Why Can't Us Again?

Because the Yankees, that's why.

Well, the WFCs will have to relinquish their title, apparently, having lost Game 6 to the Yankees in rather convincing fashion. It was clear pretty much from the beginning which was the better team in this Series, but the better team does not always win and so I held out hope for the Phillies.

I do like this bunch of players that they have now - they don't quit, and they always think they can pull one out of the fire. They play hard.  They seem surprised when they lose. I hope the team can keep together for a few more years.

I didn't watch too much of the Series, really. I missed the first half of Game 1 handing out candy at Not Bad President Elementary. I missed all of Game 2 attending a fundraiser for the local YWCA, who eased my pain by having a number of local chefs put me into a calorie coma with their donated skills. And the stress levels were just too high to watch all of the innings in the other games - I'd peek in here and there to see how they were doing and often watch a couple of innings before heading off to do something else for a while. This was true even for Game 5, which the Phillies won. Although honestly, a six-run lead with one out in the 8th inning should not be that exciting nor should it end with the tying run at the plate.

During this World Series I have discovered that I seem to have raised two genuine Phillies fans.

Oh, it's not just that Tabitha and Lauren watched almost as much of the Series as I did, or that Tabitha especially would ask me questions about the games as they progressed. It isn't even that Lauren was excited to wear her Phillies shirt to school on the same days that I wore mine to teach at Home Campus (my students put up with me good naturedly).

No, I think it became clear that you can take the gene pool out of Philadelphia but you can't take the Philadelphia out of the gene pool when I flipped over to the game during a commercial break in tonight's episode of Mythbusters (of course we were watching Mythbusters - be real). The girls instantly looked to the corner of the screen, where it showed the Yankees winning by a score of 4 to 1 at the time. "We're getting crushed!" they cried. "We're going to DIE!"

Optimism is not the byword of the true Philadelphia fan.

And so others celebrate somewhere else, and last year's WFCs have to go back to the drawing board for next year. On the plus side, though, I get my life back, and it was quite a ride while it lasted.

Go Phillies!

A Day at the Museum

The girls were off from school on Friday, so we decided to cash in some of the furlough time that we are required but not permitted to take and go off to the museum. We'll explain it to the state somehow.

We like museums around here. I ran one for five years, and Tabitha and Lauren still miss the place - I used to take them with me sometimes when I closed up the place for the night, making the backwards loop through the buildings and locking doors behind me. And the Kid's Museum to the south of us is always a big hit, even though they're getting a bit big for the place. A couple summers ago we even spent some time at the Smithsonian, which just floored the girls.

Museums - good things.

Last August Kim and the girls went to the Milwaukee Public Museum as part of a Girl Scouts field trip, and Tabitha and Lauren have been talking about it ever since. It's the coolest! The fab! Teh Shiny! Made of pure unadulterated awesome, simmering in awesome sauce with awesome-flavored awesome-bits on the side. Naturally, they wanted Dad to see this storehouse of amazements too.

So off we went.

The Milwaukee Public Museum is in some respects a throwback - a mad jumble of haphazardly-explained artifacts, displays and hands-on exhibits that has no particular overarching theme other than being an effort to put as much odd stuff under one roof as possible. It's kind of like a college dorm that way, only without the odor of stale beer. Although this was Milwaukee, so finding that wouldn't have been all that hard, had we wanted to do so.

We elected to pass on that.

The first thing we did was go to the Butterfly Exhibit, which is a good-sized room kept uncomfortably hot and humid and filled with the tamest butterflies in the midwest - the sort of butterflies that will not only land on you if you stand still long enough, but will hit you up for spare change while doing so. The whole room is a whirl of motion, some of it from the insects and the rest from the various denominations of children that flutter about the place more frantically than the butterflies do.

Needless to say this was a highlight.

As was the display of mammoth bones.

And the large plastic bug.

The European village was also quite a thing - a room roughly the size of a lecture hall crammed with huts, each hut decorated in the ethnic style of a specific European nationality from about 1850. Some have cats. You get to this village by passing through the Milwaukee Street Scene from roughly 1900 - where you lose the fifty years I don't know - but you can't get through the Milwaukee Street Scene without hitting up the Old Fashioned Candy Store, where they do indeed sell candy from the 1950s, which is another half century added in somewhere. You have to wait until you leave to eat the candy, however, since there is no candy-eating in the museum.

It's a regular vortex o' culture, indeed it is. Plus Lemonheads.

We cruised through the mummy section, gawped at the Native American displays, and stared in awe at the dinosaur battle that was lovingly recreated for our viewing pleasure by someone with a fascination for reptilian intestines. There was geography and biology, and I enjoyed looking at the 19th-century American coins as well.

If it's old and vaguely anthropological, you'll find it at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Bring the family!

All Hallows, All the Time

We need to spread out our holidays around here.

In addition to the usual holidays that happen in the last 63 days of the year - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve - we also have all four of our birthdays plus Kim and I celebrate our wedding anniversary. It does keep the rest of the year on a relatively sane schedule, but once the leaves turn it is just WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH right through to the new year.

We got our holiday season off right, though, by squeezing both Halloween and another go-round of Lauren's birthday into this weekend.

Saturday was the Official Birthday, as opposed to the party day that we celebrated last week, and Lauren was just buzzing. Seven! Lucky number seven! We had planned to go out to dinner on Sunday as a family birthday party and open family gifts then, but really how much of a chance of success did that plan have? About as much as the Phillies seem to be having, alas.

So there was a brief interlude of happy materialism on Saturday afternoon, as Lauren dove into her family's gifts. She got quite a number of things, most of which have been well played with already - she got a number of "sculptures" from different sources, for example, and has introduced them to all her other sculptures during the nighttime game she and Tabitha sometimes play before bed.

But the big hit, at least so far, was the stilts she got from Mom and Dad. All weekend long - clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, all around the house, followed shortly by CRASH, BAM, giggle, giggle, pause, clomp, clomp, clomp.

Why we have a television, I do not know.

Partied out temporarily, it was time to get back to Halloween! There were pumpkins to carve!

We let the girls do most of the carving this year, though we handled the big knives and the most stubborn part of the scraping. Carving pumpkins is fun, but every time I get started on it all I can think of is Linus Van Pelt's anguished cry when Lucy first sinks her knife into her pumpkin: "You didn't tell me you were going to kill it!"

But kill them we did. With malice aforethought and pumpkin guts aplenty, much to the joy of the hamsters, who will feast on pumpkin seeds for the rest of the year.

 

 

And then it was trick or treating time!

Since there was no Dave O visiting this year to stay home and hand out candy, Kim volunteered to do that and I took the girls out foraging.

There is something truly odd about marching up to people's houses and demanding candy, and them actually giving it. Odd, but reassuring - there is still generosity in the world. Though I have to admit our traffic was down all around this year - fewer kids stopping by our house, and fewer houses to hit on our neighborhood rounds. Some years are good years around here, with a hundred kids stopping by or more, but some years you're lucky to get half that. Usually that means bad times - the Halloween after 9/11 was rather sparse, for example, and last year during the onset of the Recent Economic Unpleasantness people were also thin on the ground. This year? Maybe the flu. Who knows. But we had a good time anyway, and the girls came back with reasonably full baskets of goodies.

And Tabitha can have the ones with peanuts in them this year, which just excited her no end.

Hang on to your hats, folks - the holiday season has arrived and the roller coaster has left the station.  

Halloween and Baseball

There are times when you have to make choices in life. Last night was one of those times.

Through a combination of events too vague to recall, I have once again become the room parent for Tabitha's class at Not Bad President Elementary. It's not a bad gig, really - you make a few phone calls, show up to a few events, and you get to hang out with your kids at school. Plus people are generally very responsive when the Room Parent calls.  It's not much in the way of power, but it's mine and I'll take it.

Last night was the annual Halloween Parade down at NBPE - all of the kids come to school in their costumes and go from classroom to classroom holding out paper bags which they have decorated (and which are intentionally on the small side, the better to limit intake). We room parents or the folks we have gotten to volunteer in our place then fill those bags with goodies from the buckets and buckets of candy that people have brought in ahead of time.

Buckets.  You have never seen that much sugar in one place at one time.  It's all you can do to stuff it into those tiny bags and get rid of it.  Although the candy distributor does get to take a little off the top - including the Good Stuff like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.  Consider it a tax of sorts.

Last night was also Movie Night at NBPE, since the schools across Wisconsin are closed today and tomorrow for administrative reasons. They were showing either Monsters vs. Aliens or Coraline. We've seen them both, and in the interests of avoiding another weeks-long nightmare run, we decided to avoid Coraline this time around. Monsters vs. Aliens was very much like Meet the Robinsons - a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half, but not much more than that. And that would be fine.

Last night was also Game 1 of the World Series, with the WFC's traveling up to New York to take on the Yankees in what every baseball writer capable of dragging their booze-soaked fingers across a dingy keyboard has described as the best match-up in a decade. Imagine - the Phillies as part of that.  

A choice, therefore, had to be made.

And you know, it really wasn't much of a choice at all.

The girls spent the afternoon over at their friends' house, where the mom did an amazing job of facepainting the horde of ricocheting children and finding them old clothes to wear for their costumes. Tabitha, as usual, was a cat. Lauren decided on a witch this year.

I handed out candy.

There will be World Series games forever, and some of them may well involve the Phillies now and again, but there just won't be that many more times Tabitha and Lauren will want me to hand out candy at their Halloween Parades. Plus, to be honest, the stress of watching the games can be more than I need these days.

So. Candy. Win.

We didn't actually stay for all of the movie. For one thing, the sound didn't work quite right and after a while you get tired of reading the lips of animated characters, since they don't quite line up anyway. Plus Tabitha said she was tired. So home we went.

And when I got home, there was the game, waiting for me - and the Phillies with a 1-0 lead that eventually they turned into a 6-1 victory that wasn't really that close. It was, indeed, a great game - at least from a Phillies fan perspective. Rarely in the life of a sports fan do you get to see a pitcher do what Cliff Lee did last night - completely dominate what is, arguably, the best team in the game. There is a reason why the WFCs are the underdog despite being WFCs - they are the second best team in baseball, and they were playing the best team in their house.  And they crushed them. 

I'm really loving that. 

As are a lot of people, I suspect.  I wore my Phillies hat and t-shirt to the Halloween Parade and got more than a few supportive comments from people who just wanted the Yankees to lose to whomever they were playing.  And I'll take that.

We all stayed up to watch the rest of the game. Well, the girls and I stayed in the living room anyway, while Kim finished the game upstairs getting ready for bed, since she had to get up early today and the rest of us didn't. Lauren conked out on the couch somewhere around the 7th inning, but Tabitha made it to the end of the game.  It's these shared experiences that count, I think.  Parades, baseball - it's all good.

Go Phillies! WFCs!

Why Can't Us Again?

Squashed

Well, count vegetables among the things I am illiterate about, along with movies, popular music, and why anyone considers Fox News to be journalism.

It was Lab Day yesterday, which meant that Kim wasn't going to be home much before 6 if at all, so dinner was on me. Now, normally this is not a problem. I'm generally the one who gets home first anyway, so more often than not I'm the one cooking dinner. I like cooking dinner, though I have to admit that I'm not as interested in what I make as I used to be. It's just fuel. Getting old, I guess.

We learned a few years ago that we need to make dinner menus for the week.

For one thing, it means that our grocery shopping trips are much more efficient. You would be surprised at the things that fall into your cart on the whimsical thought that you might get to cooking them sometime if the stars line up and the creek don't rise. And since food packaging people are getting far too creative these days about the things that show up on grocery shelves, keeping that kind of adventurism in check is a safety issue.

For another, it cuts way down on the 4:45pm phone calls that start out, "Any idea what you'd like to eat tonight?" and end up with, "Well, there's gotta be something interesting in the house." There usually is something interesting in the house, but whether it is a) preparable in the time remaining between arrival home and abject starvation, b) reasonably healthy, or at least moderately non-lethal, or c) recognizable as food even if correctly prepared, are all open questions.

So. Menus.

Kim did the menu for this week. Well, I did it, but since we had some late shifts to last week's menu, which Kim actually did, I just moved the meals we didn't get to onto this week. Easy. Cheaper too, since we'd already gotten the stuff. The problem was that last night's meal called for spaghetti squash.

And it was Lab Day, which meant that Kim wasn't going to be home much before 6, as noted.

So I went looking for a spaghetti squash.

What exactly is a spaghetti squash, anyway? Spaghetti I understand. Noodles - thin ones, covered in gravy (which is spaghetti sauce to you non-Italians, or "red sauce" to you midwesterners). Often adorned with meatballs. Got it. Squash I understand too - that is a game played by people I do not wish to know, involving little paddles, hypersonic rubber balls, and discussions of portfolios and white wine.

How do these things mix?

Eventually I found something that looked like it might be a spaghetti squash. At any rate it was clearly a vegetable. It was sort of beige and vaguely pear-shaped, though with the heft of a small cat and the texture of a paving brick. Yep, I thought, I could squash something with this.

So I cut it open.

Now, I've had spaghetti squash before and lived to tell about it, and the one thing I do remember about it was that it was stringy. Spaghetti-like, even. This was not stringy. It was orange inside, and rather firm.

And it was at this point that Tabitha wandered over and asked me what I thought I had in my hands. A spaghetti squash, I told her. "No, dad," she patiently explained. "That's a winter squash."

Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

Kim, of course, thought this was funny, and was very proud of Tabitha's squash-discerning skills. Apparently all that gardening this summer paid off.

We'll have to put this on Tabitha's weekly "Name two things you are proud of your child for this week" report that her teacher makes us turn in. The second one might just be "not laughing at dad while pointing out the correct name of the squash."

Lucky Number Seven

In the grand family tradition of celebrating holidays when there is time to celebrate them, we declared today to be Lauren's birthday.

Normally her birthday is on Halloween, which is just an altogether cool birthday to have since it could be taken just so many ways and provides an instant excuse for a party well into adulthood. In fact, more so for adults - for kids, having a birthday party on Halloween is just one event too many and would just be a distraction from the main event of cruising up and down the neighborhood in search of candy.

So today was it.

We made reservations with one of the local hotels for the use of their pool, since Lauren thinks that the main reason hotels exist is to provide pools and she wanted some of that action for her big day. And since swimming in October in Wisconsin is such a rare treat, we couldn't say no to that. Plus, we figured we could let the kids swim and splash until they wore themselves out, and someone else would have to clean up. Bonus.

We didn't count on the hotel giving our reservation and room away to a much larger party that wandered in off the streets about twenty minutes before we got there. There was much earnest discussion on this point, with Kim successfully keeping me at least six feet from the hotel desk at all times, and eventually they did comp us the whole thing and provide us with other rooms. So it all worked out in the end. Certainly the girls didn't mind.

Other than that, things went about according to plan.

We drove over to the hotel with a visibly vibrating Lauren in the back seat, unloaded our stuff into the room eventually provided, and headed straight for the pool.

Lauren and her guests spent a pleasant hour and change careening wildly around the pool, dodging the other party and visiting the hot tub. Did you know you can make beards out of Hot Tub Foam? Live and learn.

 

There was cake and gift-opening. Lauren insisted on a bakery cake, which is not something she has ever had. Bakery cakes are not nut-free, pretty much by definition, so they have been off limits around here. But Tabitha agreed that she would not mind homemade cupcakes, not one bit, which was very generous of her.  So Lauren got her cake - a fancy one, with horses on. Not sure where the horse thing came from, but it made her happy.

 

And now, for all practical purposes, Lauren is seven.

I have no idea how this happened. Every year around this time I look at her and I think, "Wait, how did she get so big? How has she changed so much and I haven't changed at all?"

But she has, and I have, and that's not such a bad thing, really.

Happy Birthday, Lauren!

Soup's On

I made wedding soup today.

It's been a long time since I made wedding soup. It's not a difficult dish to prepare, really - it's time consuming in the way that homemade meals can be, especially if they require you to take a pound and a half of ground beef and turn it into 1/2-inch diameter meatballs, but there is something soothing about that labor. Plus you can do that while watching large men fight over a small ball on a big screen, and what better way to spend a Saturday afternoon?

The only hard part is finding the escarole.

Yes, you can make it with spinach, but you can make lasagna with cottage cheese too. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

I first ate wedding soup on a regular basis in Pittsburgh, when I was working downtown. There was a deli across from one of the many temp paralegal jobs I had that year - a real deli, run by two grouchy old men who clearly felt that their food was better than their customers deserved. These were not "gruff-exterior-but-heart-of-gold" kind of grouchy old men either. They were grouchy clear through to the bone.

But they made great food.

And you could get a quart of thick, hot wedding soup for around $4, which was just a grand thing on a temp paralegal paycheck. There were a bunch of us who made that trek at least once or twice a week.

I never saw an entire episode of Seinfeld, but I have to say the character of the Soup Nazi always made perfect sense to me. My brother and sister-in-law have actually eaten at the place where the real Soup Nazi cooked, and they said he was pretty much exactly as portrayed in the show. These guys weren't up to that level, but they made good soup and they took no guff from greenhorn customers.

When Kim and I got married, we had the caterer make us wedding soup. It seemed appropriate. We had to provide the recipe, since there are no Italians around here, and we also had to provide detailed instructions as to how to go about getting escarole (which you could not buy in Our Little Town then, probably for the same reason that we had to provide the recipe to the caterer, come to think of it), but it was worth it.

You can now get escarole locally, which means Our Little Town is moving up in the world, I think.

So wedding soup for dinner was just about right tonight. Add in fresh-baked homemade bread, and you've got yourself a meal.