I’ve told my class that they’re doing a good job memorizing “Who Has Seen the Wind?” Today I read them the rather epic “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and several minutes into it, a hand shot up.
“Um, Miss C., are you going to have us memorize this?”
Filed under: Overthought
. . . but I think that a weekend’s quality is proportionate to the number of pairs of socks it leaves disgustingly dusty.
Context: we were recounting how wonderful a kidney transplant was for my great aunt. #5 piped up:
“If I die, you can give me away.”
Filed under: In the Kitchen
I recently saw a 70’s era recipe for a dish called “Bruncho Relaxo.” Even better than the name is the description, which starts: “No more Mexican than the water chestnuts it contains. . .” It’s hard to know which is more irreverent: Gringos trying to Mexican-ize names of non-Mexican recipes, or cooks using Swiss cheese and water chestnuts together.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Whatever ill facebook has done to society, at least it has brought back the sensible custom of using maiden names as middle names when identifying one’s self. It’s might not be best for everyone, but it’s less clunky than hyphenating *, less awkward than having a different last name than one’s spouse and children, and more helpful than dropping a maiden name altogether.
*If you’re Welsh, having a hyphenated name is cool. Maybe it has to do with the melody of Welsh names, or the fact that if you put two Welsh surnames together, you get a reasonable number of vowels for one surname.
If you know her, you can hear her inflection as she said these:
“I think drivers who don’t use their blinkers are so annoying! And I don’t even drive.”
“The LA Times- where every page is the opinion page. . .”
Sometimes I think she is actually a few generations older than I am.
Filed under: overheard
Context: youth group discussion of Caravaggio, his religious art, and his tragic life. This image flashes on the screen so that we can discuss the significance of humility killing pride, the longing for pardon, etc. Somewhere to my right I hear:
Cute shirt!
Filed under: Uncategorized
I don’t want to admit how many already-read, never-to-be-read-again books on clutter I got rid of while I cleaned out this week, or how long I’d been storing them.
#6 sometimes listens along with #5’s books on tape. A recent selection was Emma, by Jane Austen. I asked if they had finished it, and #6 had this literary criticism:
“Yeah. I knew what was going to happen after the first disk.”
“How?”
“It was obvious! She hated him. That’s a dead giveaway that she’ll marry him.”
Filed under: In the Kitchen
“Oddly, it’s not real cooks who insist that the finest ingredients are necessary to produce a delicious something. . . Real cooks take stale bread and aging onions and make you happy.”
Susan Wiegand
