A Gentle Hum

It begins with a 'click' and from the far side of my house, our propane furnace kicks into action.  Often, that's my signal to get up from wherever I am - if I'm already sitting down - and to find a nice, cozy bit of carpet or linoleum, just beside a heater vent.  The hum of warm air that follows, rising through the vents, is usually accompanied by a soft metallic 'clang, clang, clang.'  That's partially due to the fact that someone has discovered that not all of the vent misers are attached to the floor, and that the holes she exposes by removing them are great for stowing her favorite toys, such as padlocks, pens and socks.  Consequently, bits and pieces have begun to go missing, leaving some remaining parts loose.  The passing air easily rattles them.

Ben says that we should get the grates fixed so that the sound will go away.  He's begun to devise clever ways of stilling the flaps on his own.  I don't think I would mind the absence of the noise, but I don't mind its presence either.  I love to be warm in the winter.  Who doesn't, right?  And the sound of the miser flaps clapping to the warm air has begun to register in my mind as a comfort, just like warm milk, favorite songs, a familiar sweater, or the heat itself.

I had to take a moment, earlier today, to remind myself that the end of November doesn't have to mean the end of giving thanks.  In fact, it really shouldn't.  The wintry cold hit our house the week after Thanksgiving, whereas before it had been pretty mild.  If we had come so far south hoping to escape frigid winters, we would be feeling sorely disappointed right now.  And although I was grateful for those vents - a luxury we didn't enjoy in our last home - and for the heat that comes up through them a week ago, I feel doubly so now.

Wild Running

When I was in college, I was crazy about running.  I was never a very good athlete, certainly never good enough to participate on a college team, but it was my escape and I loved it.  As my schedule became more demanding, I began to wake up at 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning to get my daily exercise, winter or summer, rain or snow or clear sky.  I found that there was something oddly enchanting about the silent, frosty mornings that I met between November and March.

It's been years since I had that routine.  I'm discovering that one of the most puzzling challenges raising a very young child is finding a way to exercise in the winter.  Fed up with the handful of cheesy televised workouts through which I usually rotate, I decided, this morning, to attempt to recover the daily ritual that was so dear to me a few years ago.

I have to admit that I'm not in the shape I once was.  My legs aren't accustomed to carrying me the way they did before and when I was doing this sort of thing every morning, my lungs didn't mind it.  Now the jolt of the cold alongside the increased demands of my muscles awakens the usually-dormant exercise-induced asthma, limiting how far I can push myself.

Nevertheless, as I pushed myself around and around the track - a far cry from the mountain trails and twisting streets I used to chase - covered from head to ankles to reddened knuckles with layers of fabric, the enchantment returned.  I had the clear, cold stars all to myself and from my ear buds, music kept time with my steps.

I'm not saying that I recommend this routine.  I'm not entirely sure that I'll be willing to drive myself to do it again soon, but there is something unique about it, and beautiful.  There's some element of insanity and some feeling of power, even as I'm all but shivering between sweat and wintry cold.  And the music is...exquisite.  Running out there on my own reminded me of a passion for music that I had long since forgotten.  The cold, the dark, the solitude, the movement or the wildness - or maybe a combination of all of them - gives the music a whole new dimension.

   

Curry Fry

Once upon a time, I was making stir-fry, and I had a thought.  It went like this: I'm using about 1/4 cup of soy sauce and just as much brown sugar for this meal...for two people.  That's a lot of salt and sugar per serving.  Since then I've been trying to style my Asian-inspired foods after curry, rather than regular stir-fry.

Usually, I'm very good at over-steaming my vegetables so that the result is somewhat...gray.  Ugh.  The following was a lovely success.  I wouldn't go so far as to call it curry, as I don't keep things like coconut milk around, but maybe 'curry fry' would be an appropriate name.

Ingredients:

 - 3/4 cup of brown rice

 - 1 1/2-1 3/4 cups water

 - 1 tsp butter

 - pinch of salt

 - 1 large carrot, chopped

 - 1/2 large onion, wedged

 - 1/2 cup of frozen peas

 - 1/2-1 cup of pumpkin, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes (remember my nativity pumpkin?)

 - 1-2 Tbsp oil

 - 1/2 tsp garlic

 - salt & pepper to taste

- 1/2 cup of chicken broth or 1/2 cup water + chicken boullion

 - 1 Tbsp cornstarch

 - 1 tsp curry powder

 - 1/4 tsp ginger powder

 - 1/8 tsp mustard powder

 - shot of soy sauce

 - teeny tiny dash of red pepper, if you like it spicy

Prep:

1. Combine water, salt, butter and rice and prepare per package instructions (mine cooked for 45 minutes).

2. Heat oil in a frying pan and add onion and carrot.  Toss until coated and slightly softened.  Add peas, pumpkin, garlic, salt, pepper and 1/2(ish) cups water.  Decrease heat, cover, and let steam - and be careful.  That pumpkin and carrot will absolutely LOVE to adhere to the bottom of your pan.

3. While veggies are steaming, combine water/broth, boullion, cornstarch, curry, ginger, mustard, soy sauce and red pepper.  Whisk together until smooth.

4. When the water has all evaporated and the vegetables are soft, turn the heat up a little and add the sauce (cornstarch mixture).  Mix with a spatula or wooden spoon until the sauce thickens and begin to bubble.  Remove from heat.

Serve curry fry on top of rice.

*Only after the fact did it occur to me that it might have been very very yummy to crush some fennel seeds and saute and steam them with the vegetables.  If anyone tries this before I get the chance, please let me know how it goes!*

And here's a picture of my helper. :)

December Evening

Happiness is...

The girl who sits in my kitchen

at the edge of the light,

wearing the banana I sliced for her

on her fingers and face,

only a window away from new snow.

Changing Seasons

Nativity pumpkin...hehe...

Halloween ran away from us before I could really, properly celebrate...so here I was, in early December, with the little pumpkin I'd gotten for carving still on my kitchen table.  And let's not forget the two-dollar cleaning and carving kit I'd splurged on.  That was still in the cabinet, where it had been waiting for two months.

So we carved our pumpkin, really only a month an a few days overdue.  Somehow, Halloween seems much longer ago than that and I'm not precisely sure why, but I think that time moves so much more quickly around this time of the year.  I can only base that hypothesis on something I've never confessed to anyone, except maybe my husband...maybe.

In my mind's eye, I see the months of the year like blocks in an oblong loop of sidewalk, moving clockwise.  From about mid-May to mid-September is one long, straight portion and the other goes from January through April, so there's not much of a corner at the spring-summer end of the loop, but on this end, it curves from September to the end of December.

I don't know what came first in my mind - the idea that this season is a bend in the calendar or the feeling of constant, rapid change, but they exist together in my head and have been that way for as long as I can remember.  So there you go, thought of the day.  Nothing profound, but it's a little insight into my own personal weirdness. :)

Lovely Nonsense

Someone decided to help me blog today, so I decided to let her.                        

/g jK VGBNHTYJU7
GH1   hJNVVVRF





'1

Usually she only wants to push keys like 'alt,' 'ins,' 'F11,' or the keys that will change the language on my computer to Hebrew, so this is kind of a special treat, just so you know. :)

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year...?

I'm coming to a daunting realization about motherhood (yes - another one!), and that is that Christmas is largely my responsibility now.  As a 'stay-at-home mom,' it is up to me to get Christmas wrapping, Christmas Eve pajamas, stocking stuffers, and everything that Santa will leave under the tree.  In addition, any Christmas cookies, fudge, or other goodies are also up to me to provide.  I say everything, but that isn't quite fair.  It's more like 90%.

The other day, as I wove my way through Walmart crowds and sparkly red and green displays, I found myself complaining aloud to my husband.  "No one told me this about motherhood!"  Yes, I had fully expected to get spit-up, boogers, poop and every other bodily fluid or goop on my hands, face and clothes (and those expectations have been realized, I assure you).  I anticipated long, sleepless nights of taming wiggles and banishing nightmares.  I was amply warned about the perpetual messes I would spend my days chasing from one end of the house to the other.  But no one told me that the magic that my kids will anticipate all year round, the magic that is Santa Claus, would  be mostly mine to forge.

In the midst of all of this, I also heard a little voice in my head, reminding me that I've only got one child, and she isn't old enough yet to know what a present is, or to care.  If I'm stressing now, am I ever in trouble!

And then, there was last night, as we raised our Christmas tree, our modest little shrine to the season.  Taking the advice of many blogs and magazines we'd found online, we began to decorate by putting the more fragile ornaments up top, and the ones that could stand a little almost-toddler investigation down low.  As I hung little stuffed Santas, felt candy canes, and bulbous silver jingle bells on the lower plastic boughs, Addie decided to pitch in, removing each ornament as soon as I had moved on to the next.

I realized that if I can focus on those little things, the memories and photographs of my almost-year-old's first real Christmas (last year didn't count), somehow all of this manic buying, baking, planning and wrapping will all make so much more sense.  It's a thought that's made it into my mind, but I haven't fully internalized it yet.  Maybe that's what I'll focus on this month.

Goodness - and I thought I had already learned that Christmas isn't about what's under the tree.  I guess I have a lot to discover yet.