Mah Jongg Weekend

I went to the Lake of the Ozarks with Zelda, Gretchen, Tara, and Jackie. Tara's dad owns a little lake house down there. Lake of the Ozarks is a funny little place, all these coves and twisty turns as the water fills the valleys. Everything feels secluded and empty there in February. Last year when we went, I never went outside the whole weekend. This year I took a walk with Tara around their part of the lake, losing my sense of direction but having a nice walk with three happy dogs who befriended us.

We played 18 hours of mah jongg, in three stretches. There were 5 of us, which is perfect (6 would be, too, but 7 would get too impatient, I think, and only 4 means if one person gets tired early, the game is over). We noshed and talked and talked and talked.

Gretchen is a physical therapist, Zelda and I are teachers, Tara works for a professional association as an event planner, and Jackie is retired. The talk was heavy on the health care end of things but school, religion, and girl scouts featured prominently.

I won the least number of games (actually, I think Jackie did in the end when I won my 4th game Sunday morning). Zelda must have won over 12 times. Mah jongg is a complicated Chinese game, made more complicated by Jewish interference, and the 5 of us know it well after having played it for 7 years now.

No one got drunk. No one was sick in the morning.

Not a lot of serious talk around the board--but after the games were over on Saturday night, Zelda, Gretchen, and I stayed up until 2 talking about the ramifications of infidelity (not in abstract, but about people we each knew) and our girls. Then Zelda went to bed and I talked with Gretchen until 4:30 (at which point I told her just to go to bed, don't look at the clock, just go to bed).

I've had a stressful 6 months, frankly, although this is easily beaten by the last few years for Gretchen. I'm coming to an end of a chapter in the novel of my life--nothing so dramatic as marrying or graduating or having a baby, but a chapter that moves a lot of things along quickly in my day-to-day existence. I'm trying to work my head around a number of topics, including religion, work, my kids' school, house, and money.

In addition, there's a newish friendship that I'm still figuring how to navigate my way into--where do all the tiles fit, anyway? There are differences in gender and roles in this case--it isn't uncomfortable but I'm trying to piece it out and I can't say more about it except that I think he wants to be my friend and I think that's ok even though I pretty much, in the end, have all female friends, and even though this fact doesn't insulate me from strife or craziness (it welcomes it with open arms, frankly), it is always hard for me to figure someone out and at what point it's appropriate to say we're friends, and then when I compound that with the fact that he's a boy and he's not in on of the typical roles I'm used to in friends who are boys (brothers-in-law, old friends from college, and the large category of "husbands of girlfriends"), I just find myself not sure. Gretchen talks, and Gretchen listens, and she's been so busy the last 6 months or so that I haven't had a chance to really talk or listen to her. By the time it was 4:30, I had my head in the right spot and woke up ready to open the book again and start a new chapter.

We shuffle and deal out hands of 13 tiles, trying to puzzle out a hand from the random stuff we're dealt. Not to be too heavy handed in my metaphor there, but as that hand starts to come together, it's a mixture of luck, familiarity, and skill. I walked into my house Sunday afternoon with a good mix of the three, ready for the next bit of life.

Welcome to my Carnivale

I know I have been out of the blog world for a while now, save a picture here and there of one of my kids and a list of my top ten margarita flavors or whatever. I've been super super busy with the things I do, and, as exhausting as it is, I'm finding myself at another moment when Illegitimi non Carborundum would be a good motto to paint on my wall. I'm not just busy. I'm being wrung out. Again.

At my current organization, let's call it the traveling Carnivale, I am simply a roustabout--a workman. I am not the bearded lady, I am not a mentalist or a tarot card reader. I set up the tents and the ferris wheel and stay out of the way when I can.

The Carnivale is run by Management, but Samson of course is in charge of the day to day operations. He has to listen to Management and do what Management says, but he's the face of the Carnivale. We all like and support Samson. He does the right thing. He's on the side of the angels. He's worked in carnivals so long, he's seen it all and he knows how to be patient and take the long view. And he says what he means and doesn't beat around the bush.

I'm just a workman, but I get along with Samson. I ride along with the Carnivale and help him when I can.

I take some risks. I make some mistakes. Nobody dies. But some people, including Management, see me as an annoying presence in the Carnivale. Such is the story of my life. I'm annoying. Management is also not the biggest fan of Samson, for reasons that are not clear to the viewer. It's just the way of the world.

Samson wants to start a new act in the Carnivale, and I'm behind him 100% on this. Management was wary at first, and then saw the numbers and thought perhaps it would be good. The Carnivale hired a new entertainer. Everyone in the traveling company likes her. Then Management changed its mind. They were nixing the new act. "Maybe next year, maybe when we're more financially stable." Samson and I met with management and I was furious. But I didn't burn bridges right there in the room. I went home and thought. And fumed.

The thing is, the new act? It fits into our Carnivale better than many of our current acts, even. It's really good. I went around to other carnivals to learn more about the act and asked advice about what entertainer would be best to bring on board with us. It's more than the typical workman's job, but I felt passionate about it. It was going to be good.

Now I'm just a workman and I don't see the whole picture. Management may have my best interests at heart--if the Carnivale succeeds, my life is easier than if it disbands or shrinks. But I want this new act, and so do many of the other workmen and entertainers. We like this idea. But for some reason, we have no power with Management. Money talks and we're on Management's dime so we have nothing to say. Pack up the ferris wheel, load the wagons, keep your head down and shut your mouths.

But I was having a cup of coffee in the mess tent with one of the entertainers, I'll let her remain anonymous but she's good at what she does, and we decided we can't let Management dump the new girl on the dusty side of the road and wish her well. Not only that, but we'd be a better Carnivale with that act, and we both know it. And I admitted that I'm frustrated enough that I'm starting to think my talents might be better appreciated by another traveling company.

But I only sort of mean that. I like Samson and the fan dancer and the mind reader far too much to really walk away. And how many more years will traveling carnivals really prosper anyway? I need to stick with what I know, in the end.

So now we're a little group, it's not just me and Samson talking behind the wagons away from the crowd anymore. And I've got a bead on a good tent and the entertainer we've brought on board has lots of connections in her world. We could make it work. We just have to disobey Management, not get Samson shot and left behind in a ditch somewhere, and keep our faces out of the dusty wind.

At the risk of being thoroughly embarrassed

The lighting could be better. The background could be better. I could have had on a less frumpy sweater. Perhaps done something to my hair. And nose (shaking fist at my grandfather, the source of all my facial genetics...). But all that aside, here's what I want to do when I grow up. And what I'm starting to do already.

Billy Cooks

Billy's Muffin Tin Mix

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/2 cup coconut
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup sesame seeds

Directions: using measuring spoons and cups of various sizes, move ingredients from containers to muffin tin. Later Mom will add powdered milk, honey, and peanut butter and make them into no-bake pb balls. But that's later.

Ten on Yesterday: 10 ways getting an education degree prepared me for parenthood

Stolen from Lisa, who of course went to architecture school, which isn't as obvious a preparation for parenting as an education degree sounds like it would be. But it's not the teaching that prepared me.

1. I know most children's books by heart already and do not make the mistake of buying cruddy children's books that my kids would obviously prefer over Eric Carle and Beverly Cleary and I would want to throw against the wall. I don't have to learn the hard way.
2. There's a lot of playing with blocks in education courses. Already adept.
3. No child will ever be as crass as Jerome, as sad as Elizabeth, as bizarre as Kelly, as needy as Jeffrey. I can handle it.
4. I have a teacher voice. I can be loud without yelling.
5. My brain got to rest for at least 3 years of college, so the first few years with a baby are not surprising in their mind-numbing capacity.
6. I have been coated on other people's bodily fluids so many times, well, it just doesn't upset me too much anymore.
7. I am used to people giving me un-asked-for advice.
8. I have that look. Practiced for a long time before Fiona arrived on the scene. The "I will wither your soul" look.
9. I am used to constant interruption. I thrive on it.
10. I am used to being mocked by people who think they are smarter than I am.

Bit of Snow

It's snowing a bit. And I don't have enough milk to make french toast, although I have homemade bread and farm fresh eggs. It's time to run for milk, regardless. We're doing our semi-annual "eat the pantry clean" thing we do--like use those frozen peaches (that it turns out I am still allergic too), the cans of green beans, that sort of thing. It keeps us from reaching into the pantry and pulling out a jar of capers and wondering why we have it, when we got it, and what should we do with it now. So the cupboard is pretty bare, and now it's snowing and that means in St. Louis that tomorrow I can go to the store, but most St. Louisans panic and run for staples right before the snow hits.

What else? Fiona is all arranged and ready to start doing some Irish dance again. Not at a school--but with a friend from atrium and the parish who homeschools and whose mom was shocked by the Irish dance culture (but really wanted her daughter to have the opportunity to learn that sort of dance). So Fiona's going to do a little demonstration, a little teaching, and together they'll piece together a few more traditional sets while they're at it.

I kind of want Fiona to teach me, too.

Bree is over. They're playing a playstation game called Little Big Planet. It is benign and narrated by Stephen Fry, but I can't work my head around it. I am officially old. Jake can. I'll stick to Katamari.

I made peanut butter balls to get rid of sesame seeds and coconut in the pantry (again with the clean out). They are devouring them.

It took 15 minutes to go from "the streets are melting the snow when it lands" to "the streets are white with snow." I knew it was going to be something when all the juncos and sparrows and mourning doves were huddled together on the fence, on the branches of the magnolia, on the wires.

I have a meeting tonight for school. It's called the Mission Keepers. I'm pretty sure it was named by a consultant (eye roll). But I'm going to check my cynicism at the door. There has been an implied offer of wine if I attend.

Now it's time to go make deer burgers and get potatoes together for baking. Greens, too, with bacon. Not everything is from deep in the pantry this week. The piano teacher should be here momentarily as well. Things get busy on a snowy Monday afternoon.

Ode to Joy

Another ode.

Which reminds me of the time a gal at church with a daughter about 9 months older than Fiona, back when Fiona was about 3, invited me over for a "playdate" but when we arrived, her daughter was at preschool. So Fiona kind of wandered around, bored and somewhat disappointed (but Fiona is not too hard persuaded that things will be ok), while the mom read me Pablo Neruda's Odes. In Spanish and then in translation. I think, in the end, she was so desperate for adult conversation that she forgot the key piece to a playdate--having kids play--and jumped straight to the "please be my friend and talk poetry with me" part. Of course I've never since been to a playdate that involved discussing poetry...

But this is an Ode to Joy. Actually Joy--the soap, the lemon-scented soap for dishes.

Growing up, we always used Joy. We didn't have a lot of brand loyalty--the cheapest bath soap that wasn't Ivory; whatever tomato paste was on sale, etc. Many things were interchangeable. But never once do I remember using a dish soap that wasn't Joy in my parents' kitchen.

My grandmother, Penny, is a Joy apologist. Or as she says: Joysoap. You can use Joysoap for most anything, and I don't mean in the Big Fat Greek Wedding Windex joke way. She had real evidence and a lifetime of experience with Joysoap. Your plant has white flies? Take it out of the pot, wash the roots in joy and water, and repot it. Hostas have bugs eating the leaves? Spray them in a diluted joy and water solution.

My father injected his ash trees with the stuff and they haven't succumbed to whatever is killing the ash trees in our neighborhood.

Besides its gardening uses, it cleans, too. It was our bubble bath growing up. Yes--there was Joy in the kitchen and Joy under the sink in the bathroom (I would never use this because of Daisy's eczema, but my siblings and I were a hardier stock). We washed cars with it, outdoor furniture, diluted it with water and sprayed down the counters.

I got married and we used Joy, but sometimes Jake would pick up Dawn. Dawn smells like soap, and the dishes smell like soap when you wash them in it. Although both Dawn and Joy clean your dishes (and I know there are Dawn folks out there who do everything with Dawn, wash the dog, dye their hair, whatever), if there has to be any soap residue odor left over, lemon just makes more sense to me than, well, Dawn-scent.

So I started insisting on Joy. We go camping with the neighbors and I bring Joy with me so my dishes don't smell like Dawn. I've soaked in enough tubs with Joy bubbles and washed enough dishes in Joy sinks I'm probably partially made of the stuff at this point.

And then it disappeared.

It wasn't at Target. It wasn't at Schnucks (our local grocery store, the closest to my house and the one I "know"). I told my friend the other mary and she looked for it too. Dierbergs had it. Dierbergs is only in the county so it's a bit of a hike. And they didn't always have it. She looked online. Its link on the website was down. We were worried.

I tried other soaps. Ajax. Palmolive (lemon scent). The eco-friendly stuff (7th generation and its many knockoffs). Lavender dishes. Hmm.

I would go to my parents' house and I'd find, hoarded under the kitchen sink, 12 small bottles of Joy. "I saw it at Save-A-Lot (or some such place--Walgreens?) and knew I needed to grab it while it was still there." I wondered about the sustainability of this. Could we realistically gather up and store enough Joy to last the rest of our lives? What about my poor kids? What would they use? Would they be forced to convert to some other dish soap? The thought of them not following my traditions saddened me.

For Christmas last year, the other mary handed me an extra gift bag. "From my private collection," she said. She's not a wine drinker and frankly, I'm not either (I'll drink any white; I have only two reds I will drink because all the others I've had make me flush like a drunk Irishman, which I really am not--Irish, yes, but not the other thing). So I was surprised. It was hefty, the bag, and I reached in and pulled out a large bottle of Joy.

My kids think I'm crazy. I probably am. But it was among the best Christmas presents ever. "You have to conserve it," the other mary said.

Later, she brought me a 40 ounce bottle she'd found somewhere. I was conserving--I had switched to Ajax for dish use, which didn't work nearly as well but did the job. Joy was for the other things. The more important things. But with 40 ounces, I could afford to splurge.

She gave Fiona another bottle as a door prize when we had dinner over there a few weeks back. It went straight to the counter by the sink. I used to to wash some casserole dishes I knew the dishwasher would fail to clean (it's an ability thing, not for lack of trying--it just doesn't have enough appliance IQ to do some things). That familiar smell of lemon attacking grease. And it worked. And I was happy.

Perhaps it was a stock thing--maybe we'll see it on our shelves again someday. Until then, I know to grab it when I see it. Probably in the end, I'll be dead and Fiona, Daisy, Billy, and maybe a few grandchildren and in-laws will be standing in the basement together, sighing at the spiders and the mess, and say, "What was the deal with Mom and all the Joy? Look at all this."

Level II First Aid

I am now CPR/AED/Level II First Aid trained and ready to respond.

The CPR/AED course was good. Lots of hands-on. The video did most of the teaching. Even though the teacher used the word "abominable" instead of abdominal, it was fine.

The Level II First Aid? Goodness. Being the daughter of an ER nurse meant I was already Level II First Aid trained. Seriously. You know it's bad when the instructor corrects what the book says and then you correct it back--that yes, that IS what you're supposed to do with a nosebleed (why does everyone still persist in tilting the head back?).

It was 7 hours of my life plus 70 minutes in the car but now it's done and the cadettes can go to the Smokies and I am ridiculously in charge of healthcare first response first aid stuff when we camp. The Girl Scouts usually require 3 courses and a test run to pick your nose in public, but I can be the registered first responder at a day camp, say, and determine the health and safety everything just as if I were a nurse or EMT. I can't go beyond my training, but I can stand in and tell people what to do and what not to do. I can also inspect hockey equipment. Just saying. It's scary that this course counted for anything. Or maybe there are people out there who don't know what to do in the case of a stroke or a knife sticking out of someone's thigh. Probably, when I think about it.

Again, it's too bad I can't test out of things based on life experience. Oh wait, I CAN. That's what I'm doing next month with art education.

But now all is well between me and the Girl Scouts and all will be well. Even if I get a pain in my abominable area just thinking about my wasted Saturday...

Ode to Ridiculousness

Ah yes. It's the frequently recurring Girl Scout post.

My cadette troop is planning a trip to the Smoky Mountains this summer. It is going to rock. We're camping, and hiking and cooking over a fire and being in that lovely place. I'm even looking forward to the drive (I'm also looking forward to the date--I mean, by that time in the summer, many things that are up in the air that I probably can't talk about, not Girl Scout related, will be knit up and done).

In order to go on a trip for longer than 2 days, one must have a Level II First Aider. Not just camping trips, but any sort of trip. You could be going to Chicago to visit museums for a week and still need a sports first aid certified person. Whatever. That's the rule, and we don't have a Level II first aider. We have my coleader, who has Level I, with CPR/AED. And we also have one of the moms, who is an LPN.

A week's worth of non-returned phone calls finally ended with the training person from my council calling me back today. This is the woman who wants me to be a trainer and had me jump through all of those hoops already. Some choice quotes from our conversation:

"What form are you looking at? Where are you getting this information?" (which then led to 5 minutes on hold).

"No, of course you can't count one person's CPR/AED and another person's Level II first aid together." (because in a real emergency, they'd NEVER WORK TOGETHER, OF COURSE).

"Well, the best way to get the right answers is to call the right person the first time."

"Nobody at Girl Scouts [council] knows what everyone does. It's ridiculous to think we'd know--there are hundreds of programs at Girl Scouts. If I had to remember what everyone was in charge of, I wouldn't be able to do my own job."

"You would know what you needed to do if you took the training course for how to plan a girl scout troop trip."

The trip is on. We're going. It's a mother-daughter trip so it might just be that we go, as friends from school, with moms. Or I might be able to make it to the Level II first aid course before then. Maybe. It's just...why is it my fault that I didn't read someone's mind and know that Shaunquavia Rice-Pudding was the person I was supposed to talk to? I thought it only made sense to ask my neighborhood (volunteer) coordinator, since the form needs her initials for approval! Then I figured it would go to our council representative. Silly me. Silly me for thinking this would be simple. I actually got to say, "I'm ready to jump through all your hoops, but you won't even tell me which ones I need to jump through."

She doesn't like me.

The feeling is mutual.

On the other end, I have two new girls joining my troop. Both are 4th graders, which will shore up the 4th grade contingency but will leave them all behind next year because I'm running my troop as cadettes-only next year. It could be that next year, with a start of 4 juniors, I can be the certified indentured servant and go camping/archery/canoeing with them but they can run themselves as a junior patrol in our troop.

I now have 20 girls. Nothing succeeds like success, but really? REALLY?

One of the new girls, her mom is totally on top of things thus far. The other one? She keeps sending me overly polite emails about her daughter joining, which would be no big deal except she keeps calling me Brittany even though all my responses clearly come from my email address with BRIDGETT written in it, and I sign it that way each time...just a little demoralizing. Want to join my troop? Learn my name. You don't even have to spell it right. But I'm not Gretchen or Barbara or Brittany.

And then there's cookies. No drama from the older girls but...

Odetta, in my older girl troop, has a step-sister named Dasani who is in Daisy's grade at school and came to several meetings without actually signing up and finally I sent an clear note home to her father, Ogden, with whom I've had trouble before, that I needed either a $12 check or a short statement of why that was beyond their means; I had no response so figured the matter closed until Dasani's mom Platinum called me to say that she had been selling cookies and when should she turn in her form, separate from Ogden's, which sort of forced me to meet Platinum and have her fill out the registration form (for which she also failed to pay me or write a short statement of need, and I simply filled it in for her based on her tale of woe involving leaving her 4 bedroom brick home in Kentucky to come up here and fight Ogden's lies in court to get her babies back), and since then she has turned in the form, in my mailbox, not my cookie manager's, with a big post-it note marked "COPY AND RETURN TO ME ASAP" which made me almost just take a match out and light the danged thing on fire but instead I turned it in to Rachel and have fielded 3 calls from Platinum today making sure everything was straight and curse the Girl Scouts for giving her my number because I think I'm now in the middle of a custody battle and Ogden is not going to be happy and I could probably care less than I do but I just don't see how.

It's too dark to go shoot arrows at something. I'm going to have to settle with the elliptical in the next room to get this frustration clear of my system.

And I have a cough.