Embarrassed By How Embarrassed I Get

I am way too self-conscious. 

When I saw that a neighbor’s house was being tented – in a tent with red and yellow circus stripes, no less – I admit that my first thought was, “Those poor people. Now, everyone knows they have bugs.”

Maybe there is something wrong with me, but then again, people were actually stopping their cars in front of the house to openly stare. C’mon, people, it’s not that big a deal. (Not that I should talk, since I took a picture.)

But I do think that my anxiety/self-consciousness level is set a wee bit high.

For example, although I am a complete goody two-shoes when it comes to driving – I have never received so much as a parking ticket, my registration sticker is never out of date, I always use my turn signals, I never parking in an ambiguous spot – I feel a little jolt when a police car shows up in my rearview mirror. (Yup, I am one of those people who slow down and won’t pass a patrol car.)

And when I go for my dental check-up, my biggest concern is to avoid the embarrassing event known around our house as “the hygiene lecture.” You know what happens: the hygienist, rooting around in there, clucks at the state of your gums, asks you if you ever floss, then hands you a mirror and proceeds to demonstrate, once again, how to brush your teeth properly. Mortifying.

In fact, I am currently dragging my feet on scheduling Lola the dog’s next grooming appointment because I know we are going to get a hygiene lecture about her. She is a complete mess. Not that she cares. She appears to relish her bad smells.

Maybe I need to learn to embrace my inner dog.

How Do You Spell Intelligent?

Full disclosure: my kids can’t spell worth crap.

My son, diagnosed with dysgraphia (extreme difficulty with handwriting), recently got his Iowa Test scores back. As usual, all of his scores were high, except for the spelling subtest, where he scored in the 25^th percentile. (And if you have ever seen how my son spells, you’d be asking, “Twenty-five percent of kids spell worse than that?)

Meanwhile, no one could possibly impersonate my daughter, who is both smart and dyslexic, when she texts. “Concussion” is “concoction,” her friend Michael is “Mickle,” and “weird” is invariably “weard.”

But, nope, I refuse to worry about spelling. Because so many abilities – reasoning, creative problem-solving, social skills – are far more important.

This opinion was strengthened recently when I was buying some books on language. Here are some honest-to-God Amazon reviews:

 

Hmph, sniffed one, "This is a usage guide, not a grammar guide," for a book called Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies. (Umm, did you not see the title?)

 

In a review entitled, "Bryson, you're an ass," for The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, another writes, "I am an undergraduate student in linguistics and as a gramarian (sic) ... I must say that this book represents the lowest and least informed type of linguistic literature to date. Bryson has no concept of ... humility." (Emphases mine.)

Hmm, I’d rather hang out with the smart/cool people. Did you know that Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google, meant to name their company ‘‘Googol’’ (the word for ten raised to the power of 100) but misspelled it?

 

While I’m all for proofreading, I’m also with Andrew Jackson, who said, “It’s a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.”

Packing It In

I hate packing. I mean, I really despise it.

It started when my children were small. I would be packing for them as well as myself – and I also did all the other tasks related to traveling: I bought the plane tickets, boarded the dog, arranged the car service, stopped the mail and the newspaper, sent in the “vacation watch” form to the local police, cleaned out the fridge so we wouldn’t come home to something hideous …

… And my husband, without fail, as he stuck piles of clothes – that I had laundered and folded – into his suitcase, would say, “OK, I’m done packing. Why aren’t you?”

He thought he was being funny. He didn’t realize how close he was to getting smacked.

Besides the desire to smack someone, packing brings out all my worst perfectionist tendencies.  It seems like it has to be done exactly right. And when my children were small, it kind of had to be. You needed to have distractions, new things they hadn’t seen before, packed in the diaper bag, along with, of course, diapers and changes of clothes and snacks and, I learned this one the hard way as a very new parent, baby pain-killer in case an ear infection flared while you were in the air. My father-in-law once, during a long car trip, saw me pull so many things out of that diaper bag that he compared it to Mary Poppin’s magic carpetbag.

It’s getting easier. My kids are teens now and pack for themselves. Now, I just have a little look-see and -- I can't help myself -- ask things like “Did you bring underwear?” and “How about your retainer?”

Still, the kids know to steer clear of me when I’m packing, even if my husband doesn’t.

More Drama at the Fish Tank

He had been a gold gourami.

My daughter’s favorite in her fish tank was a gourami. He was the only one with any personality or smarts, the first to figure out that the sight of a person meant food (which may have contributed to his demise.)

Because, one day, the gourami looked a little fat … and over days, he kept getting fatter.

My daughter consulted tropical-fish experts, both at pet stores and the many who stand ready online to tell you what you are doing wrong. The consensus was that he was constipated.

Several said to feed him a shelled pea. I’m here to tell you that shelled peas drop like stones to the bottom of the tank, where all the more able-bodied fish rush to eat them. I ended up standing at the tank, one school day, per my daughter's request, holding a shelled pea on the end of a fork tine in front of the gourami’s face, who by this time wasn’t eating anything and really didn’t like having a fork in his face.

The guy at the small, independently owned fish store sold us a mysterious powder in an unmarked baggie. My daughter dropped it in the tank, per his instructions, where it turned the water suddenly green and caused all the fish to immediately and copiously poop … all of them, except for the gourami.

He was, by this time, so swollen that his eyes looked bulgy and his scales had started to stick out. My husband unhelpfully pointed out that the poor thing “couldn’t even scream.”

When he started to list to one side, it became clear he wasn't going to make it.

We euthanized him the way the Petsmart lady said was painless: we put him in a water-filled container and stuck him in the freezer.

It was sad.

An Asian Version of Cabbage & Noodles

Since I am heartily sick of all my ideas for dinner, I asked my kids if they had any thoughts. They didn't, so I told them to Google around and see if they couldn't find some new recipes for us to try. My son Googled "meat pie." Good luck with that one, kid. I'll need some persuasion to tackle that.

My daughter found one, though, that turned out to be an Asian version of the cabbage & noodle recipe my Hungarian grandmother used to make (which I posted here). Instead of regular onions, this one uses green onions. Instead of egg noodles, it calls for angel hair. Instead of butter, there's oil (I used peanut) and sesame oil. Instead of salt, soy sauce.

Apparently, great minds, around the world, think alike.

This recipe was posted by papergoddess on www.food.com:

Shanghai Noodles

3 tablespoons oil
1-2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 cups shredded cabbage (can be Chinese cabbage)
1/2 cup chopped green onions
8 ounces angel hair pasta
2-4 tablespoons soy sauce, to taste

Optional ingredients: 4 ounces sliced cooked chicken and/or one can bean sprouts, drained.

Cook pasta.

Heat oil and sesame oil in skillet. (We used a wok, to feel official.)

Saute cabbage and green onions for about five minutes.

Drain pasta. Add it and the soy sauce to cabbage mixture and heat through.

Another Slow-Cooker Recipe

The vegetable-adverse boy likes this one because he likes beans, but his sister doesn’t like beans. Oh, well. Somehow, in our family, our food likes and dislikes are almost always in direct opposition to each other.

We set up the rice cooker with brown rice and mash up some guacamole to serve with this. Makes enough for two dinners for our family of four.

Three-Bean Turkey Chili

1 lb lean ground turkey

1 small onion chopped

1 28-ounce can diced tomato, undrained

1 15-ounce can chick peas, drained

1 15-ounce can kidney beans, drained

1 15-ounce can black beans, drained

1 8-ounce can tomato sauce

1 4-ounce can diced mild green chiles

1-2 tablespoon chili powder

Salt to taste

Cook onion and turkey in skillet till turkey no longer pink. Discard fat and put in slow cooker.

Add remaining ingredients; mix well. Cook on high for 6-8 hours.

I originally found this recipe on disneyfamily.com but can’t find it there now.

Slow Cookers Rule!

How else would we have calm, healthy dinners on weekday nights?

Numerous studies show that teens who eat dinner with their families regularly are less likely to smoke, to do drugs, to drink alcohol abusively, they get better grades and higher test scores, have larger vocabularies and better reading skills, have less obesity and eating disorders, and are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables than teens who do not.

Not to mention home-cooked meals are healthier and cheaper.

However, by the time evening rolls around, we are all tired and hungry. (And the poor kids are facing their nightly homework.) Not the time to start cooking an entire meal from scratch in the name of family harmony.

But if I can throw some ingredients into the slow cooker that morning, a meal like Norman Rockwell’s grandma might make can be waiting for us.

Like this pasta:

2 carrots

2 stalks celery

1 small onion

2-3 cloves garlic

1/2 cup olive oil

Pinch, dried oregano

Pinch, dried basil

1/2 cup red wine

1 pound, sliced mushrooms (Spring for presliced, saves time.)

28-oz. can diced tomatoes

28-oz. can tomato sauce

Salt to taste

1 ½ pounds whole-wheat rigate pasta

Chop carrot, celery, onion and garlic in a food processor. (You can chop these by hand, but the food processor saves time, plus it chops them so fine my vegetable-adverse son doesn't realize he is eating carrot.)

Saute the vegetables in the olive oil, along with the herbs.

Pour into slow cooker. Deglaze the pan with the wine; add that to the slow cooker, along with the mushrooms¸ the tomatoes and tomato sauce and the salt. Stir, cover and set on high.

Come back in 6-8+ hours to boil up the pasta.