Sweetest in the Gale

I have a half-finished post sitting here from April 5.  It begins with this paragraph:

Yikes, guys.  I feel like I am always playing catch-up with this thing.  Now I have not only pictures and stories from San Francisco but also pictures and thoughts from Easter.  And I may not have mentioned this yet but Dave decided to move in over April vacation instead of during the summer, so HOORAY and all that, but by the way, that is TWO WEEKS from now and there are roughly eight million things I need to get done before then, including getting rid of stuff via eBay, craigslist, and/or freecycle, reorganizing the closets, helping Dave with the painting, and figuring out a time for some kind of housewarming thing.  I utterly failed to have a housewarming party when I first moved here so I am going to try really hard not to flake out this time around.

Naturally that is not remotely relevant anymore and the following things have happened all of which have conspired to make me a Very Bad Blogger.

-All the painting in the world (well, two rooms actually, but never mind that)
-Actual moving
-Two separate bouts with the Terrible Cold of Terrible (I blame the cute little disease vector)
-Death of computer
-Setting up of new computer, which mostly involved installing things, cursing a lot, and walking away (being mad at your computer doesn't get you very far towards writing a blog post)
-Housewarming party, visit from Maggie, Sin's wedding
-Personal crisis about Why Am I Blogging Anyway, What's The Point, and Do I Feel Comfortable Making Any Of My Personal Life Public At This Time
-Backup hard drive going on the fritz halfway through transferring stuff to the new computer, so while my music and some documents are here, my pictures and some other stuff is not, which makes it hard to write that post I was going to write about San Francisco, which was going to have all the pictures and things.

In other news I have sort of figured out Twitter and I think I might like it.  A little.  I'll see if there's a way to integrate it here that makes sense.  What I like about it mainly is that I see it can be set up to automatically post (tweet?) if I update something on Goodreads or Rate Your Music or Last.fm and that is something that I was trying to integrate with this blog but it alwys seemed like too much work.  But on Twitter it is so easy that it is already done, so what I mostly need to do is get Twitter in my sidebar somehow and I suppose I can call it a day.

So, umm.  San Francisco was awesome and someday there will be pictures.  (I am cautiously optimistic that my backup drive is not dead, just that the AC adapter is not working properly, perhaps because a gerbil chewed on it back in the day.  I just need to decide to spend the money on it.)  Cohabitation is swell.  We are planning to go to a few different concerts this summer and I am pretty psyched about it.  Dave has been biking to work, which makes me kind of jealous (my work is closer, but the roads are worse for biking so I am disinclined to spend an hour each day fully expecting my own death.  He takes a bike path most of the way, which is freaking awesome.)  I've been biking with him a little on the weekends and coveting bike gear.  I have started container gardening on the back porch - we have basil and chives, and tomatoes and peppers in Topsy-Turvy planters, and some parsley from Ikea which I have very little hope for (Dave's dad gave it to me because apparently while in Ikea he was stricken by that Ikea Sickness which makes you buy things that you neither need nor want, and I had to start it from seed which is never a good idea for me anyway, and then the instructions on the package were all written in the universal language of Stick Figure so I probably did it wrong but how would I know?)  Anyway the goal is to maybe have vegetables someday but I am very bad with potted plants so we will see.

So that's what's new with me.  What's new with you?

You know how you come back from vacation and get slapped across the face with reality?  That happened to me, and I never got time to post again about San Francisco, and then I thought of other things I wanted to post but decided I couldn't yet because I hadn't finished the vacation stuff, and then I didn't post anything at all.  And I would tell you about the rest of SF tonight except that then I would have to get all the photos off my camera and that just seems like too much work for 10:00pm, for someone who got up at 4:00am (admittedly, I went back to bed from 7-10, but still, my sleep patterns right now are not right at all.)  So I think I will promise to do that another time.

Instead: miscellaneous family things!

My landlord has agreed to let Dave and Morgan move in this summer.  I am terribly excited and want to start painting things and rearranging furniture immediately.  For now I am contenting myself with organizing the closets.  It is such a relief to know that we can all stay here, probably for as long as we like, and that the rent is affordable (that is to say, way under market value.)  It has been feeling more and more like a pointless charade when they go back to Dave's now that Morgan stays here sometimes.  All this extra effort and for what?  So we can be apart?  No thanks.  Send over the moving van.

Dave's recent obsession with referencing SNL's "Throw It On The Ground" led to a point last week when Morgan asked "Daddy, why do you keep talking to the floor?"  At another point I think he was referencing some other thing that was entirely over her head when she turned to him and said "You are disturbing me, mister!"  She is very cute when she's in a huff.  I am trying to enjoy it before she gets bigger and it is a lot less cute.

She has this thing now where when we are in the car (and oddly enough, tonight at dinner) she pretends we are in a spaceship.  We get to be Commander Daddy and Commander Amanda, but she calls herself, and insists that we call her, Captain Morgan, which unfortunately evokes "college lush" more than "toddler space captain."  We keep trying to promote her but she won't let us because she says the other ranks sound silly and I think she is convinced we are making them up.  So we seem to be stuck with Captain Morgan.

A few weeks ago I impulse-bought a kid-sized pink baseball glove at Walgreens.  I didn't show it to Morgan until today because the weather hadn't been nice enough and I didn't want to rope myself into throwing a baseball around indoors.  But we finally had the best weather ever today and I figured it was time.  Mind you, she arrived at my house today wearing her princess dress-up clothes, but that did not stop her from being excited about going outside to play catch.

And now it is my bedtime.  I told Morgan that we are having pancakes tomorrow and she is terribly excited, mostly, I think, because pancake batter is something that you can stir, and stirring is really the only thing I let her do in the kitchen, so I think she will be up at five to inform me that she is READY TO STIR and demand to know why am I not in the kitchen yet?

So far I have visited a Japanese tea garden, a used bookstore that has a sale for left-handed people on one day each year (alas, not yesterday), a park at the top of a very tall hill with a view of the city, a taqueria, Chinatown, a Japanese restaurant, and a bar that allows dogs but serves no food whatsoever.

I may have neglected to mention this, but I am in San Francisco!  Hi there.  I am visiting a friend who shall be called the Archivist as I know not whether she wants her name to appear here.  Anyway, it is moderately warm here and I am terribly excited.

Oh hi.  I promised I would update and then I totally didn't.  Oops.  Well, here I am now.

I finished the brown corduroy skirt of awesome a couple weeks ago.  It is just as fabulous as we suspected it would be.

I wore it out to a concert on Feburary 13th and felt very stylish.  Dave and I went to see Laura Veirs at the Middle East.  It was a decent show.  Her most recent album, July Flame, isn't really my favorite, and she didn't play the best song on the album ("Summer is the Champion," in case you were wondering.)  The show didn't really draw much from earlier albums at all.  But I did enjoy the song "July Flame" and also she had a violinist with her, and I always find violinists mesmerizing to watch.  Especially when they are cute, too.

In honor of Valentine's Day, I bring you: KITTIES IN LOVE.

Sorry about that.  I am done talking about my feelings for a while, I promise.  Instead, let's talk about what I had for dinner tonight!  I know.  My life is riveting.


(I wish I were better at taking pictures of food.  If I could send the smell of my dinner through the internet I'd do that instead, but since I can't this will have to do.)

For some reason the peppercorn veggie burger idea hit me randomly in the middle of the day today.  I think I was just considering putting some leftover french-fried onions on a veggie burger for dinner, and that made me think of how you could get a black bean burger  at Chili's topped with onion strings, and how they used to have a peppercorn burger and if you asked for that with a veggie burger substitute sometimes they would go to the trouble to encrust it properly and other times they wouldn't, but when they did it was totally awesome.

Honestly I don't know why it never occurred to me to make my own before now.  It was not that hard.  I ground up the peppercorns with a mortar and pestle that I rarely have a use for, and I let the veggie burger thaw for a while so it would be just soft enough to accept the peppercorns.  After frying the burger I topped it with swiss cheese, sauteed mushrooms and red peppers (leftover from omelettes last weekend) and the french-fried onions that had started me thinking about this in the first place.

For a side dish I made rosemary-garlic roasted potatoes.  There was a time when I didn't really care for rosemary; that all changed when Catherine and her husband came over one time and made me roasted potatoes with rosemary, salt, and pepper.  I've replicated that recipe slavishly for years, but tonight I figured I'd try it with freshly-pressed garlic, too, and it was delicious.  Plus it made the house smell amazing.

Add a Sam Adams, and you have one Very Satisfied Amanda.  In a little while I'll finish it all off with a slice of cake that a friend gave me the other day when she came to adopt my old TV.  I cannot remember what kind exactly, but I think I remember the words lemon, and coconut, and boiled frosting, or something to that effect.

Then maybe I'll try to get some other stuff done this evening, too, if I don't go into a food coma.

So my sister is getting married this summer, and last week she called to inquire whether I would be her maid of honor.  Which... DUH, OBVIOUSLY, YES.  We are not super close, so I was not entirely sure whether she would go the traditional route wherein sister is in the wedding party, so I was fairly excited because I had not been assuming that it would be so.

I was just about twice as excited, though, that she wanted Morgan to be the flower girl.  Actually, this is another example of how you can overthink something.

Most likely reason she asked Morgan to be the flower girl: Wow, there aren't really any little girls in the family that I can think of, and none of my friends have really had kids yet... hey, isn't Amanda dating that guy with the cute daughter who I have met exactly once ever?

Extra meaning that Amanda adds to the scenario: Wow, I feel so very validated!  It is as though she is symbolically affirming my connection to Dave and Morgan and expressing approval for the various ways that one can build a family.  Subtext!  Deep meanings!

But, whatever.  When I feel invalidated it generally isn't because someone specifically set out to invalidate me, so I suppose I can feel validated whether or not someone expressly wanted to accomplish that.

Anyway, I know for me it will be more fun to have Morgan involved, partially, perhaps, because child-wrangling will keep me distracted, but also because having my own little family group there will keep me from feeling left out and disapproved-of, which is sort of how a lot of family gatherings were going for a while.  Maybe that's the difference: I'm not just getting a +1 invitation; they specifically want Morgan (and Dave, by proxy) to be involved.  And maybe that is the sort of welcome that I've been wanting to feel for a while.

It took me a long time to realize the power of seeing yourself reflected in stories on TV and in books, mostly, I think, because as a member of a white American middle-class nuclear family, I saw reflections of my life pretty much everywhere and took it entirely for granted.  It was only when I went to college and came to terms with my bisexuality that I began to notice that if you look to the mainstream media, some stories are rarely told, like the stories of women in love.  But even then, it would be hard to claim that I was really all that marginalized -- for crying out loud, I was in college, and there was plenty of queer lit out there if you took the trouble to track it down, and there were budgets for things like "diversity" and therefore certain groups of marginalized people could put together a whole film series if they were so inclined, which apparently we were.  And then of course the vast majority of my love life involved men, anyway, so if I were writing a biography and there were a chapter on Amanda's Life As Part Of An Oppressed Demographic it would probably not be much longer than this paragraph.  But at least I sort of got it, at that point.

Naturally, the reason I bring it up is because I am grasping for stories again.  Stories tell us that what we believe in is possible.  Stories tell us that other people believe what we believe, and therefore that other people believe in us.  No matter how firmly you believe that the earth is round, no matter how many times you tell yourself that if you just keep going in a straight line, you'll make it all the way around, it still helps a lot to hear someone say that they did it, too -- to hear something besides the naysayers telling you that you're going to fall off the edge of the world.

(Yes, yes, there are oceans in the way.  Shush.  You're cramping my metaphorical style.)

I firmly believe that family means nothing more complicated than a group of people who love each other and take care of each other.  I've believed this for years, and long considered my college roommates to be my second family.  The sort of family that I want to create now is the same sort of thing.  I believe in it, and I know that other people believe in me, but sometimes I wish that I saw these sorts of stories out there, for encouragement and for guidance.  I want stories in which I'm not the bad guy -- stories without a wicked stepmother.  I want the stories without the drama and backstabbing.  I've heard those stories.  I've heard the stories in which kids grow up scarred from their parents' divorce.  I know that can happen -- I'm not that naiive.  But I want to know what else can happen.  I want to hear about the other possibilities, because that's what we're striving for.  I don't want to believe in something imaginary or something that I have to invent.  I want to believe in something simple and commonplace, like an apple, that you see every day without even thinking to wonder.

Here is an example of how you can overthink something.  (I have many examples of that, for the record.)

A major fact of my life is that when Dave has Morgan, he is not here.  They come over for dinner frequently and all, but it is always a sort of rushed thing right after work so they can later rush home to get Morgan to bed on time and there is always much praying that she won't fall asleep in the car, as she often does, thus making it impossible for her to actually sleep at bedtime.  So I see them, but it is hurried and I feel bad about it.  And then of course I miss them for the rest of the evening.

Now, I happen to have a spare room, with a futon in it and everything, but I had entirely written off the idea of ever having them both stay over, for the following very good reasons: Morgan already has the disadvantage of living between two homes, it is unfair to her to add a third one to the mix; Morgan (until recently) shared a room with a parent at each of her houses, and I thought she might not be comfortable in her own room, and furthermore I didn't want her to get the impression that I was displacing her.  So, I did not really allow myself to think about it.

But then this past weekend Morgan's mother asked Dave whether he could take Morgan for an extra night, which of course he wanted to do, but of course that had the additional consequence that we would have to go a long time without him spending the night here, and it was very Woe and Sadness and all that.  So he asked if it would be okay if he and Morgan both spent the night.

And I recited all the reasons listed above, and we said "Hmmm," a lot.

Then I asked "Do you think she'd like it?"

And he said "I think she would be completely thrilled."

And that was that.  And I suppose the moral of the story is that abstract reasoning is all well and good but at the end of the day you just have to know what your kid likes.

She was completely thrilled, and in fact we all were.  When she got here we showed her the room and she immediately started nesting by bringing every toy in the house into her room and turning off the lights and pretending to sleep just to try it out.  I was much more relaxed than usual about dinner because no one had to go anywhere.  Afterwards we made and decorated sugar cookies for her mother's birthday.  (Am I crazy?  Am I a saint?  Neither; probably I just wanted to use my new stand mixer.)  We had bedtime with all her usual stories and stuffed animals and things.  She fell asleep right away, probably because she hadn't had her usual inconveniently-timed nap in the car.  And then it was like a usual evening with Dave, except with more whispering.

In the morning we woke up to the sound of Morgan singing to herself in her room, and I made us all pancakes for breakfast.  I don't think I have ever felt more domestic, and I don't think being domestic has ever felt more awesome.

Before she even went to bed, Morgan asked if she could stay over again sometime, and I think we will do it again for sure.