Walnuts on My Windshield #27

Friday, April 8, 2005

Having royally grilled the men-folk in my last article, I thought it would be only fair to fillet the females this time.

A while back, when I realized that I simply could not manage my daily tasks and maintain my sanity, Scott voted for sanity. We decided that the girls should learn to cook. My mother tried to teach me to cook, too. She is a good cook, and she thought that cooking was one of those things that every girl should be able to do by the time she left home. I, however, wanted none of it. I didn’t give a rip about cooking, was quite content to live on bologna sandwiches, figured I’d never get married anyway, and could not for the life of me see why I should waste my time learning to do something so useless and boring. To her credit, Mom was persistent, but I think somewhere along the way, we both just resigned ourselves to the fact that cooking was simply not going to be one of my life passions. It’s not, so we both were right.

I can tell you that Scott did NOT marry me for my culinary skills! In fact, for those first few months, we had the same three or four meals over and over. I can’t remember what they all were, but I know spaghetti was one. Scott got kind of tired of it and suggested we bake a chicken. I had no idea how to do that, so I just unwrapped the bird and stuck it in the oven – frozen, I think, and all the giblets still within. It wasn’t a stellar meal.

Scott was pretty determined to eat baked chicken, though, so he decided to try it himself. He obtained a chicken, pulled all the junk out, and rinsed him thoroughly (the chicken). Then he tried to figure out a way to drain and dry the bird completely. Scott has always been a creative problem-solver. In some old photo album, there is a picture of a stick-thin Scott with very LONG hair, wearing a white lacy apron of mine (undoubtedly a wedding shower gift from some friend of my mom’s who didn’t know me personally), standing in front of the kitchen sink. Perched on the faucet is the bird. Actually the faucet is inserted fully into the bird’s lower cavity, causing him (the bird) to look like he is having one of those exams we all dread. He is getting the shaft, so to speak, and leaning forward, with excess water dripping from his neck stub As I remember, that second baked chicken turned out better than my first attempt.

Thankfully, through the years I have leaned how to use a cookbook and a crockpot, so we have not starved. I am able to cook tolerably well, but I hate to cook. My approach to cooking is to wait till the mood strikes – this can take months – and then cook like crazy for a day or two, making double batches of things we like, resulting in a freezer-feeding frenzy. When there are no more main dishes downstairs (our freezer is in the cellar), I either resort to mac and cheese, or try to motivate myself to cook again.

When I am cooking, I am not doing it for enjoyment. I am simply trying to get a disliked task done as efficiently as possible. Therefore, I want to be LEFT ALONE while I am cooking. Because of that, the girls have not picked up much in the food prep department by osmosis. Jessica actually likes to cook, which is encouraging; but Katie is so much like me that it is scary. (On a side note, Andrew passionately loves to cook. He is quite good at it and can actually be a help in the kitchen. We have some neighbors who are surrogate grandparents to him. His treat when all his chores are done is to be allowed to go over to Ms. Connie and Mr. Tom’s for thirty minutes. I began to notice that he was planning his trips over there at the same time every day – 1:30 PM. It turns out that they have satellite TV (that means they can actually see the picture on their TV, something with which we don’t concern ourselves), and there is a cooking show that comes on every day at 1:30. Andrew goes then so he can watch cooking with Rachel Ray!!! He even comes home and tells me sometimes, "that’s not how Rachel Ray does it.")

Scott said that the girls needed to each cook supper one night a week. Okay. We set up a schedule, and now Katie cooks on Monday and Jessica cooks on Tuesday. Wednesday we eat out if it’s a library week, and the kids and I do mac and cheese if it’s not. (Scott eats out in Springfield before church.) Thursdays and Saturdays I cook or thaw something yummy from the freezer, Fridays is leftovers, and Sunday we either have potluck with our group (requiring me to cook only one dish and a dessert!) or if it’s a non-group week, everyone fends for himself.

So, Jessica cooks on Tuesdays. One thing often required in cooking is the chopping of onions. I have read lots of suggestions for how to keep from crying while chopping onions, but the only one that has worked at all for me is to refrigerate the onion for a while before chopping. It works best if you refrigerate it overnight. That, of course, would require planning what you are going to cook and remembering to stick the onion(s) in the fridge at bedtime. We can’t store them in the fridge because our fridge is small. We can’t get a larger fridge because the cabinets are mounted low. We can’t raise the cabinets because that would require remodeling the kitchen, which would make a huge mess, and then how would we cook? You get the idea. By the way, when I cook, I cook in the morning. This is because I like to get all my distasteful tasks out of the way as soon as possible. I do all the prep in the morning, then actually bake whatever it is at 5:00 PM. Jessica also likes to cook supper after breakfast. Katie would prefer to delay the dreaded as long as possible.

One morning, I got Jessica going on whatever she was cooking. I left to go see if Andrew was collecting his trash and Josiah was getting his math done. When I migrated back to the kitchen, I saw a funny sight. Jessica looked like a bug. She was chopping onions, all right, but she was wearing her swim mask! You know how those things make your face look: frog eyes, bulbous nose and silly splayed lips. She had been crying over the onions and was trying to think of a way to keep that spray out of her eyes. It was a brilliant idea, and she has been found wearing the swim mask in the kitchen several times since. Hey, whatever works. By the way, I promised her I wouldn’t post a picture of her cutting onions in the swim mask, but I never promised not to write about it.

And then Katie pulled a funny one. Some months ago, Josiah got a computer game called Roller Coaster Tycoon. This is a really nifty game. It is much too complicated for me to understand, but here are the essentials: you own an amusement park. You take out a huge loan and install all these rides. You design the park however you want, using paths, rides, bathrooms, restaurants, etc. You hire staff to run the park. You charge admission, and people come. Based on how thrilling your rides are, more or less people will come. However, there can be problems. Your lines may be too long. Your roller coasters might be too nauseating. Your bathrooms may be too dirty. Etc. For these reasons and others, your guest count could drop. The computer keeps a running total on things like income, number of guests, and the payback on your loan. It’s actually a pretty good tool for teaching business and economics. Well, Josiah started playing this game, and his sisters were intrigued. Now they play it, too. We have Off Day on Friday, and that is the only day that the kids can play unlimited computer games. (It’s also the only day Mom can do unlimited writing!)

We have a bedtime ritual with the kids. We "read and pray" with them most nights. The structure of this activity evolves over time, but we basically read the Bible to them (or we discuss what they and we have read that day), pray with them, and bless them. This involves anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes per kid and there are four of them. When Scott’s home, we each take a boy and a girl. As in, "who do you want to do tonight?" We do the boys first and then the girls.

One Friday night, I finished Josiah and headed up to the attic to do Katie. When I walked into her room, I saw something funny. Katie was in her PJs, lying in bed, reading a book, but Roller Coaster Tycoon was running loudly on her computer. (You hear the screams of the crowd as the roller coaster flips upside down.) I asked her what was up – as in, why wasn’t she sitting at the computer playing the game that she enjoys so much. She replied that it had to do with her debt ratio. I was confused. She explained as follows: the park is constructed on borrowed capital. You are constantly in the process of paying back your loan and taking out other loans to improve your park. (Note: I always assumed that amusement parks were built and then simply maintained, but living in Branson has taught me that that is not the case. They are constantly being renovated. Take Silver Dollar City, for example. We all know that the Herschends, who own SDC, are loaded. But they are also pretty smart. So why on earth did they - about three years ago - construct a new state-of-the art "liquid coaster," Buzz-Saw Falls, which also required huge amounts of auxiliary construction, only to tear it down this past season? Now they are in the process of building - or maybe it’s built by now – their new "launch coaster," Powder Keg, on the same site. Couldn’t they figure out on the front end what would play in Peoria and just build ONE roller coaster on that particular plot of ground?)

Katie’s debt ratio was such that she could not borrow any more money to improve her park. She would first have to pay down her debt to an acceptable level. To do that, she needed more income. Her goal was to keep costs low and hope that lots and lots of guests came to her park. The only solution was time. If she rocked along with the status quo long enough, her debt ratio would drop below the determined threshold and she could borrow and build again. Since there was nothing else to do, she left the park running and chose to go to bed and pass the time reading; doubtless some archeological tome. I asked her how long it would take for this to occur. "Oh," glancing at the statistical information, "probably about 30 minutes." So we read and prayed, and then, since it was Friday, she was free to be a tycoon for another couple hours!

I decided a few weeks ago to try a new hairstyle. My friend, Sherry, has hair that I like. I thought I could have hair like hers. Never mind that hers is thick and mine is thin. She gave me some photos of her hair, and I took them to my hair cutter. She eyed them critically and said she though thought there was hope. Now, if my hair had had more volume and body, it would have been easier, but with some mousse, a blow dryer, a curling iron, plenty of hair spray and some sculpting paste (yikes!), Chrissy did make my hair look pretty much like Sherry’s.

You must understand that my idea of hair styling is wash it, towel dry it, run some gel through it, and either blow-dry it or not. Five minutes on hair is my max. I went home, wondering how I would ever maintain this style. Twice before I have bought curling irons and thrown them in the trash. I can never get them to curl my hair, and I always end up getting burned. Since they are clearly too complicated for a person like me to use, I had permanently given up on them. With this new style – which, by the way, 50% of my family did not even NOTICE when I walked in the door – I bought a curling iron. The next morning, I locked myself in the bathroom to fight the beast, determined to understand and conquer it. About 45 minutes later, I emerged, unburned, and looking – I thought – tolerable. Andrew met me in the hallway, gazed at me in stunned awe, and said, "Oh, Mom! You look just like Vannah White! It’s very fluffy." Now, I have been compared to a lot of things in 44 years, but that was a first. And the last, I’m sure.

From My Bookshelf:

Alaska: Tales of Adventure from the Last Frontier by Spike Walker, rank 6. I don’t know WHY I keep doing this to myself! I like books about adventure, and topics like Alaska, Antarctica, and the Arctic are just a bonus. That’s why this book caught my eye. However, I want to read a book that tells a story, and this one is a collection of pieces of stories. I hate that! A few of them were interesting, but I’d much rather have read ONE story all the way through. Somebody please remind me that combo story books are as bad as combo biographies.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, rank 6. I actually listened to this, which was probably a help in some ways and a hindrance in others. I have only read two of Shakespeare’s plays in my life, "Romeo and Juliet" and "MacBeth," and those were both almost 30 years ago, because they were required reading in school. The Bard has never interested me in the least, but I was browsing through books on tape at our favorite branch library, and I realized that I have already listened to most of the ones that sound good to me. I have been trying to stretch my brain a bit lately and also add a little culture to my life. Katie’s Geometry and Biology are meeting the brain stretch goal, so I decided I could force myself to listen to two cassettes of Shakespeare, especially since it was a comedy. This play was funny and full of puns and turns on the language. The author was clearly clever. However, it was very hard on tape to figure out who was talking at any given time, which made following the plot a bit challenging. It would have been hard to read it, also, so I guess Bill was right in expecting it to be presented as a play.

The Story of Springfield by Miriam L. Brown, rank 9. Every now and then, I find a rare gem, and this book was one. I really like history and especially local history. This book from the children’s section was written in 1940! In fact, I could tell that this hardbound edition was actually a photo copy of the typewritten (complete with capital Ms too high!) original, bound in book form. It was only 24 pages long and probably written for a third-grade audience, but I learned SO much! It mentions all kinds of recognizable landmarks and locations, and it was fun to imagine what the town must have looked like then. The book covered agriculture, transportation, human history, botany, geology, and many other topics. Here are some interesting excerpts from the final chapter, which is titled, "Springfield Today." "Springfield today covers about 8,000 acres of land. We have a population of about 60,000 people. It is now the fourth largest city in Missouri." [Note: in 2000, the Springfield metropolitan area’s population was 378,000 (!!!), and it is now the third largest city in Missouri.] "The Public Library [where I checked out this book] . . . was started in 1903. Now it has about 53,566 books. . . Right next to it is a building used by the Social Security Commission. The early pioneers would be surprised to see the work that goes on in this building. In those days there was plenty of work for every one. Even the children helped their families a great deal. Today there are hundreds and hundreds of people in every community who cannot find work to do. So our state and national governments help them. The offices of these government workers are in this building." And finally, "The electric lights and many other things about the home that are run by electricity, the radio, the sweeper, the washer, the iron, the toaster, the sewing machine, the electric stove and the frigidaire, make the home of today seem like a place of magic out of a fairy tale compared with the first cabins John Campbell and his friends lived in."

Dimensions of Scientific Thought, narrated by Edwin Newman, rank 6. This one was a little too deep for me. It talked about the 4000-year history of scientific thought. I admit that I did get a better understanding of terms like induction, deduction, positivism, relativity, quantum theory, and chaos theory. I guess my brain was stretched, but I’m not at all sure I could adequately explain those terms to someone else. I also got another dose of what some of the great thinkers (people like Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Gallileo, Copernicus, and Kant, to name a few) thought.

Quote of the Week:

"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." ~ Albert Einstein

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