I have no idea what I am supposed to make you understand."  You just can't say that.  They'll eat you alive, and their parents probably will too.  It was hard for me to feel so dishonest every day.

One day near the end, in tenth grade, we were studying The Iliad, and we were looking at stock epithets, which are shorthand descriptions Homer uses for certain characters.  The students understood and were good-naturedly searching the text to find examples which I then listed on the chalkboard.  As I wrote yet another stock epithet on the list, the thought echoed in my mind, "I lived to be forty-seven years old and raised four children, one of whom is currently pursuing a PhD in chemistry at an ivy league university and another of whom will start medical school next year.  And I never knew what a stock epithet was until yesterday, and it never mattered..."

To my horror, I heard my voice say to the class, "And I certainly hope that you find a practical use for this someday..." and fortunately I stopped before I said, "Because I certainly never needed to know it."  I clamped my lips together and willed myself to think before I spoke again.

"Wow," said a boy sitting in the front row.  "At least you're honest.  All the rest of our teachers tell us that we'll never be able to buy groceries if we don't learn their stuff."   In that moment I loved that kid with a raw, motherly love that wanted to say, "Homer has nothing to do with whether you will be able to put food on your table as an adult."  I wanted to give him a big hug and sit down with him and explain the difference between what he really needs to know and what is entirely superfluous.

I failed as a teacher.

I am not there anymore, and I'm sure it is for the best for the school and the students.  Still, I wish I had not failed.  It was a very disappointing failure.  I'd wanted to be a good English teacher.

So now, instead, I fail daily at packing my house, because if there is anything I am worse at than pretending to know something about famous literature I never studied in college, it is making decisions about what to keep and what to throw away, and clearing out my house.

Today I came home from a fruitless three hour long doctor's appointment and made a berry-peach pie.  I hope that my husband will love me if I make pie, because making pie is one thing that I actually can do, even if I am really bad at most everything else, such as holding a job or keeping house.  Yes, at least I can make pie.  Perhaps they should call me Amelia Bedelia.

Psalm 147:3-4

He heals the brokenhearted
     and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars;
     He gives to all of them their names.
               ~Psalm 147:3-4 (ESV)


I read this yesterday, and I loved the juxtaposition.

God cares about us in an individual way, hearing our hearts' cries even when we do not know He is listening.  When our hearts break, He is there, never leaving us or forsaking us, binding us up, healing our souls even while they reverberate with pain that drowns His presence from our consciousness.

He knows my name.  He knows how many hairs are on my head, and that is a constantly declining number these days, but He can keep track.

Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered...
               ~Jesus (from Luke 12:7, ESV)

Amazingly, astonishingly, astoundingly, He also created and controls the entire cosmic universe, vastness so great that all we can do is try to come up with mathematical formulas to express the size of it symbolically.  We study and track the patterns of the stars, the very stars that He put in their spots, programmed and named.  He knows everything about them; He could give you a breakdown of the chemical formulas of their matter.  With all our tools, instruments, computers, calculations, we can only attempt to scratch the surface of understanding, and our hubbles crash and burn with all our efforts, humbling us and making us start over, slowly, again and again.  He watches us struggle, strive, begin to discover the works of His hands.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
     The Lord is the everlasting God, 
          the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
     His understanding is unsearchable.
               ~Isaiah 40:28 (ESV)

It reminds me of one day, a number of summers ago.  Shawn and I had taken the kids to Lake Ontario for the nature, fresh air, exercise.  We hiked a trail along the shoreline, climbed on rocks and obsolete cement structures, grew hot under the sun and itchy from the weeds growing along the sides of the trail brushing us as we passed.

Shawn and the kids headed out onto a strange, greenish cement pier with their hands full of stones for skipping.

Feeling quiet, I distanced myself, perched on a large boulder at the edge of the water, removed my shoes and socks to cool my feet in the bath before me.

Refreshing water splashed my toes and dampened me.  I swiped my finger through droplets on the top of my foot and down to the rock where I drew a wet blot.  I breathed deep and looked out across the Great Lake, all the way to the horizon of the earth.  Where the water met the sky was very far away; it occurred to me that I would die in an attempt to swim there.  Yet, this water soaking and teasing the soles of my feet, touching me, was part of the same vast body.  I looked from the horizon to my wet toes and back again, and I thought, "This is like God.  He is near and He is far.  He is accessible, and He is beyond understanding."


The sun baked heat into the hair on the top of my head, and I felt as though the surface of the earth tipped a bit, although I'm sure it really did not.

My next house

We are really moving to the Midwest.

My stomach gets that empty-achy feeling when I think of all I must do between now and then.  Mostly I pray and procrastinate.  I hope that praying will soon help me stop procrastinating.

Sometimes it is easier if I focus on a part of the process that is a little less awful, like the part about finding a new house.

We never did quite get our "dream" house.  That's OK.  We have 20 acres of lovely land in the country, on which we never built, but that's OK too.  I like the house I have; I like it a lot.  The only thing it's missing is a broom closet, and truth be told, I don't think broom closets exist in Central New York. 

I like my house so much, that I started looking for a similar house in the Midwest.  I was searching online, looking at this and that, when it dawned on me... my kids are not coming with me.  In fact, the older three will probably never live at home again.  Jonno is going to college this fall.  David is going to medical school.   Not a one of them will live in my new house with me.

The thought makes me more sad than ever as I try to face packing up and moving out of this house that I like, this house that has served us so well for the past 18 years.

In the meantime, what in the world kind of house do you get when you are moving with an empty nest, but you have four tremendous, incredible, wonderful kids and you want them always, always to know that they can come home for a visit, and there will be room for them.  Even if (oh, please, please let it happen) they all come at the same time, there will be room for them.  Even if they get married and have families and all come at the same time, I'd like to be able to do it, although I pray to God that at least one of them will settle near me and share the hosting of this type of family reunion.

I'm thinking my first choice of house, if I could actually design it and have it exist, would be something like this:

It would be either a split-entry or a ranch with three bedroom and two bathrooms upstairs, and a walk-out basement with two more bedrooms and another bathroom.  Shawn and I could live on the main floor and each use a spare bedroom for our "offices" when nobody was visiting.

The main floor would have a large, open area with connected kitchen, dining-room and living-room.  The kitchen would be full of lovely stained oak, cherry or maple cabinets; I'm not fussy as long as they are not too dark or too light.  An island with a breakfast bar would overlook the rest of the space, and Shawn and I would always eat there when were were alone.  A fireplace, either red brick or gray stone trimmed in oak, would be the focal point of the living-room, but there would also be a beautiful, large window looking out to the front yard.  Bookshelves projecting on either side of the window would give it an alcove sort of feeling.  The floor would be hardwood, the ceiling would be vaulted, and the counter-tops would be a warm, brownish quartz.  It would be big enough to host a large family dinner or a small group Bible study, but small enough that we wouldn't feel lost when we were home by ourselves.

Additional dream features:  a wooden cathedral ceiling, like a church, crowned by a ridiculous crystal chandelier over the dining-room table.  Also, I'd love French doors from the dining-room to a cozy sun-room/enclosed porch where I could read my Bible in an overstuffed floral chair of particularly bad taste.

I like my bathrooms fairly basic.  The best bathrooms, in my humble opinion, have one piece fiberglass tub-shower units with no grout (easy to clean), and beautiful ceramic tile floors.  I like black and white tiles, the little, old-fashioned octagonal ones.  I also saw a sparkly white quartz counter-top once, and I thought it would be very nice in a bathroom.

Please, I do not want a whirlpool tub and separate glass shower in my master bathroom.  I do not enjoy cleaning glass shower doors.  Shower curtains are the bomb; you throw them into the washer until they are shot, and then you replace them (for a whole lot less than it costs to replace a moldy glass shower door).

I also hate the design where the toilet is off in its own little prison cell, relegated to a place of dishonor in a posh "salle-de-bain."  One generally goes into the bathroom to use the toilet, and I hate for it to be hard to find.  I also have a thing about wanting a toilet to be adjacent to a sink.  Sometimes you just need that set up, and when you need it, you really need it, and that's all I'm going to say, but I'm serious.  My ideal master bathroom would have an antechamber with a sink, mirror and linen closet.  This enables one to use a non-steamed up mirror while someone else is showering.  A pocket door would lead from this area to the regular bathroom, which would be small enough to get nice and warm quickly when in use, and contain a sink, toilet, standard tub/shower and window for ventilation.

The downstairs (sunny, bright walk-out basement) would have two bedrooms, a standard bathroom, and a large great room with potential for installing a small kitchen in case we ever needed to put somebody up in an apartment down there.  I'd love it to have heated cement floors, stained a funky marbled brown, and a fireplace or woodstove.  It would have sliders leading out to a stamp-crete patio surrounded by rose bushes.  There would also be a storage/utility room on the non-windowed side of the house on the bedroom end.

A 2.5 -3 car garage with plenty of space to store the deck furniture in the winter would finish it off.  Some brick on the exterior would be fantastic.  Also, plenty of closets, including a broom closet.  That's my dream house.  It seems to me that everyone should want such a house, and it seems strange that it is so hard to find.

Coming back...

Guess what?

I'm retiring.

I taught for one full semester.  On Friday I will be done teaching, and on Monday I will be all done grading and tying up loose ends.

I have three more days, and the weatherman says it's supposed to snow tomorrow, which would make it two more days if we get a snow day.

Shawn got a job in Illinois.  After living in New York for 25 years, it is going to seem really weird to learn a new state, new spelling of the state, new rules and laws.  I wonder if you have to get your car inspected every year in Illinois?

We will be leaving our kids behind.  Well, not exactly, but Shannon will be on the east coast, the farthest of any of them.  Jon is going to college!  He only applied to one college, but by the grace of God they took him.  It's Lulu's college, so that might simplify driving issues.  They'll be 8 hours away instead of 5, but I keep telling myself, "It's less than double.  It's less than double."  We don't know yet where DJ will go to medical school; he has one acceptance that he likes a lot, and he will hear from a couple other schools in March.  Then he will decide.

I can't figure out what kind of house you look for at this stage of life.  I was looking at houses with floor-plans similar to the house we have now (2 story colonial types).  Then I realized that I would probably be very lonely rattling around in a big house like that without any of my kids.  Ugh.  But we still want to have plenty of room so they always feel welcome to visit.

I feel a little bit like throwing up.

Teaching was interesting.  Parts of it were good, and parts were not.  I like kids (most kids, most days), and I like teaching in the classroom.  I despise grading.

I also despise school bathrooms, even school bathrooms that are only for the staff.  When your body is not quite right, and when that is actually one of the reasons you are retiring, you rejoice at the thought of being at home in the comfort of your own bathroom, no longer struggling with facilities that seem to have been imported from inner-city Moscow.

Merry Christmas!

Now that I don't blog anymore, obviously I rarely come here.

I may start blogging again at some point...

But even though that has not yet happened, I wanted to get something down.

A recipe.

It's been rather hectic lately, and by "rather" I mean "tremendously."  A traditional Christmas celebration very nearly did not happen at our house this year.  I still feel a bit sick to my stomach at the amount of receiving (as opposed to giving) that I did during 12-2012.  Perhaps I will buy and mail some late gifts over break.  If I do, it will be at the expense of lesson planning.  Sigh.

Thank the Lord for kids who can bake cookies, decorate trees and play carols on the piano.

My heart is also filled with thanks because Shannon came home and had her wisdom teeth removed on 12-21... and it went smoothly and she is recovering very well.

Probably I don't need to spell it out, but I was not at my peak regarding holiday plans, holiday shopping or holiday meals.  When Christmas Eve rolled around, I realized that I had some cryovac-packed chicken breasts in the refrigerator and an old bag of chopped spinach in the freezer.

Does it happen to you the way it happens to me?  I can plan, strategize and work my fingers to the bone preparing a nice meal for company and have everything turn out ho-hum at best.  But when I have no plan, no recipe, no company coming, possibly not even any ingredients, this is when my culinary masterpieces occur.  This is what happened Christmas Eve.

The result was delicious.  I sat at the table and shared a chicken and rice casserole with my family, savoring each bite and thinking what a shame that I did not exactly know what I had done to bring it to pass.

It was good enough that, even though I don't remember what I did, I wanted to try to get something down in case I want to try it again some day.  So here goes:

Crazy Christmas Eve Chicken and Rice Casserole

                             Ingredients:

long grain white rice

butter

water

kosher salt

raw chicken breast (boneless, skinless)

granulated garlic

minced onion

crushed red pepper

cumin

flour

chicken broth

whole milk

grated sharp cheddar cheese

salsa

frozen spinach

(1)  Cook 1.5 cups of rice and set aside
        (saute the 1.5 cups of rice in a couple Tbsp. of butter until warm, add 1/2 tsp. kosher salt and 3 cups of water, bring to a boil, cover tightly, let sit 20 minutes or until ready to use)

(2)  Cut up 4 good-sized, raw chicken breasts into bite sized pieces.  Cook in a large pot in a little bit of olive oil.  Add:  granulated garlic, minced onion, kosher salt, crushed red pepper and cumin.  I did not measure.  I tend to be generous with seasonings.  Cook the chicken and seasonings together until the chicken is no longer pink and the flavors have permeated into the chicken.

(3)  Sprinkle 1/4 cup flour over the chicken and cook and stir until it is evenly coated and the flour seems to be lightly browned.

(4)  Add 2 cups chicken broth.  Stir well as you add it.  Stir and cook over medium heat until it bubbles and begins to thicken.

(5)  Add 2 cups whole milk.  Stir constantly and continue to cook over medium heat until this also thickens and bubbles.

(6)  Add about 1 cup of grated sharp cheddar cheese (I did not measure).  Stir in until melted.

(7)  Add about 1 cup of salsa (again... I did not measure).  Stir in.  Turn off heat.

(8)  Cook a bag of frozen spinach (16 oz.?  12 oz.?).  Drain and snip with scissors into small pieces.

(9)  Add the spinach and the rice to the chicken and sauce.  Stir well.  Pour into a large, buttered casserole dish.

(10)  Top with additional grated sharp cheddar cheese.  Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes (this is assuming that the parts were still quite warm when you combined them).  When the cheese is melted and slightly starting to brown, and the casserole bubbles around the edges, it is ready to eat.