Girl Detective

I often gripe that TV shows shy away from the really dark stuff, as in my entry on House. I just watched the first two episodes of the new Battlestar Galactica series, though, and I found darkness in abundance. It is so dark, in fact, that it’s still rattling about in my head, demanding attention.

I watched the first episode as a kind gesture to my husband. Then I was the one who insisted that we watch the second as soon as possible. I am neither a groupie nor a detractor of science fiction television. I gave up on Firefly after two episodes. (I will grant, though, that the original pilot movie was quite good, and the cut-up version they ran was not, so there was unrealized potential there, in spite of the execrable space hooker with a heart of gold.) I did get hooked on Babylon 5, only to become disgusted with whatever season it was that Tracy Scoggins joined the crew. I think the Star Trek shows/movies have some good bits, as well as some terrible ones. I got bored watching Farscape. All in all, then, I wasn’t at all prepared to like Battlestar Galactica. Like everything else, I thought it would be just OK. I was wrong.

Battlestar Galactica is good television. Period. It happens to be good television that is also science fiction, and that is what is so surprising. There is no need to make allowances for its genre, or its campy origins. This is good stuff.

I think there are two main reasons that this re-imagined series so impressed me. One, they learned from the key mistake of the original. The original Battlestar Galactica started as a two-hour movie that was aired audaciously against the Academy Awards. In the post-Star Wars sci-fi frenzy, it completely trounced the Oscars. Everyone was so excited about it that the studio pushed the creators to get a series together immediately. The series was thrown together in a rush. No surprise, it lasted less than two years. This series also started with a mini-series, but then took enough time to start the series off right. It’s run in England already, and has just come stateside. How long it will run depends on its reception here.

Its English roots are the second likely cause of its quality. As Warren Ellis noted in his review of House that I posted here, the English do a much better job of dark TV. It is quite a job that’s been done with Battlestar Galactica. Mary McDonnel and Edward James Olmos lend quietly impressive performances in their leads. I was surprised at how un-pretty most of the rest of the cast is, with the exception of the actor playing Lee “Apollo” Adama. The human race has been wiped out, the Cylons are hounding the survivors, and things are neither played up or down. They are definitely not, though, played for camp. That was what I had been expecting, and I’m sure I’m not the only person experiencing geekjoy that I was mistaken.

There are some linguistic lost causes that I mourn nonetheless. One is the chronic misuse of hopefully, which means full of hope. Another is the use of “whom”. Most people avoid the issue by avoiding the word. More and more I think this is what the end result will be. It saddens me, though. I like “whom” and wish it would be used more and used correctly.

I’m not necessarily one to talk, though. I knew that whom should be used an an indirect object after a preposition, e.g., Ask not for whom the bell tolls…. Who is to replace subjects and direct objects, e.g., Who’s on first? I was writing a letter recently, though, to someone whose intellect impresses me. I was trying to make a point, and didn’t want my point to be obscured by bad usage. I had a few sentences that were demanding that I choose between who and whom and I had to make my best guess because I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what part of speech they were. I was tired and I couldn’t lay hands on my copy of Chicago Manual of Style. It wasn’t near the other writing books like it should have been. Instead, after our move and in the absence of a formal filing system, I found it later wedged between The Mad Scientist’s Club and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (But of course. What was I thinking, not looking there?)

It wouldn’t have helped me, though. It has no entry on who/m. Instead I had to turn to little Strunk and White, (which, as I write this, I can no longer find. GRRRR.) Even if I could quote it, it wouldn’t help. It had a slight entry that did not illuminate. Instead it forced me to come up with my own rule. If you can substitute s/he then use who, if you would use her/him, use whom. Sometimes you need to flip the words around. For example, Who is the actor whom you despise?

Sadly, I think, it may be easier to leave out whom than to wrestle so with its use.

I find all the girl muppets on Sesame Street annoying. There’s Rosita, the aqua, Hispanic monster whose voice has a grating whine. Then there’s Zoe, the female counterpart to Elmo. Elmo annoys because he refers to himself only in third person, but in general he’s a pretty nice, friendly monster. Zoe, on the other hand, can exhibit quite a mean streak, especially when she’s defending her pet rock, Rocco. She also sometimes exhibits behavior that is so flaky that she seems almost stoned. There’s one other recurring female muppet, Prairie Dawn, who is bossy and impatient.

I don’t have the same problem with the female humans on the show: Susan, Maria, Gina, and Gabrielle. These are all fine characters who are kind and interesting. I find the boy monsters–Grover, Cookie Monster, Telly, Elmo, even grouchy Oscar–cute and engaging. All these monsters were there when I was a child, though.

Sesame Street is a show that I like and respect. I hope that it will inspire the same feelings one day in my son Drake. Is it me? Do I dislike the girl monsters because they’re new and different? I didn’t grow up knowing the characters of Gabrielle or Gina, though, and I still like them. Do I dislike the girl monsters for the same reason that teachers favor boy students over girls? Or have the creators of Sesame Street, in their efforts to round out their cast of monsters, created girl monsters who are less likeable than the boys?

In a comment on my dictionary entry, Zen Viking called me on my rant about free content and challenged me to elaborate.

I am sure that given a lot of time, I could write a lengthy and well-reasoned treatise on this. I don’t want to spend time on this, though, which is part of why I think content should be free. If I have to pay, or enter a whole lot of personal information, or own a computer to access information, then information is slow to get, it’s unjust in distribution and makes doing what I’m doing (in this case, writing) more difficult.

Copyright laws were invented to encourage creators to create. Over the years, they have been warped by many, including Disney, to protect profit. I don’t believe that every book, magazine, movie, newspaper or DVD should be free. I do believe there should be a free form of it, though. I also believe that restrictive copyright laws do more harm than good.

If you are interested in delving into this issue more deeply, then my husband G. Grod recommends the work of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, and author of Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Lessig was also tapped as an artist of the year by the Minneapolis City Pages, but so were Kevin Smith and Garrison Keillor, so there is some dubiety to the distinction.

I no longer subscribe to Warren Ellis’ mailing list Bad Signal. To use one of Ellis’ own favorite phrases, the list had a high signal to noise ratio. Ellis one of those strong personalities that inspire a lot of fans to think he’s a guru. He’s a smart, funny writer with a well-developed–perhaps TOO well-developed–dark side. My friend Blogenheimer, though, forwarded me Ellis’ review of the Dead Baby episode of House, which I will print below, because a lot of his commentary is spot on. If you’re interested in reading more by Ellis, go to warrenellis.com, but it’s not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.

I continue to have some lurking doubts about House, but I continue to watch it. House is definitely an Ellis-y protagonist. Smart, pissed and unafraid to let you know about it, but not without occasional glimmers of soul, conscience and humanity. What’s good about House is that there is some dark stuff, and they don’t usually drive home every point till you want to vomit. It’s also got fast, funny dialogue. What’s not good about House is that it’s yet another medical diagnostic show and sometimes requires the viewer to do some pretty strenuous sustaining of disbelief.

For example, in the Dead Baby episode, Dr. House was the first person to cry epidemic when babies started getting sick. As in most House episodes, they have no idea what the patient has, so they have to make a guess, treat it, see if it works, (it never does, and it’s often gruesome like a spinal injection, or claustrophobic like a long MRI), learn from their failure and still (in most cases) save the patient in time. As Ellis notes, the baby episode hinges on their best guesses being two types of bacteria, each of which requires a different treatment. So they treat the baby of the blond, American looking parents with one antibiotic, and the baby of the ethnic lesbian couple with another, and the lesbians’ baby dies. I was more than a little disturbed by the implication, and surprised that Ellis did not remark on this. The writers pulled their punches a bit by immediately making blond baby get sick anyway. The upshot was that it was a virus, not a bacteria, and they eventually figured out which one and were able to treat it, saving blond baby and the others.

The end of the episode aggravated me when it was revealed that the source of the virus was an elderly candy-striper handing out teddy bears to the new parents. Even if most people don’t know that nearly all stuffed animals contain choking hazards for infants (the ones on the show had button eyes AND a neck ribbon–double whammy) and are labelled “for children 3 and up”, ALL health care professionals know that stuffed animals are unsanitary breeding grounds for dust mites and other allergens. So even if a hospital would’ve had a person with a persistent cough doing the rounds of VULNERABLE NEWBORNS, she wouldn’t have been handing out stuffed animals, much less ones with ribbons and bite-off-able eyes. At the end of the episode, the only one so far in which one of the patients dies from the hypothesized treatment, I was left with fatigue from having to hold up my disbelief for so long, and annoyance that they’d killed the lesbians’ baby. The writers tried to show they were serious by killing a baby, and at least with this viewer, it backfired.

> bad signal
> WARREN ELLIS
>
> So Adi Tantimedh says to me, you
> should see this new series on US TV
> called HOUSE, because the
> protagonist could be one of yours.
> So I downloaded the fourth episode
> the other night, and watched it
> before bed last night.
>
> Two surprises: the lead is played
> by British comedian Hugh Laurie,
> and the credit sequence uses the
> excellent “Tear Drop” by Massive
> Attack with Liz Fraser.
>
> Hugh Laurie’s only done a little
> straight acting that I’m aware of –
> some light stuff in a Ken Branagh
> fillum and a quick thing in SPOOKS.
> Here, he wears a near-beard, an
> American accent — not perfect, I
> suspect — a limp, a cane, and a voice dropped an
> octave into an earthy croak as
> Gregory House, a nasty medical
> consultant in a nice hospital.
>
> House is a cranky genius with the
> social skills of a wild boar. He is the
> Unpleasant Doctor we’ve all met.
> I like stories about clever people,
> but I like some intimation of method,
> and House appears to be psychic
> in his apprehension of an epidemic
> in the hospital based on two babies
> getting sick. It’s a bit, you know,
> this man arrived at the morgue with
> two sticks of dynamite covered in
> his own prints lodged in his lungs, but
> it was Moider and I Resign and Dr
> Quincy You’re Amazing.
>
> Naturally enough, a bunch of babies
> get sick. And the hook of the episode
> is that they have two possibilities
> as to the disease, with two different

> treatments. Which means that
> some babies will be given one treatment,
> and some the other, and obviously
> one method or the other will lead
> to dead babies.
>
> Which, for US TV, is kind of
> interesting. I mean, it’s squeezed
> dry of emotional milk, and naturally
> enough one of the young and
> pretty supporting cast (including
> a wasted Omar Epps) has a dead
> child in her past and blah blah —
> but for soft American entertainment,
> that’s actually kind of hard stuff.
>
> House isn’t jagged enough to be a
> complete bastard, although one of
> his troops names him such, but
> that’s less Laurie’s fault than the
> script’s. Long and crooked, Laurie
> stumps around the place like a
> wounded spider, a murky fog of
> Hate trailing behind him. Standing
> in the maternity ward, another
> doctor comments that it’s unusual
> to see him willingly be in the presence
> of patients.
>
> “Patients don’t bug me until they
> get teeth.”
>
> The actress — I’ve blanked on her
> name — who did that turn as Sam’s
> Prostitute Friend in WEST WING
> appears here as the hospital
> administrator, a thankless role in
> this kind of show (the person who
> has to tell Quincy it’s not Moider
> and therefore be Wrong every
> week), and pulls it off with some
> charm.
>
> Clever Scumbag shows tend not to
> have a great lifespan in American
> television. VENGEAANCE UNLIMITED
> and PROFIT come to mind. They
> do better over here in Britain, where
> it’s something of a tradition. HOUSE
> isn’t a great Clever Scumbag, but
> it’s nice to see US TV trying it again.
>
> — W
>
> —
> Sent from mobile device
> probably from the pub

The first few episodes of The O.C. that featured Alex, Seth’s new girlfriend, had her straight blond hair with its purple streak up in an elaborate ‘do. The artifically stiff, round curl on the side of her head reminded me fondly of one of my favorite childhood dolls, Quick-Curl Barbie. QCB had strands of wire intermixed with the normal platinum strands so that you could use the plastic curling wand to style her hair into a curled coif with staying power. Alas, the wires became brittle after much manipulation and broke off, leaving QCB with rough bits of wire sticking out of her head, looking much more like a science project gone horribly awry than a beauty maven.

I didn’t have much luck with doll hair during childhood. Another favorite doll, Velvet, had blond hair with a ponytail fountain that sprung from a hole in her head and could be pulled out or retracted back. One day the obnoxious neighbor boy yanked on the ponytail for the last time, and Velvet’s crowning glory got pulled clean out, leaving her forever with a short bob and a gaping hole in her head. Her big sister doll, Crissy, had no such problem, but I was unconsoled; Velvet had been my favorite. Like Barbara Eden on I Dream of Jeanie, Velvet’s ponytail was a source of power and wonder. Its loss was a hard one.

The writers of last night’s episode of Lost, in which we got the back story for siblings Boone and Shannon, were back in the saddle again. It moved quickly, was interesting and gave us a few more things to puzzle over even while some questions were answered. I think the writers chickened out a bit by making Boone and Shannon step-siblings. I don’t think they were willing to get as dark and twisted as it would have to be to make them half- or full-blood siblings. In any case, I was relieved that last week’s bad episode was just that–an episode. The series continues to be mostly fun. And I loved that little bit where they showed Sawyer being escorted, shouting, through the police station. They never have explained what he was doing in Sydney, and why he was going to LA.

In an unsupervised moment, my toddler Drake managed to break all twelve of a new carton of eggs. In a frenzy of home economy, I stored the unshelled eggs and determined to find a recipe that would use them all as quickly as possible. I decided on a cheesecake, calling for 6 eggs plus 2 yolks.

I started at noon and was not able to slice it till 9:45 p.m. And slice it I did, rather than leaving it for the next day. Because there was no way I was not getting at least a little piece of what had taken up nearly all of the day and caused no small amount of trouble.

First, I had to bake the cookie crumb crust. I did; it looked great; I removed it to cool. Then, when I was heating the oven to 500 so the cheesecake could get a glossy top, smoke started pouring from the oven and the smoke alarm went off. Butter from the crust must’ve leaked out of the pan and onto the oven bottom. At 500, it had been burned to a black, smoking mess that could not be dislodged even with a scraper. What to do? Abandon the cheesecake, with its 2 and a half pounds of cream cheese and 8 eggs? Ask the neighbors if we could use their oven? Instead, I checked to see if the pan would fit in our toaster oven. It did, so I put the cheesecake in, burned the top because of how close the fit was, but then lowered the temperature. While the cheesecake baked for 90 minutes, I started the cleaning cycle on my regular oven. Once the cheesecake finally was done it had to cool for 3 hours, then chill for 3 hours, then sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. And at that point, I finally got cheesecake.

Was it worth it? I’m not sure. It was good, and I’ve eaten quite a lot of it this week. (In my defense, I haven’t been out much, so haven’t had the opportunity to share it. And cheesecake really isn’t toddler food.) I used a gingersnap cookie crust and put chopped bittersweet chocolate in it, so it’s got a bit of sass to it. But I’m not sure any dessert is worth all that trouble and time.

I got some more tips on handling dry skin from the dermatologist’s office this week.

Don’t soap up everything when you bathe, just the nooks and crannies.

Pat dry, don’t rub or scrub with a towel.

Use a mild soap, like my favorite, Dove Sensitive Skin.

Use fragrance free moisturizer and laundry soap.

I’ve got stitches in my back right now, and they itch like crazy. I had a dermatologist appointment earlier this week, and she removed a suspicous-looking mole for biopsy. It looked suspicious to her, that is. I had a hard time finding it in the mirror, and it looked little different to me than the dozens of other moles around it. That’s why I’d sought the opinion of a professional.

The chunk of skin she cut out is in a difficult place that makes reaching and lifting difficult, both of which are frequent as I care for my toddler Drake. I also get the joy of waiting two weeks to find out whether anything is wrong.

For the past fifteen years, I’ve been a fairly conscientious user of sunscreen and protective clothing and general sun avoidance. And in spite of fifteen years of good behavior, I still had a chunk of my skin removed this week.

I write this for all of you that still go out in the sun without sunscreen, that go to tanning salons or who actually lay out in sun trying to get tan.

Stop fooling yourself. At best, you’re just aging and drying your skin. At worst, you’re courting cancer. Unless you have the green light from your dermatologist to go out in the sun with abandon, and I’m betting you don’t, then you know it’s bad and you do it anyway. Cut it out.

Or you’ll be like me, and your dermatologist will cut it out for you, and you’ll have stitches that hurt and itch and if you’re lucky, that will be all.

Last week, our toddler Drake woke up from his nap fussy; things just escalated from there. Soon he was in a full-on raging tantrum, and nothing we tried would calm him. We sang, we rocked, we walked, we offered him toys, we took him out into the fresh cold air, I even broke down and offered him both the regular phones and my cell phone, but nothing stemmed the screaming. After twenty minutes, I remembered that this had happened to me once before, only I’d been alone and the tantrum had gone on for forty minutes. I’d put Drake in the car, figuring that he’d be safe in the car seat, and the driving calmed him quickly. Again, putting him in the car calmed him. His screams subsided to quiet hiccuping sobs and sniffles and finally disappeared altogether. Then the rest of the night he was fun, happy and charming. It was a freaky, upsetting little interlude.

Often I make a “soft” list of hopes at the new year–things that I want to do, but that I’m not going to pull my hair out if I don’t. This year, though, the date came and went, and I couldn’t even be moved to do the soft list. Instead, only one thing has occurred to me that warrants resolve.

I resolve to leave shorter voice mail messages for people. I tend to ramble, and often repeat myself. It’s not much of a resolution, I know, but it will make my life and those of the people I call just a little better.

My husband G. Grod and I have pretty much given up on making or receiving phone calls while we’re in our toddler Drake’s presence or earshot. Drake doesn’t appreciate that our attention goes elsewhere, but what really pisses him off is that we’re using the phone, which is obviously HIS toy that we cruel parents never let him use. Screaming, tantrums and general misery ensues, for all involved.

On one hand, this makes sense. If I had a friend over, I wouldn’t take/make a call without excusing myself. Drake understands many things, but it’s not like we can say, “Oh, please excuse me for a minute.” When we’re there, we’re supposed to be on call for him and him alone.

Oh the other hand, this is one of the many tiny but exhausting things about parenthood that can be so wearing. Before having a child, I steeled myself for lifestyle changes like not going to movies or out to dinner. Those changes haven’t been a big deal. It’s things like not being able to use the phone or the toilet that get to me, things that I naively used to think were inalienable rights.

I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday and noticed that the Boynton books were buy two, get one free. They had a similar promotion last year, during which I exercised restraint, then later regretted it. Yesterday, I did no such thing. I bought six books so we have a complete collection: Doggies; Fuzzy, Fuzzy, Fuzzy; Blue Hat, Green Hat; Hey, Wake Up; Barnyard Dance; and Birthday Monsters.

So far, my toddler Drake’s favorites are Fuzzy, Fuzzy, Fuzzy and Hey, Wake Up. For reasons neither my husband G. Grod nor I can comprehend, he very much enjoys the lines about broccoli stew in the latter book, and laughs with hilarity each time.

If your Boynton collection is not complete, get thee to a bookstore and take advantage of this deal. Unlike some other children’s books, they weather repeated readings without inspiring bitterness, fatigue or nausea.

Lost is one of my favorite new shows this season. It’s not perfect, but it’s been quite good. This week’s episode, though, definitely showed signs of weakness. Much of what makes Lost a compelling watch is that the information is doled out bit by bit so we are not left completely stymied week after week.

Good secret management is what makes for a compelling thriller. Make the secret too obvious, and it’s no fun when it is officially revealed. But make it too obscure, and it doesn’t pay off either. Good secret management keeps the viewers engaged, drawing them along to a conclusion that will, they hope, have good closure.

This week’s episode was a long backstory on Kate, which served to show that she’s a good liar. I could sustain my disbelief to believe that she’d lie to another thief in order to break into a bank to access a safe-deposit box containing only a personal memento. I could not, though, believe that she’d lie to both Sawyer and Jack to retrieve it out of a salvaged case. Neither of them, when the case was opened, would have prevented her from taking a personal memento, or questioned her on it. The conflict among them was artificially heightened in order to call Kate’s honesty into question. I’m left with a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps the writers will give more context to make her behavior more credible. Right now, though, it feels like they clumsily wrote an episode simply to highlight that she can’t be trusted, which probably means that she can be.

Here’s my take on a few other of the show’s secrets. I think that Rousseau’s child Alex is a girl. She never used a gender pronoun, and it was only Sayeed who referred to Alex as him. Also, my guess is that the man Kate referred to when she said “I killed the man I loved” is her father, not a former lover. We’ve been given hints about these, over a few episodes. These secrets are being well-managed, then.

A great example of secret-management gone bad is the X-Files. It was also built around secrets, but over time the explanations grew so unwieldy and complex that it broke down. Some viewers stayed till the end; I wasn’t one of them.

Sometimes a good secret can elevate a merely OK work. I thought Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, was pretty good. The secret, though, was so cool that I still remember it fondly.

Other times, a bad secret can drag a good book down. I loved the book Smilla’s Sense of Snow right up till the end and the revelation of its lame secret (which was the same secret as an arctic episode of the X-Files). Wondering if revealing the lame secret in advance would lessen the disappointment, I revealed it to my husband–with his permission–before he read Smilla. He still thought it was a lame ending. Smilla’s lame secret is also why I no longer recommend a book until I have finished reading it. Endings are hard, no matter what medium or genre one works in. One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, does annoyingly short-shrifted endings.

I too, both in my fiction writing and in these weblog entries, often struggle with endings. While I can empathize with the writers on Lost, they’re paid way more than I am to do what they’re doing, so I hold them more accountable. I’m expecting those secrets to be well-managed, and I’m going to be mighty peeved if they are not.

Some might say this is a common-sense caution. I, however, often need to have common-sense things spelled out to me, so I share this dry-skin advice.

The dryness of winter is not a good time to try a retinol product for the first time, especially if you have even moderately sensitive skin. A few years ago I finally bit the bullet on my persistent cystic acne, took my dermatologist’s advice, followed his cautions, and underwent a treatment of Accutane. Accutane, like retinols, is a highly concentrated form of vitamin A that forcefully encourages growth of new skin by sloughing off the outer layers. After several months, the end result was great–I am no longer troubled by cystic acne. My one regret, though, was that I’d undergone the treatment during late fall and winter. The cold, dry air exacerbated the already extreme moisture-draining effects of the drug. Taking retinol in winter made an already difficult process for my skin even more uncomfortable.

If you, like me, are often trying new products, especially ones to combat aging, give yourself and your skin a break. Retinol creams do work for some, but they are irritating. For now, use gentle, hydrating creams and lotions. Products with retinol will still be around in a few months, when the weather and the humidity are more favorable to their use.

I don’t think we’re going to break 20 degrees Fahrenheit today, and it’s probably not as warm as 50 degrees in our basement. I change multiple diapers a day and am trying to make hand washing before meals a habit for our toddler Drake. All these mean that unless I’m careful, I’m going to have skin, especially on my hands, that is as dry and cracked as the writing on Arrested Development. While eternal vigilance isn’t possible, there are a few things that I do to keep dessication at bay.

One, I’m not drinking much more water. When I was breastfeeding, a nurse told me that while it’s important to keep hydrated, drinking too much water results in frequent urination, which in turn can result in losing more water than is retained. So contrary to common sense and practice, I’m sticking to the usual recommendation of about 8 glasses a day.

Two, I use Cetaphil cleanser for my face. Not only is it gentle, but it can also be tissued off without water.

Three, I apply hand lotion after every hand washing. I keep lotion next to every sink.

Four, I don’t shower every day.

Five, I avoid moisturizers with petrolatum, lanolin and mineral oil in them. These ingredients create barriers so that moisture doesn’t escape from skin, but they can irritate skin and simply sit on top of it rather than moisturizing or healing cracked skin. Using lotions with gentler ingredients immediately after rinsing the skin with water works best for me.

Finally, I find products by Dr. Hauschka good on several levels, though affordability is not one of them. The ingredients are natural, organic and sustainably harvested. They smell and feel great to use. I find the rose moisturizers for face and body and the rose body oil very comforting both in scent, which is light, and texture, which is rich.

That way they’d determine which parents are so distractable when out to dinner that their child can not only grab and eat a fistful of butter, but repeat the stunt with mayo, then barbecue sauce.

I just hope the doctor won’t be testing Drake’s cholesterol at his next checkup.

I got back from the grocery co-op yesterday, and my husband G. Grod started to help me put away the groceries. Unfortunately, this meant we both turned our attention away from Drake. When we did notice him, he had opened the carton of eggs and managed to crack every single one of them. He was upset when we dragged him away, since he can’t understand exactly why raw egg is not the best plaything ever. Only one egg was lost and I may still salvage the rest. I made two pies and have a cheesecake on deck. I hadn’t planned a bake-fest, but if the cheesecake turns out well I’ll hardly be in a position to regret the egg debacle.

The problem with falling out of habit is that it’s so easy to stay there. It has been some time since I’ve posted. My monkey mind is crying that there are many, many things on which to spend time and attention, most notably a very engaging novel. I will resist its siren call, however, and instead throw myself back into writing.

Guilt nibbles at the back of my consciousness; perhaps I should be attending to another habit that’s been lying fallow for longer–my yoga practice. Alas, it must continue to wait. There are also the matters of thank-you notes and holiday un-decoration. I forget exactly who is was that once said that Twelfth Night is a good deadline for these tasks–my high-school algebra teacher, I think. I agree that it’s a good goal, but I’m not sure I’m going to hit it this year.

Our wee family took a quick jaunt to mid-Ohio to visit my parents for New Year’s day. Power had been restored the day before we arrived; they had been without since the storm the week before. Mid-Ohio was a mess–trees split and down everywhere. Minnesota gets a bad rap, weather-wise, but in my nearly seven years here, I have not seen the kind of winter devastation that Ohio is digging, chopping and sawing its way out of right now.

G. Grod and I spent New Year’s Eve with my parents, sister and brother-in-law eating good pizza, playing poker and watching some of the Law and Order: SVU marathon. I continue not to love L & O, and am sad for Jerry Orbach’s passing, but I enjoyed bits of the marathon in any case. On New Year’s Day, we ate pork and sauerkraut for good fortune, the latter of which is one of the few vegetables that our sixteen-month old son, Drake, will condescend to eat.

In spite of its short duration, our trip allowed us to see many friends, family and even to meet a new baby. It was a good beginning to 2005.

Lots happened in 2004. I resigned to stay home with Drake, we sold our condo, bought a house and moved, during which time Drake and I had two extended visits to family during our real-estate transactions. I was a winner at Nanowrimo with 50 thousand words of novel #2. My husband was laid off from his job in November. His brother came to visit during December, managing the impressive feat of staying four weeks and still having us be sad to see him go.

Two things stand out for me. One, Drake was not yet crawling when we began to look at houses; he was walking confidently when we moved into one. The transition out of our condo and into this house was a long one, during which all three of us developed and grew.

The second is my most distinct experience from 2004. In May, I flew to England for a friend’s wedding, leaving Drake, whom I was still nursing, home in Minnesota with my husband G. Grod. I pumped my breasts while I was away so that Drake could still nurse when I returned. Midway through the nine-hour flight home, I had just begun to pump in the lavatory when we hit turbulence; the light came on saying I must return to my seat. What a way to go, I thought, hooked up to a milking machine over the Atlantic. As calmly as I could, I disengaged myself, powered down, cleaned up, gathered myself and my things and returned to my seat. The turbulence passed, I returned to the lavatory, though more trepidatious than before, and I completed my task, lactating in the face of adversity.

That experience feels emblematic for a year that was full of difficult, bizarre, funny, scary, yet mundane experiences that I couldn’t possibly have imagined in advance. I’m hoping for a smoother ride this year.