This blog is no longer happening at this site.
If you are a regular commenter on Rhymes with J. and I had an email address for you, you should already have an invitation to read this blog at its new location.
If you have any questions, feel free to email: scallen3, America Online
edited to add: comments will still reach me
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
6/27/07 11:30 pm
Why do I persist in trying to go online during thunderstorms? This time I typed the post in word and pasted—hope the formatting doesn’t get funky.
I know, I know, classic hubris: I was just being so pleased with how this blog was getting maybe 5 hits a day, and then the main blog got a very nice uptick in hits because of Jenny’s link (I’m so glad you noticed the feral ponies in that post! Their ancestors were originally circus ponies and they were released on Rodgers’ Mountain in the 30’s. The same state park is famed for its azaleas, but you have to go much further along to encounter the ponies. Ilsa was out of her mind when we met them, but I was determined not to carry the carrots I’d brought for them one more day, so I made her tough it out).
One of those people just didn’t play by the rules. Jenny, I hope it wasn’t someone you know—understand, I only know what s/he did via my statcounter, and s/he may be so blog-naive as to think s/he was invisible clicking around, but it made me realize I need to go to a password.
Leah and Phantom, you both gave me suggestions—vox and wordpress, which allow feeds on private blogs. It looks like wordpress (like blogger) will let anyone with one of their accounts read a private blog, which means that they’re NOT private at all are they? Am I right about this?
I tried to sign up for vox—I mean, I did sign up, but didn’t get much past that. This computer is too ancient (at less than five years old) and way too many links were non-functional in the version of Safari that I’m using. I’ll have to download Firefox, which I’ve had trouble doing in the past and definitely can’t do during a thunderstorm. Or I may need to find a host site that’s not geared so exclusively to people with the wherewithal to keep up with all the latest toys. It may not happen before I go, but I’ll be switching this blog to somewhere else soon—don’t worry, Leah, I’m not planning on jumping ship altogether—Rhymes with J. will stay on blogspot for the foreseeable future, anyway.
So, today’s food:
builder’s bar
milk
iced tea
co-op sandwich: festival of soy (vegetarian hoagie)
limeade drunk from Z.’s teaset
water
seltzer
black raspberries
potato salad (includes green beans and cannelini)
fresh mozzarella
the first good tomato of the season
more black raspberries
strawberries
seltzer
Uncle Donor came over and we went to a free concert in a park not too far from here. I think it’s the first time that he and I have gone out in public with Z.—we were each holding one of her hands while we walked from the car to the concert—and there is no doubt that every feature she has that doesn’t look like me can be explained by a quick glance at him. Maybe not her ears. But really, everything else.
Exercise—last night I actually got a little walking in on the way to and from the party, which was three blocks from our house, so six blocks total. Today we maybe walked a comparable amount from the car to the free concert. But this is not enough and I need to get my schedule organized but it has so far been really really hard to have anything like a predictable day with A. and Z. Last week A. didn’t get out of school til Thursday, squeezed in a hair cut that meant I had to take Z. mid-day, and then she left for the Berkshires late Friday morning.
This week has been better, I guess, but there have still dinner and lunchtime commitments and A. handed Z. off to me in the middle of the day today, and we’re leaving town on Friday, which is the day after TOMORROW and the laundry is in disarray—there is a machine there, but it’s embarrassing to show up at one’s mother’s house with dirty laundry. It’s so freshman year, you know? At least once we’re there there will be a pool in Maryland and everything we’ve planned for the rest of the week involves plenty of walking.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of exercise here. I’ll only move my body if it’s part of a routine, built into the rhythm of my day. I’ve only gone to our pool once since it opened a month ago. I need to do better than that.
I know, I know, classic hubris: I was just being so pleased with how this blog was getting maybe 5 hits a day, and then the main blog got a very nice uptick in hits because of Jenny’s link (I’m so glad you noticed the feral ponies in that post! Their ancestors were originally circus ponies and they were released on Rodgers’ Mountain in the 30’s. The same state park is famed for its azaleas, but you have to go much further along to encounter the ponies. Ilsa was out of her mind when we met them, but I was determined not to carry the carrots I’d brought for them one more day, so I made her tough it out).
One of those people just didn’t play by the rules. Jenny, I hope it wasn’t someone you know—understand, I only know what s/he did via my statcounter, and s/he may be so blog-naive as to think s/he was invisible clicking around, but it made me realize I need to go to a password.
Leah and Phantom, you both gave me suggestions—vox and wordpress, which allow feeds on private blogs. It looks like wordpress (like blogger) will let anyone with one of their accounts read a private blog, which means that they’re NOT private at all are they? Am I right about this?
I tried to sign up for vox—I mean, I did sign up, but didn’t get much past that. This computer is too ancient (at less than five years old) and way too many links were non-functional in the version of Safari that I’m using. I’ll have to download Firefox, which I’ve had trouble doing in the past and definitely can’t do during a thunderstorm. Or I may need to find a host site that’s not geared so exclusively to people with the wherewithal to keep up with all the latest toys. It may not happen before I go, but I’ll be switching this blog to somewhere else soon—don’t worry, Leah, I’m not planning on jumping ship altogether—Rhymes with J. will stay on blogspot for the foreseeable future, anyway.
So, today’s food:
builder’s bar
milk
iced tea
co-op sandwich: festival of soy (vegetarian hoagie)
limeade drunk from Z.’s teaset
water
seltzer
black raspberries
potato salad (includes green beans and cannelini)
fresh mozzarella
the first good tomato of the season
more black raspberries
strawberries
seltzer
Uncle Donor came over and we went to a free concert in a park not too far from here. I think it’s the first time that he and I have gone out in public with Z.—we were each holding one of her hands while we walked from the car to the concert—and there is no doubt that every feature she has that doesn’t look like me can be explained by a quick glance at him. Maybe not her ears. But really, everything else.
Exercise—last night I actually got a little walking in on the way to and from the party, which was three blocks from our house, so six blocks total. Today we maybe walked a comparable amount from the car to the free concert. But this is not enough and I need to get my schedule organized but it has so far been really really hard to have anything like a predictable day with A. and Z. Last week A. didn’t get out of school til Thursday, squeezed in a hair cut that meant I had to take Z. mid-day, and then she left for the Berkshires late Friday morning.
This week has been better, I guess, but there have still dinner and lunchtime commitments and A. handed Z. off to me in the middle of the day today, and we’re leaving town on Friday, which is the day after TOMORROW and the laundry is in disarray—there is a machine there, but it’s embarrassing to show up at one’s mother’s house with dirty laundry. It’s so freshman year, you know? At least once we’re there there will be a pool in Maryland and everything we’ve planned for the rest of the week involves plenty of walking.
But that doesn’t solve the problem of exercise here. I’ll only move my body if it’s part of a routine, built into the rhythm of my day. I’ve only gone to our pool once since it opened a month ago. I need to do better than that.
Hey You from H@zen and S@wyer
I'm happy to have you reading the main blog but I don't know you and I know you've read the no-lurking rules for the annex so please follow them and don't come back til I know who the hell you are.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
6/26/07 10 pm
Today--201 (no, I don't think I actually lost another pound since yesterday, since that would mean burning 3500 calories over what I ate, or whatever the exact number is; I'm just reporting what the scale said because it made me happy. I never thought weighing 201 pounds would make me happy.)
builders bar, milk
iced tea
Gazpacho, tortilla chips, and some fresh mozzarella for lunch (leftovers)
2 squares of Green and Black Maya Gold (first chocolate in more than a month and it didn't make me binge on the rest of the bar.)
seltzer
Snack--can't remember what. Cheese puffs and something else.
water and then some more water--it was hot!
A plate of Mt. A!ry potluck for dinner. This is the thing of a private blog (and, Phantom, yes, it's working at least insofar as anyone lurking is doing so very discreetly): I know you'll know the kind of thing I mean. I went for seconds on the artichoke dip in the brown-bread bowl but didn't finish the fruit-yogurt soup. The sprouted-grain salad was particularly fine. The whole wheat pasta salad was a little on the near side of al dente.
A brownie. A. made peach brown betty but it went so fast I didn't get a shot at it.
A Coke--which maybe was a mistake, except I'm the only one in my household who's not crankola at this moment, so you know, maybe it wasn't.
We were at a sheva berachot dinner for the bride and groom. It was more fun than the wedding or the aufruf--a better scale for hanging out, no one whose face I didn't know, A. was there so I wasn't toddler-wrangling the whole time, and there was good singing.
The coincidence of the two weddings was that they had the same song for the processional--a Shef@ Gold song that A. chose for the wedding in the Berkshires, since she led that processional. And coincidentally, the Philadelphia couple also chose it, and they arrived at the potluck when we did, and someone started singing it, so we entered to the song.
Our host for the potluck said a few words--now, we're indirectly responsible for this couple because they met while the bride was visiting California to work on A. and my chuppah--and in his remarks the host revealed that he and the bride became friends because of a stray comment he made at Z.'s baby-naming. So this was a weekend where the Rhyming Family played this kind of role of being toasted for connections we made not just accidentally but more or less completely without knowing it. It was a useful and happy thing to be reminded of as I'm making my way out of my cave.
So, okay, the sheva berachot are the seven blessings said at a wedding and in the grace after meals in the week after the wedding. Because Z. needed to go home, we only heard them under the chuppah but b/c of the way the couple structured their ceremony, with friends coming up to comment on each blessing (did I mention that from signing the ketubbah to the end of the ceremony was TWO HOURS!?) there was no momentum to them under the chuppah, and I missed them at the wedding meal itself, so I really wanted to stay for them tonight. A. was pretty pooped, but she indulged me, and it was good. The sixth of the seven blessings contains two songs where, in a group of guests that's Jewishly-literate enough (according to A. the guests in the Berkshires did not reach critical mass on this point), the entire gathering will join in and when they're singing it for you it can actually make you dizzy. Not like my own anniversary is next week or anything.
When I first was going to Hillel, when I was converting, grace after meals intimidated me--there's this whole Hillel thing of doing it as fast as possible, and there's a whole intricate thing of which blessings are substituted for which occasions, and I would always get lost. We hardly ever do it at home--we substitute one of several much shorter blessings on shabbat, which is the only time we evver *do* bentsch (=say the blessing after meals), but over the years I've done it often enough that I don't get tripped up much and it is sung with great gusto so it's fun to do it once in awhile. It was fun to do it tonight. It was fun to do it with people I know. It was a social evening, and it was fun, and I went home singing, and when was the last time that was true?
Also, and this is a thing that ties into Helen, and to Z., the bride's stepfather, who is Arthur W@skow if that means anything to you, did the fifth blessing to the tune of "Morning Has Broken" and Cat Stevens was what I listened to on A.'s discman for a long long time in my initial weeks of pumping for Z. (when she was in the hospital and then later in the next few weeks when the blanching and the nipple confusion were so severe that I couldn't have her at my breast). I had that cd with me when I drove up to New York on the Sunday after Helen died and on my way back down I kept hitting replay over and over and over again on a couple of them, that one in particular. There are a handful of other songs I've used that way, to draw something out of me like a poultice. Big Yellow Taxi is one, during some of the particularly bad and drama-prone patches in Adams House my junior year. Naive Melody/This Must Be The Place is another, when my mother had surgery and when Smartest Dog died. So Arthur hit something home there.
(Thunder coming, blogging could get iffy. The grid in these parts is a little shaky and prone to brownouts and blackouts.)
But anyhow, I think that this wedding could well be the impetus I need to get back into the social swing of things. I know that I'm about to be out of town for two weekends in a row, possibly three, and then Harry Potter, so it's not exactly like I'm about to commit to getting to shul on time for another month or more, but, you know, not a bad evening.
builders bar, milk
iced tea
Gazpacho, tortilla chips, and some fresh mozzarella for lunch (leftovers)
2 squares of Green and Black Maya Gold (first chocolate in more than a month and it didn't make me binge on the rest of the bar.)
seltzer
Snack--can't remember what. Cheese puffs and something else.
water and then some more water--it was hot!
A plate of Mt. A!ry potluck for dinner. This is the thing of a private blog (and, Phantom, yes, it's working at least insofar as anyone lurking is doing so very discreetly): I know you'll know the kind of thing I mean. I went for seconds on the artichoke dip in the brown-bread bowl but didn't finish the fruit-yogurt soup. The sprouted-grain salad was particularly fine. The whole wheat pasta salad was a little on the near side of al dente.
A brownie. A. made peach brown betty but it went so fast I didn't get a shot at it.
A Coke--which maybe was a mistake, except I'm the only one in my household who's not crankola at this moment, so you know, maybe it wasn't.
We were at a sheva berachot dinner for the bride and groom. It was more fun than the wedding or the aufruf--a better scale for hanging out, no one whose face I didn't know, A. was there so I wasn't toddler-wrangling the whole time, and there was good singing.
The coincidence of the two weddings was that they had the same song for the processional--a Shef@ Gold song that A. chose for the wedding in the Berkshires, since she led that processional. And coincidentally, the Philadelphia couple also chose it, and they arrived at the potluck when we did, and someone started singing it, so we entered to the song.
Our host for the potluck said a few words--now, we're indirectly responsible for this couple because they met while the bride was visiting California to work on A. and my chuppah--and in his remarks the host revealed that he and the bride became friends because of a stray comment he made at Z.'s baby-naming. So this was a weekend where the Rhyming Family played this kind of role of being toasted for connections we made not just accidentally but more or less completely without knowing it. It was a useful and happy thing to be reminded of as I'm making my way out of my cave.
So, okay, the sheva berachot are the seven blessings said at a wedding and in the grace after meals in the week after the wedding. Because Z. needed to go home, we only heard them under the chuppah but b/c of the way the couple structured their ceremony, with friends coming up to comment on each blessing (did I mention that from signing the ketubbah to the end of the ceremony was TWO HOURS!?) there was no momentum to them under the chuppah, and I missed them at the wedding meal itself, so I really wanted to stay for them tonight. A. was pretty pooped, but she indulged me, and it was good. The sixth of the seven blessings contains two songs where, in a group of guests that's Jewishly-literate enough (according to A. the guests in the Berkshires did not reach critical mass on this point), the entire gathering will join in and when they're singing it for you it can actually make you dizzy. Not like my own anniversary is next week or anything.
When I first was going to Hillel, when I was converting, grace after meals intimidated me--there's this whole Hillel thing of doing it as fast as possible, and there's a whole intricate thing of which blessings are substituted for which occasions, and I would always get lost. We hardly ever do it at home--we substitute one of several much shorter blessings on shabbat, which is the only time we evver *do* bentsch (=say the blessing after meals), but over the years I've done it often enough that I don't get tripped up much and it is sung with great gusto so it's fun to do it once in awhile. It was fun to do it tonight. It was fun to do it with people I know. It was a social evening, and it was fun, and I went home singing, and when was the last time that was true?
Also, and this is a thing that ties into Helen, and to Z., the bride's stepfather, who is Arthur W@skow if that means anything to you, did the fifth blessing to the tune of "Morning Has Broken" and Cat Stevens was what I listened to on A.'s discman for a long long time in my initial weeks of pumping for Z. (when she was in the hospital and then later in the next few weeks when the blanching and the nipple confusion were so severe that I couldn't have her at my breast). I had that cd with me when I drove up to New York on the Sunday after Helen died and on my way back down I kept hitting replay over and over and over again on a couple of them, that one in particular. There are a handful of other songs I've used that way, to draw something out of me like a poultice. Big Yellow Taxi is one, during some of the particularly bad and drama-prone patches in Adams House my junior year. Naive Melody/This Must Be The Place is another, when my mother had surgery and when Smartest Dog died. So Arthur hit something home there.
(Thunder coming, blogging could get iffy. The grid in these parts is a little shaky and prone to brownouts and blackouts.)
But anyhow, I think that this wedding could well be the impetus I need to get back into the social swing of things. I know that I'm about to be out of town for two weekends in a row, possibly three, and then Harry Potter, so it's not exactly like I'm about to commit to getting to shul on time for another month or more, but, you know, not a bad evening.
Monday, June 25, 2007
6/25/07 8:45pm
builder's bar
water
iced tea
bagel with cream cheese (yeah)
seltzer
gazpacho
multi-grain baguette
cheese
builder's bar
milk
202--5 pounds down.
Therapy was not so exhausting this week. Exercise--6 blocks of walking to car, weeding later on. Still not figuring out how to move enough in the summer schedule. Carrying the boo, while demanding, is not aerobic.
I am once again so underslept that after the reorder was prepared I did nothing but stare into the computer all day long, and not in a professionally productive way. My old flame turned up at work and I confess that today all I wanted was for her to go back to California.
She! Never! Calls! First!!!!
At least A. is home so bedtime should get back to normal.
water
iced tea
bagel with cream cheese (yeah)
seltzer
gazpacho
multi-grain baguette
cheese
builder's bar
milk
202--5 pounds down.
Therapy was not so exhausting this week. Exercise--6 blocks of walking to car, weeding later on. Still not figuring out how to move enough in the summer schedule. Carrying the boo, while demanding, is not aerobic.
I am once again so underslept that after the reorder was prepared I did nothing but stare into the computer all day long, and not in a professionally productive way. My old flame turned up at work and I confess that today all I wanted was for her to go back to California.
She! Never! Calls! First!!!!
At least A. is home so bedtime should get back to normal.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
6/24/07 10 pm
Day o' eating out:
cafe for breakfast: cheddar and apple crepe, green tea--too rich for me actually
lunch--what's lunch? I had some crudites and hors d'oeuvres and other things in French (no, actually, those were all the things in French--really if I tried I could probably get blogger to do the diacritical marks, but it sort of smacks of editing, something I'm loathe to do in the annex) at the 20 minutes of wedding reception I attended before taking Z. home.
diner for dinner--mozz. sticks and omelette with cheese, spinach, tomato, and wheat toast on the side
ice cream, but it wasn't worth finishing--that'll teach me to opt for soft serve as a grown-up
And I messed up Z.'s bedtime ritual such that she worked herself up into a fever pitch of misery around a bath that she simultaneously wanted to have and refused to have until I took the choice of having it away, at which point she firmly decided that a bath was what she needed. I held firm, but my god it hurts to be called mama by a child who's crazed with tears.
A. comes home tonight, thank god.
cafe for breakfast: cheddar and apple crepe, green tea--too rich for me actually
lunch--what's lunch? I had some crudites and hors d'oeuvres and other things in French (no, actually, those were all the things in French--really if I tried I could probably get blogger to do the diacritical marks, but it sort of smacks of editing, something I'm loathe to do in the annex) at the 20 minutes of wedding reception I attended before taking Z. home.
diner for dinner--mozz. sticks and omelette with cheese, spinach, tomato, and wheat toast on the side
ice cream, but it wasn't worth finishing--that'll teach me to opt for soft serve as a grown-up
And I messed up Z.'s bedtime ritual such that she worked herself up into a fever pitch of misery around a bath that she simultaneously wanted to have and refused to have until I took the choice of having it away, at which point she firmly decided that a bath was what she needed. I held firm, but my god it hurts to be called mama by a child who's crazed with tears.
A. comes home tonight, thank god.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
6/23/07 11:20 pm
hoo boy.
I think I'm sticking to menu reporting right now--though I will say that I did manage to put together a shabbat dinner yesterday night at which we FORGOT to bless the challah. It was as if it was not on the table. And I forgot to bless my kid, too. It will be good when A. comes home.
Today, what we mostly ate was challah-based snacks. Toast w/cream cheese and cinnamon sugar for breakfast, a peach for me, an apricot for Z. Lunch was something or other--oh, leftover ravioli for me; Z. ate the rest of the extensive snack leftover from shul (really, I had packed her a full lunch: almonds, goldfish crackers, apricot, string cheese, water). We had lots of limeade. We slept for 3 1/2 hours. Both of us. And I'm still tired, because I sabotaged my bedtime last night. Z. had almonds and honey bunnies for snack when she woke up. For dinner, we had peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches with milk, apples, and cheese, because there was nothing in the pantry to cook because I didn't make it to the co-op yesterday. For some reason Z. is resistant to bread, so she opened up the sandwich to get at the honey, made toothmarks in the apple, and feasted on smoked gouda. Ice cream for dessert.
There was fruit at the wedding event we went to in the evening. Which was past Z.'s bedtime and I was, err, ambitious and guilt-ridden to even try it. (The bride is someone who I used to be much closer to and most of the initial fault for our drift is mine.)
Umm. Yeah. Right. That was buried in there. I went to shul this morning. Because of the aufruf (=bride and groom are called to the torah, everyone throws candy). It was the first time other than Z.'s birthday that I didn't leave in tears since I can't remember when, but it was also more of a party than really services. A low-davenning day. And the bride's stepfather, a Nationally Prominent Rabbi, did this thing of after each aliyah he interpreted the portion in English, which was LONG. I spent almost the entire time on the playground, anyway, and it was jumping. We had San Francisco weather today--no humidity, 70's, balmy--and there are no kids' services for the summer, so the playground minyan was the place to be.
I think I'm sticking to menu reporting right now--though I will say that I did manage to put together a shabbat dinner yesterday night at which we FORGOT to bless the challah. It was as if it was not on the table. And I forgot to bless my kid, too. It will be good when A. comes home.
Today, what we mostly ate was challah-based snacks. Toast w/cream cheese and cinnamon sugar for breakfast, a peach for me, an apricot for Z. Lunch was something or other--oh, leftover ravioli for me; Z. ate the rest of the extensive snack leftover from shul (really, I had packed her a full lunch: almonds, goldfish crackers, apricot, string cheese, water). We had lots of limeade. We slept for 3 1/2 hours. Both of us. And I'm still tired, because I sabotaged my bedtime last night. Z. had almonds and honey bunnies for snack when she woke up. For dinner, we had peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches with milk, apples, and cheese, because there was nothing in the pantry to cook because I didn't make it to the co-op yesterday. For some reason Z. is resistant to bread, so she opened up the sandwich to get at the honey, made toothmarks in the apple, and feasted on smoked gouda. Ice cream for dessert.
There was fruit at the wedding event we went to in the evening. Which was past Z.'s bedtime and I was, err, ambitious and guilt-ridden to even try it. (The bride is someone who I used to be much closer to and most of the initial fault for our drift is mine.)
Umm. Yeah. Right. That was buried in there. I went to shul this morning. Because of the aufruf (=bride and groom are called to the torah, everyone throws candy). It was the first time other than Z.'s birthday that I didn't leave in tears since I can't remember when, but it was also more of a party than really services. A low-davenning day. And the bride's stepfather, a Nationally Prominent Rabbi, did this thing of after each aliyah he interpreted the portion in English, which was LONG. I spent almost the entire time on the playground, anyway, and it was jumping. We had San Francisco weather today--no humidity, 70's, balmy--and there are no kids' services for the summer, so the playground minyan was the place to be.
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