"This case deserves to be a classic." *

The Queen of Japan narrates the following story:
A young Japanese boy, Sunoco, discovers his father has been killed. He enlists the help of the Queen, who orders Sherlock Holmes to time-travel (from present-day America) to help solve the mystery. Sherlock discovers that Sunoco’s father was murdered by a pig-Latin-speaking Roman centurion who had traveled to Japan for that explicit purpose. The Queen, Sunoco, and Sherlock band together to capture and imprison the centurion. And then Sherlock time-travels back home, and the Queen adopts Sunoco to become the prince.

The End.

Written, directed, and produced by Group #5 (Primo, A, E, and T).
Courtesy of Primo's first grade opera workshop project.

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*Sherlock Holmes, The Adventure of the Priory School

"The Shepherd-boy shouted in an agony of terror: 'Pray, do come and help me; the Wolf is killing the sheep,' but no one paid any heed to his cries..."

Immediately after I posted the last post, the contractions stopped.
(That reminds me of that old joke about the coughing coffin...does anyone know what I am talking about?)

Anyhoo, the contractions eased up, so I am back to merely being grumpy, uncomfortable, and breathless. Exacerbated by the fact that now the public schools are not going to strike, they feel free to declare two-hour delays for just about anything including, it seems, the superintendent's hangnails. Oh, all RIGHT, I know we had an ice storm but when I was in school...let me tell you, uphill both ways, barefoot, in the snow...blah blah blah....

I did something else last night I am now really sorry I did (other than leading my Internet pals down the garden path): I skipped ahead in a book I was mostly enjoying to find out what happened and am pretty sure I ruined reading the rest of the book, since what happened in the book was of course meant to devastate the reader, and I actually didn't much care.

WHAT was I thinking? Now I need to rethink my hospital books again...

Oh! And I may not have a baby yet, but I am the proud owner of a lovely silver Honda Odyssey minivan (the whole process involved much less pushing than childbirth, too). I haven't driven an automatic since I learned to drive eons ago, but I suppose I'll manage. It's wonderful and ROOMY.

**************

*Aesop, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"

"Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air, we wawl and cry." *

All that contracting and pressure and ouchies, and so out of breath last night that I couldn’t even sleep, and I am still only 1 cm. SO unfair. But my blood pressure was waaaaaayyy up – because today’s appointment and next week’s appointment had been cancelled – NOT by me – and my chart was missing.

Remember when I told you – did I tell you? – that I told H that he had to remember one thing, that I was strep B positive this pregnancy? And he said, “Well, it’s not as if it’s not in your chart. And how am I supposed to remember that?” And I glared at him and said, “*I* will be in labor. Surely you can remember ONE MEASLY LITTLE THING if I ask you to.” (He looked suitably abashed and mumbled, “Yes, but don’t call me Shirley.”) And there I go this morning, with NO CHART.

No wonder my normally lovely low blood pressure was 140 over 100. But they found the chart and resolved the appointment issue – turns out that the fact of a simple phone call – by me - to suss out the situation at my old doctor’s new practice was enough to cause appointments to be cancelled and charts to be moved, even though I had signed no release forms or cancelled any appointments my own damn self. Jesus Crisis.

When they rechecked my blood pressure before sending me home – no closer to labor than when I’d arrived – it was back to normal. So, I am still contracting, and am still hurting, and can’t breathe, and am very very VERY grumpy, and can’t even think about food, but I am apparently NOT about to have a baby, say, anytime in the next 24 hours. Dammit.

I zipped through The Wednesday Wars last night, though, so must replace that on my hospital stack. I LOVED it. I want to own it, will definitely reread it, and it prompted me to hunt down a copy of The Tempest to reread. I don’t know what happened to my pretty little blue clothbound Yale Shakespeare volume, but I dug out one of my volumes of the teeny red leather Works of Shakespeare – the ones that turn my fingers red, like dyed pistachios do - and started in. (I wasn’t about to lug around my Riverside.) So yeah, I am such a dork that I lay in my doctor’s examining room on my left side, waiting for my blood pressure to decrease, and read Shakespeare.

I thought I had more to say but in the hour since I started writing this post, I have started experiencing what may well be real contractions. So I'll wrap up now and go lie down. And wait for H to return from the car dealership. I called him at work and asked him to bring me a vanilla milkshake, but apparently he got distracted and is bringing me a blue minivan instead.

*************

*King Lear, Act 4, sc. 6, 179–180

Q: Once I'm in the hospital to deliver, who will see me in that position? *

My dear ones, I got NOTHING. No energy, no creativity, nothing to say to anyone, not even you.

I am sitting around (feeling somewhat akin to Baron Harkonnen), waiting for contractions to begin in earnest. I KNOW my due date is 8 days away, but frankly I am surprised I made it this far. No, I haven’t eaten pineapple or spicy food, had lots of sex (PUH-LEASE, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place), or resorted to nipple stimulation; I am not THAT eager. But I am doing a whole lot of wishing and praying and silent whispering to the fetus to GET. OUT. NOW (not that I don’t love you , baby…).

Public schools had a two-hour delay today – high winds, I guess? Who the hell knows? Not me. And Seg’s back at preschool for the first time in something like a week, still coughing like he’s afflicted by black lung but looking and acting considerably perkier. I am forgoing the usual housework Terzo and I do in the mornings to edit a couple papers before the baby comes. Oh, and, you know, write a post.

I finished the third Sally Lockhart novel yesterday – and in hopes of discovering more about the delicious coupling of Sally and Daniel Goldberg, and reading more adventures involving the delectable Jim, I requested The Tin Princess from the library.

I am about halfway through The Friday Night Knitting Club - reminiscent of Jennifer Chiaverini’s Elm Creek Quilt novels, which is a good thing. As usual in an ensemble piece, there are characters I enjoy and some that drive me batty. Some of the plot is out of left field, but that’s ok, there’s enough going on to distract from the occasional creak and groans of plot maneuvering. A very enjoyable read, so far. And it’s making me want to pick up knitting needles again. Dear Suse tried to teach me how to purl via the Internet and email, but I think I need hands-on instruction. My mother-in-law knits, and rather well, so when she returns from Florida, I will ask her to teach me to purl. Remedial Knitting 101. I don’t really want to do anything too complicated, maybe make a scarf or something. I like the idea of acquiring the womanly arts : )

I am still reading Loving Frank - two things: Frank Lloyd Wright was an egotistical, self-absorbed asshole, no matter how talented, and 2) it took me a while to figure out that it is a fictionalized account of the Taliesin murders, which are horrific. I will finish it but maybe not right now. I happen to know children die, and I am not sure I can cope with children dying right now (remember my idiocy in reading Sophie’s Choice while pregnant with Primo? Yeah, don’t want to repeat that mistake…)

My pile of books to take to the hospital keeps changing. Currently the stack includes The Friday Night Knitting Club, I Love You, Beth Cooper, and The Wednesday Wars. Yes, yes, I have some toiletries packed up, and some yoga pants and sweatshirts, but the books are the important thing, don’t you think? I mean, TWO WHOLE DAYS. Yes, of course, I have to feed the baby and whatnot, but still…one baby is nothing compared to the three I’ve got to wrangle at home. And once I get my epidural, I’ll have hours in which to read until I have to push. Contractions, take me away!

*********

* A: Authorized personnel only -- doctors, nurses, orderlies, photographers,
florists, cleaning crews, journalists, etc.

"Dani the girl is singing songs to me beneath the marquee...of her soul..." *

Cusk’s glory is her style, cold and hard and devastatingly specific, empathetic but not sympathetic. - Los Angeles Times

“…the twenty-first-century version of Austen or Thackeray…” – Baltimore Sun

Her prose is called stunning (Christian Science Monitor); evocative and elegant (London Times). Unerring. Masterful. Pitch-perfect.

I wangled a free review copy of Rachel Cusk’s latest novel about a group of mothers in a tony London suburb. I vaguely recalled not liking her previous outing In the Fold but figured that might just be a fluke, a plot that didn’t grab me or unsympathetic characters.

I sat down with Arlington Park Thursday evening.

The first chapter – all five pages – described a rainstorm. In minute, excruciating, painstaking detail. I felt like perhaps I had wandered into a modern-day setting of a horror film like Dracula, or perhaps a supernatural thriller of some sort - surely something dramatic and horrific was going to occur, and soon. But by the end of the chapter, I felt sorry for the poor rain – it had been tortured and twisted and corkscrewed into submission. (I suppose she gets a point or two for anthropomorphizing the rain so successfully…)

When three pages into the next chapter, a character “asseverates” something, I knew I wasn’t going much further. Why merely assert when you can asseverate? When you can use all the big words you know to let your readers know how very SMART you are. (I started making a list of these SAT words that pissed me off, but gave up halfway through chapter four.)

And why skip describing a single detail when you can pad your book with gloriously useless and irrelevant sentences like the following:

…glimpsing the armoured forms of the big, expensive cars crouched among the shadows in driveways all along the park, she had a sort of oceanic sense of malevolence, of a great, diffuse evil silently undulating all around them in the darkness. In the Milfords’ own driveway an enormous glittering Mercedes crouched on the gravel on giant, ogreish tires. Its tinted windows seemed to cast on everything their shuttered, annihilating gaze. Juliet had felt a force of pure aggression emanating from its metal surfaces..

Never mind all the indiscriminate descriptions of pointless details which a better author would know did not pertain to the story in any way, shape, or form, OR add to the atmosphere.

He liked to bathe the giant sixth-formers in the sound of the early English composers.

”I just love coming here,” Christne expostulated, surveying the brutal grandeur of the car park, where the sky still hurled down its unsteady shafts of light and the morning’s rain stood in beads on the coruscating metal of cars and made them look reborn.

(It was about here that I started feeling perhaps Cusk missed her calling as a luxury car salesman or a high-end auto mechanic.)

This particular blurb made me physically nauseated; Cusk describes the stuffed animal lovey of one of the children in the book (and by the way, every single child is completely annoying and unlovable, but you would be too if you had one of these cold automatons for a mother):
Robbie was grey and worn out with Ella’s need for him. He looked shapeless and insensate with the drudgery of love.

Oh PUH-LEASE.

Cusk writes like a talented college sophomore who hasn’t learned yet that less is more, that leaving things out is ok, especially if all those details merely overwhelm your story and your character development.

She needs more than a good editor, however; she needs to be less in love with the sound of her own words, with the detailing of Every. Single. Thought. That flits across her mind.

Why do I get the feeling that she writes her first drafts with a fountain pen, in longhand, perhaps on curling sheets of foolscap stacked untidily on the corner of her writing desk? Just a guess...

Her prose is not cold or hard – although most of her characterization is – but neither is it florid or flowery. You can see and feel every gear turning, every cog sliding into place. It’s steely and mechanical and ugly - rather like a (well-constructed) Rube Goldberg contraption.

************

*"By the Way," Red Hot Chili Peppers

"One of the disadvantages of being a patrician is that occasionally you are obliged to act like one." *

Daddy goes away and the mice will play, 'cause Mama is a CUPCAKE.
We ordered pizza for dinner tonight, which we ate in front of the Pens-Flyers game, topped off with chocolate pie for dessert and a late bedtime. I now understand why some people parent like this all the time - it's just so much easier. Never mind that my kids will be tired tomorrow, and if we ate chocolate pie every night we'd all weigh a ton. Oh well, it's nice once in a while to be the nice guy...

************

Important questions:

When did LL Bean stop making River Driver’s shirts for adults? I own one; I need a few more. They seem to only make them for children now. Dumb. Of course, LL Bean is also the company that made my favorite bathing suit of all time – for ONE YEAR. Leaving me to swim for the rest of my natural life in board shorts and a tankini top.

Are you actually supposed to eat gingerbread houses? And if so, how? Do you just pick it apart, leaving the wreck of a house sitting out like the detritus of a real-live Hansel and Gretel attack?

How many times a day does a normal dog poop?

Why do I gag at the sight and smell of any sort of meat for most of my pregnancy only to gorge on flesh in the last two weeks? With Primo, it was Reubens; with this one, it’s cheese steaks with mushrooms and onions. I am actually physically nauseated even as I consume giant-pile-o’-meat, and yet I keep chewing.

Is it wrong that I bribe my seven-year-old to do his homework by promising to request books he wants to read from the library once he's finished?

*********

For those of you following along at home:
1 cm and 50%.
If you have to ask, you really don't want to know (Joke, I am pretty much being discreet for you. You're welcome).

***********

Finished the second Sally Lockhart book, on to the third. An am halfway through Loving Frank which is pretty good. I have Gina's strong recommendation of I Love You, Beth Cooper to read next, and The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books to sit by my bed for my leisurely perusal (and probably making of umpteen lists). Picked up used copies at the library book sale shelf of Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Gail Tsukiyama's Dreaming Water.

*************

Everyone is purging, it seems. Badger. Poppy. Me. Tonight I sorted and finally discarded about 95% of my mother's tax returns, estate papers, and other flotsam and jetsam. As the executrix, I had held onto everything JUST IN CASE. (Just in case WHAT? The federal government needed proof that my mother paid for all of her prescriptions from the years 1995 through 1998? that the house that's been under new ownership for eight years now once had perfectly reliable, promptly-paid phone service? that my mother's nursing license was up-to-date till the day she died? I clearly needed to get a good, firm grip.)

My mother's life now apparently has been reduced to two brown paper bags for the recycling dumpster. Sob. But honestly, how long am I mean to hang onto ten-year-old phone bills and fifteen-year-old tax returns? It was time. And ultimately it felt good.

But this baby had better come soon, because otherwise my house will be Spartan.

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*Marcus Licinius Crassus, in "Spartacus"

Perform random acts of pieness.*

January 23 is National Pie Day here in the States. It's a little-known holiday to most, but to bakers in general, and to me in particular, it is a sacred obligation. (OK, I made up that part, or at least the part about to other bakers.) I have long been on record for my love of all things pie, but it never hurts to remind everyone now and again.
Because pie ROCKS.

H has flown off to California for five days, so I can bake whatever I like best and not worry about his tastes. Which means I am making a coconut custard pie for ME. There are exactly two other people in this world who I am aware of liking coconut custard pie - my father-in-law who is currently in Florida, and my friend P who is in California and whom H will be seeing Saturday evening. I will tell H to taunt P with the idea of my coconut custard pie. (Of course, P is the sort of guy who might just hop a plane to get himself a piece of pie.)

Impossible Coconut Custard Pie

4 large eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 cup Bisquick
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup sugar
2 TBSP butter, softened
Coconut to taste (I only use Baker's)

Mix all ingredients in blender till smooth (I throw in a handful of coconut here, too.
Pour into a 9" or 10" pie plate (preferably one with 2" sides).
Sprinkle generously with grated coconut.
Bake about 45 minutes at 350 degrees, until done. Coconut will brown slightly, and a thin knife blade inserted in the middle should come out clean.
Cool on rack, and do not cut until completely cool.
Refrigerate after serving (if there's any left!).
Yummy cold, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, or late-night snack.


And this chocolate pie from James Villa's never-let-me-down-yet cookbook My Mother's Southern Desserts will be baked up for the boys who are chocolate fiends. I was initially looking for a basic chocolate pudding icebox sort of pie, but then decided this sounded too good and too easy not to try. I have never baked anything from this cookbook that was not delectable.

Plain Ole Dixie Chocolate Pie

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 cup cornstarch
4 large egg yolks
1/8 tsp salt
1-1/2 cups sugar
2 cups milk
2 tsp vanilla
1 prebaked 9" chocolate wafer pie shell (recipe below)
1 cup heavy cream,, whipped to stiff peaks

In large heavy saucepan, combine cocoa, cornstarch, egg yolks, salt, and sugar.
Beat well with a whisk till blended.
Over low heat, gradually add milk, whisk till smooth, and cook slowly until thickened, stirring constantly.
Remove pan from heat, add the vanilla, stir, and let cool.
Pour the mixture into the prepared pie crust.
Chill till slightly firm but not hard.
Serve topped with whipped cream.

Chocolate Wafer Pie Shell
1-1/2 cups finely crushed chocolate wafer crumbs (I may use chocolate grahams if I can't find the Nabisco wafers I like.)
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 350.
Grease 9" pie plate.
In medium bowl, mix wafer crumbs, butter and sugar, and mix till well-blended and crumbs are evenly moistened.
Press into bottom and sides of pie plate.
Bake till firm, about 10 minutes.
Allow to cool completely before filling.

Go forth and bake pie.
Or at least eat some.
We will be. And we can't do ALL the work. Some of us are very pregnant and need some help eating pie.

Oh, and here's your bonus pie track for the day: the delectable Ralph of Ralph's World, with Peggy's Pie Parlor Polka. (Follow the link, scroll down, and click on the appropriate player for "Peggy's Pie Parlor Polka.")

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*American Pie Council

You're 18, you don't know what you want. And you won't know what you want 'til you're 45, and even if you get it, you'll be too old to use it.*

Steph at Crooked House (in my opinion one of the most under-rated/read bloggers going - so go check her out NOW) has tagged me.

Here are the rules, which I am supposed to post:
- Link to the person that tagged you.
- Post the rules on your blog. - Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
- Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
- Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

Six Not-so-terribly-fascinating Things about Me

1) I am currently engrossed in my January/early February binge eating of those hard little cinnamon hearts that are sold only around Valentine’s Day. Yes, they turn my lips and tongue bright red (not to mention my fingertips and therefore the pages of any book I happen to be reading), and give me heartburn, and make my jaw ache – yet every year for about six weeks I buy and eat bags and bags of them.

2) I HATE to wear socks and/or shoes. The minute I get in my house, regardless of the outside temp, I kick off my shoes and rip off my socks and wander around barefoot, even if the rest of me is layered in wool sweaters and thermal undies. Even the Uggishs have not cured me of this habit.

3) I love snow. Not necessarily going out in it, although I do enjoy a good run in the falling snow, and I love to ski – but just the fact of snow. It’s like I have license to hang around the house and do nothing all day. Well, you know, as much nothing as I can get away with…

4) I really hate to throw things away. You never know when you might need x, y, or z…that said, I JUST pitched all the sympathy cards from my dad’s death (20 years ago) and my mom’s death (10 years ago). I felt coldhearted, but c’mon….what am I gonna do with them, use ‘em for craft projects with the kids?

5) I am vaguely ashamed of the fact that I am very interested in religion. Not just in an academic way, although had I gone to grad school for English lit, my dissertation topic would have had something to do with the direct influence of the church on the literature of 17th century England (yes, I adore John Donne). But in a more visceral way – although my brain argues there is no God, I can’t get past eighteen years of indoctrination and I still firmly believe in God, Heaven, and Hell. Not that I have the foggiest idea what exactly I think about all of them at the moment, other than I am meant to be writing a Lenten meditation for our church brochure and am totally stymied.

6) I have been pregnant four times – given birth three times – and I am still not sure, until my water breaks, if I am in labor or not. Pathetic, no?

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*Walter Stratford, in "10 Things I Hate About You" (a movie which I really need to own, I realize)