I am a minimalist at heart, and that includes packing. For our weekend away* (4 days), I thought that 2 pairs of pants would be sufficient, plus a pair of loungewear (they are actually mens' pjs but they look like nice, lightweight sweatpants).
Wrong: on day 2 I was trying to load stuff into a pickup truck and heard the giant ripping sound of my jeans. I was "airconditioned" for the rest of the day. Now, those pants were getting thin anyways, and I know it's all the style to wear ripped clothing, but I am old-fashioned and feel that I look sloppy enough without deliberately cultivating Homeless Person Chic.
On day 4, I leaned over to hug my MIL goodbye, and somehow a greasy tire tread from her wheelchair got imprinted onto my khakis. I've washed the pants and it didn't come out, so I'm trying again.
Makes me think that I should pack more rather than less for Poland.
*Weekend away: on more or less the spur of the moment we decided to help mom and dad with their moving sale last Saturday. They are selling their house, which has been in my family since about 1944, and are moving to a condo. They have to be out by the end of July, so there is a lot of accumulated stuff to dispose of. THEY are not minimalists, and their condo will probably be stuffed to the ceiling. So: a day preparing; the sale day; Fathers' Day; and a day with B's family. We packed a lot into less than 96 hours.
I am a postmodernist. Damn. I thought I was a post-positivist. And how can I be 1/5 fundamentalist????
"You scored as Postmodernist.
Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis.
Postmodernist 94%
Cultural Creative 69%
Existentialist 56%
Modernist 44%
Materialist 31%
Romanticist 31%
Idealist 25%
Fundamentalist 19%"
See the quiz here at quizfarm.
It's been a few weeks of poignance, sort of a low-level melancholy.
On Saturday we went to C's memorial service in WI. Sustained weepitude, but at least the service was fairly short and enlivened by the pastor, who combined earnestness with offhandedness in a bizarre way. I think about C a lot but perhaps haven't really come to terms that I'll never ever get to talk to him again. Today B found a postcard we bought in Chicago that we'd intended to mail to him and somehow never did: an assemble-it-yourself Chicago Tribune Building, and that moment of discovery was just somehow really really sad.
Other fraught moments: seeing his "to do" list still written on a blackboard in K's dining room; reading the heartbroken comments in his blog, more of them every week; seeing his cabin all cleaned up and museumified. It kinda made me a little upset to have all those people in there, picking up things and looking at them. There was another list - a cryptic sort of thing relating to files - out on the workspace, and the book of Stephen Foster songs we gave him at Christmas on the keyboard music rack.
B's uncle had a stroke a few days after we visited him. He can talk but apparently isn't very aware, and there's no possibility of going home, which is really sad. B's mom is having trouble focusing on the conversation at hand too, and there are threats of her having her motorized wheelchair taken away (for bad driving). Given how upset she was to be relocated to another room for recovery from her surgery, I can only imagine the despair she'll be in if she has to give up that chair.
For us it raised the philosophical issue of what agency the nursing home has for her: they say they are medically responsible to protect her even off home property (read: she can't get the chair back for offsite visits), but to what extent ought she to have autonomy to make her own decisions, even if they aren't the best? She's there as a free agent - but there's this whole grey area about diminished capacity and at what point they are medically obligated to step in. The cynic in me says they are most interested in protecting themselves from insurance or malpractice claims.
Then there are my parents: in their early 80s and looking to downside into a condo rather than some sort of retirement place. Their house has been on the market and even though they'd had serious offers, I'd lulled myself into thinking the sale was in the fuzzy future. Then we came home on Memorial Day and they informed us they'd signed a P&S and had to be out by the end of July.
It was like a punch in the stomach - thinking of how we'd never see the place again, and then how can they possibly clean out 60 years of stuff in 60 days? We had the "last" dinner in the dining room, the "last" night in the bedroom, the "last" walk around the backyard, and it was all very melancholy. (It is, however, documented in excruciating detail photographically.)
Maybe moments of passage are best illustrated by these little fragments. Funny: the social historian authors of the book I just finished on Williamsburg argue just the opposite: that fragments qua fragments can never add up to the full story, that the story MUST be constructed around the intent taken from, invested in, the fragments.
I had a hankering for beets with my roast chicken last night (baking chicken for an hour in a 375 oven, when it was already 80-plus degrees in the kitchen - at 9 pm! - wasn't the smartest idea we've had this week, but that's a different story) and was nonplussed - nonplussed, I say! - to find NO recipe for Harvard beets in Joy of Cooking. Or Greene on Greens. Or Better Homes and Gardens.
But the Internet-that-never-fails did not fail me. I added a little chopped red onion, and here's how it went:
Saute a bit of red onion in 1 T of butter. Sprinkle in 1 T flour and cook/stir.
Add juice from the can of beets; cook until gloppy and bubbly.
Stir in 2 t sugar (I used one packet of Splenda) and 2 t cider vinegar.
Add beets (I used the sliced kind, but cut them a bit more for a half-assed julienne) and warm through.
That said, B didn't really dig the glop. I am wondering if I could just marinate them in an oil-vinegar-sugar sauce for a few hours and get more of a beet salad. I'll post the results of that experiment when I've done it.
I was so impressed with the ant in the previous entry that when I was slapping away at bugs in my SIL's backyard the next day, I decided to intervene in ant social relations at the anthills in the front yard.
My SIL gave me a mushed dead bug and I found a slightly dehydrated dead worm. I placed them about 6 inches in front of one of the holes. In less than 10 seconds, one of the scouts was checking out the bug. (They continually checked out the worm too but couldn't figure out how to move it.)
One of the ants tried and tried to move the bug, but couldn't. It seemed to be stuck, so I scraped it loose and placed it on a chip of quartz that was part of the driveway aggregate mix. I figured the visibility would be better and it would stick less. Sure enough, an ant refound it and dragged it back to the hill and down into the hole. (Afterwards, other ants always checked that spot, where you could see black residue of former bug.)
I tried again with a dead beetle from the windowsill, but it was too dessicated: they checked it out but didn't bother to haul it away.
Next, I placed a new dead bug halfway between two holes. The scouts came and found it and dragged it towards hole A. But then, there was a shift towards hole B as B-ants saw what was going on and wanted the bug for themselves. A tug of war ensued, with the bug and its carriers heading first left then right, until the A ants victoriously pulled it into the holes.
With this fomenting of Ant War, I stepped away. B the Destroyer hosed away tens of anthills (this yard is completely covered with them) but by the next morning they were mostly all rebuilt. And so it goes in the busy world of ant social reproduction.