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I Am Cinderella Take 2

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imageI’m at it again tonight…and last night, and tomorrow night, and the night after that. Cinderella once more, likely up until at least midnight all these nights, trying to get caught up with paper work.

Spread over my dining room table is my stack of research papers. There are 50 of them. It’s important, necessary work for students…a process they need for college, to write the papers their professors will require, for presentations their careers may demand,  and even life in general, when they need to know how to ferret out meaningful information from the piles of dreck on the inter-webs, read it, understand it, and use it in meaningful ways.

But it’s exhausting to assess and grade.image It takes me at least 20 – 25 minutes per paper, because I have to check what’s written against the sources used, to ensure it’s used properly and well, without plagiarizing etc. And it’s not the only paperwork I need to accomplish before quarter averages can be tabulated.

I think I’ve figured out how I get so behind, so that each five week period I end up having to sink at least five nights of 6 – 8 hours of grading into my personal life, after work hours. I’m usually just too drained when I get home from my 8 hour school day working with 92 teenagers to manage a grading session once supper is made and cleaned up, laundry is thrown in, a child’s sporting event is attended, and one-on-one parent/child time is eeked out, among other things.

This Cinderella is getting too old.

Love my students (really, really do). Love teaching and feel incredibly enthusiastic about facilitating their insights, inquiries, and learning.

Can’t hack the paperwork anymore.

Such is life, though, until I retire in another seven years or so.

For right now it’s my lot to turn into a pumpkin on a regular basis. 🙂 I have the will, but now I just need the energy and the time…

Happy Sunday, all. Catch you on the upswing tomorrow when I’m more properly caffeinated.!

Autumn Decorating

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My mantel, decorated for autumn…the candles – and angel candleholders – work for Christmas, too, so I get a lot of mileage out of them 🙂

I used to only go all out decorating inside the house for Christmas.

But more recently, I’ve brought my love of Autumn indoors and a few years ago, purchased some leaf garlands, wreaths, and candle tapers in appropriate hues. Sometimes I get them out before Halloween, and other times, like this year, they don’t make it onto mantels and walls until the beginning of November.

I can’t help wondering how many others like to decorate for autumn in their homes. There must be some, otherwise, the stores wouldn’t carry the items I’ve found. But I only know one other person, personally, who does this kind of thing. I hope I’m not too weird (but I’m afraid it’s pretty likely that I am…and for more reasons than just my decorating proclivities!). 🙂

pumpkinsI’ve gone to the store to buy ceramic, composite, and otherwise formed and decorated “harvest” pumpkins (the darker orange one of these, from Big Lots, is on my dining room table on an autumn table-runner as a centerpiece at the moment)…

 

harvestAbout five years ago, I even picked up some “Pilgrim” figurines at the grocery store that are similar to these. These are a little more ornate, but they’re made of similar composite (not plastic but not ceramic either) material that makes them not too easily breakable (important when you have cats that chase each other and sometimes knock things over).

So now my house is all decked out for Thanksgiving, which I guess is a good thing, since I’m cooking again this year, and there will be at least six – and maybe ten – at the table. It’s my favorite holiday, though, so I can’t wait.

How about you – other than the traditional Christmas/Hanukkah times, do you like to bring any of the seasons indoors?

Halloween, 1970’s Style

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Halloween circa 1975 edited framed

At the Homestead, circa 1975

So, I was going through some old photos recently and stumbled upon this photo –  one of the few I have of the epic Halloween parties we used to have when I was in elementary school.

Everyone is sitting around the big kitchen table at the Homestead, chowing down on the homemade pizza, cupcakes and popcorn, along with bowls of chips and corn curls, all while dressed in their costumes.

One of the cool things about this picture to me is that none of the people sitting around the table are me or members of my family: They’re all friends from school or up the road.

See, this was the only occasion all year when I and my two closest-in-age sisters (who were the only ones young enough to have this kind of party, still, since we were the youngest three of the seven girls) could invite several friends each to the house for a “big blow-out” party.  Oh, we had friends over all the time, and there was always enough food for another three or four plates, but this was one time when we could have up to 14-15 guests AT ONCE. It was an event planned by us and anticipated by our friends all year.

Most of our friends lived in the small city nearby, where our schools were. We were in the country, and that made a huge difference for a Halloween celebration, much of which could still take place outside, in beautiful mid-October weather.

We’d set up a “Haunted House” in the one-room camp that Pa had built years before out in the woods behind the garage, and some of my older sisters would “man” it. Big, black tarps were strung throughout to make “rooms” and in each room was a different “spooky” tableau…some with moving characters who would jump and frighten those touring it.

We’d have games, like “Guess the object” where the players had their eyes blindfolded and had to guess what was in the bowls…peeled warm grapes for eyeballs, a turned out jello-mold for brains, warmed pasta with sauce for “guts” – you get the idea) 🙂 Of course we’d also play “kick-the-can” and other running-around-in-the-yard-and-woods kind of games. Loads of fun.

It was a great opportunity to be creative, in this simpler time before technology and our addiction to it made everything more accessible and therefore less mysterious and exciting.

Halloween Mary framed

Me in the costume my mother made me to be a “Scheherazade”-type princess

Halloween framed 1

One of my sisters as an “Executioner”, complete with a “bloody” axe with which she cut off my head, LOL

I never realized how much work it must have been for Ma, though, preparing all that food. And of course, we almost always had homemade costumes, not just because they were “cooler” than anything we could find in the store, but also, I learned later, because they were more economical. My parents were frugal in all the right ways, so that I never experienced a sense of “want” other than the healthy kind. 🙂

It was an innocent time filled with great memories, when Halloween was centered on fun instead of “evil” connotations, and living in the country made for some rousing good times.

Anyone else have any memories of old time Halloweens to share? Please do in the comments!

 

An Oasis of Tradition (and some Cathartic Pumpkin Carving!)

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pumpkin 3 escape adulthood

Courtesy of escapeadulthood.com

pumpkin 1 pumpkin2So this isn’t a generic pumpkin-carving post. It’s about how carving pumpkins, in additional to being entertaining and leading to some pretty cool jack-o-lanterns, can be cathartic too.

Ma with pumpkin

Ma, enjoying the process of carving out her pumpkin’s eye, LOL

Consider this picture of my dear, very sweet, normally-without-a-violent-bone-in-her-body mother about twenty years ago, when we were carving pumpkins out in the back yard. She’s having a good time carving her pumpkin’s face…and maybe getting out a little aggression too, LOL. My father is clearly enjoying the moment, too.

Pa and Mary with pumpkin

Me and Pa another year, with finished pumpkins on the front steps

Year after year, we’d all have a good time, and it’s an example of the kind of fun I’ve tried to create with my own kids as the years have passed.

Traditions are important. They provide a little bit of something to count on, year to year, when the landscape and the world keeps changing around us (as it inevitably does). We have these moments to recreate and fall back on, to re-center ourselves, bring us back to our roots, and reclaim a little of all the different times in our lives that we participated in them.

Of course traditions come in all forms, whether for other holidays, birthdays, or just things like apple-picking or preparing favorite recipes. Sometimes they are the bridge between people who have drifted apart, giving them a reason to reconnect.

pumpkin and mary

Me around 25 years ago, sitting on the top of the “school bus shelter” Pa built at the bottom of the driveway, kept company by a giant pumpkin and the little orange cat my parents took in

I love traditions, and I’ll probably be writing more about them – at least the ones I’ve cherished – in the future. But for now, since we’re at the end of October, I’ll stick with this one. Although time marches on, our traditions only have to disappear or change if we want them to.

What are some of your favorite autumn traditions, whether for Halloween or not?

The Old Button Tin

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My mother’s old button tin (a reused, 1950’s Christmas cookie tin), a box of threads and some old “Bondex” iron-on material from the 1960’s

When I was little, I was always fascinated, watching my mother sew. She could hand sew or sew on the machine.

To me it was magic. I learned in later years, that it was necessity. With seven kids to raise on just my father’s salary (at least until I was a teen and my mother started a second career in the insurance industry and worked her way up to a CPCU license), it was more economical for my mother to craft many of our clothes and other items by hand than it was to buy them ready-made. Continue Reading…

Fear and Loathing in My Kitchen

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I come home from work to face villains in my kitchen.

It’s been a long day, and I felt quite virtuous to have contained myself to a salad and some plain roasted chicken for lunch.

chips

First the open bag of potato chips sits there, staring at me with a “Come hither” pose.

I resist and pull back in terror. But before I get more than one step away…

leftover pieI shift my head just a bit, and there is the single piece of apple pie leftover from Sunday dinner. It’s lonely, desolate, and exuding the need to join me (maybe with a nice cup of tea).

“No!!!” I shake my head and back away even further.

brownies

Just as I’m certain I’m in the clear, the dark, chocolately goodness of last night’s leftover brownies sings a siren song to me, inviting me to taste just a crumb. “A little bitty crumb won’t hurt you,” it whispers in a seductive purr.

Sigh.

In the end I succumb to half of the piece of pie. So far I’ve held off from devouring the rest, but who knows how long I will be able to be strong? Eating a celery stick isn’t going to cut it. I suppose I could drink some water, but that ruby port over there is looking far more enticing… 🙂

Anyone else have nutritional struggles, especially when you’re really trying to be good?  Sigh…

The “Attack” Cows

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Cow

A cow in an autumn field near my current home, looking far more placid than the “wild” cows of my story!

Let me preface this little story by saying that 1. I was raised in the country but not on a farm, and 2. If you’ve ever been close to a cow (or a whole herd of them!), you know that they’re large, solid animals.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, here’s my (funny and embarrassing) story. I was probably around 14 years old. I’d spent the entirety of my life until then with cows as my favorite animal. Horses were a close second, but there was something about the calm, peaceful, placid sight of cows in the field, chewing grass or their cud that made me happy every time I saw them (and still does).

It was a hot day near the end of a long, dry summer, and I was home alone – an unexpected treat in my rather large family. My mother was at work and my sisters were all elsewhere. My father was due home for lunch soon, but for that hour or so the house was all mine. It was a first taste of independence, and I was reveling in it…until I heard a thumping sound and looked out the window in the kitchen door. A big black and white head blocked out the sun and the creature’s  large, dark eye rolled as it lifted its nose and bawled out a cry. There was a full grown cow standing on the back steps of the house as if it was asking to come in! Suddenly, the cow shifted and banged its head against the window a few times in succession, making me shriek and run back into the living room.

What was I supposed to do? And why was the cow acting like that? Was it scared or angry or…rabid? Tingles went up my spine and the awareness that I was completely alone here shot through me. Before I could gather my wits together, a blur of movement outside the big picture window in the living room caught my attention. Then another out the side windows, looking over the garage. I snuck over to take a peek and almost shrieked again. There was a whole HERD of cows in the yards surrounding the Homestead and coming out of the woods on all sides. They were running, mooing, sometimes banging into the fence or the house like crazed beasts. Large, surprisingly fast-moving crazed beasts.

My heart was in my throat, and I tried to force myself to calm down to figure out what I could do. Should I call the police or what? Something was clearly wrong with the cows; they weren’t acting anything like the gentle animals I’d come to know over my 14 years of loving their peaceful, placid ways. What if one of them actually broke through a window and got in the house?

They’d shifted around into the back yard by now, away from the driveway, and the thought crossed my mind that I should try to make a run for it and see if I could get to the neighbor’s before the cows “got me”.

Just then I heard a motor and some tires on the driveway. Pa was home! He made his way slowly up the driveway, and a new fear swept through me. Oh, no! Pa would be crushed by these stampeding cows! I had to warn him before he got out of his car.

Yanking up the window, I leaned into the screen, waving my hands and shouting as I saw the driver’s side door open. “No, Pa!!  Watch out! Get back in your car! There are cows loose all over the place, and they’ll charge at you!”

Pa turned to look at me, and I could see he was holding back laughter. “It’s all right” he called out to me, before proceeding to grab a stick from along the driveway and walking calmly and steadily in the direction of the “herd”, calling out a sharp “Hiya!” several times as he tapped lightly on one cow or another to guide them back toward the woods from which they’d come.

When they were all gone, he came back into the house, laughing so hard he almost couldn’t catch his breath – thanking me for trying to “save” him, but explaining that cows don’t “attack”. He said that they were probably just thirsty from the hot summer day and had likely broken through the fence of the farmer’s field on the other side of the woods. The knocked over buckets in the yard seemed to attest to that likelihood.

I know my cheeks got red, but I got a good laugh out of it, too, once I got over my mortification. And from that day onward, my family has had some fun ribbing me about the time I tried to save Pa from the “Attack Cows”. 🙂

The Infamous Lemon Meringue Pie

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It was 1986, the second  full summer my husband and I were dating, and I’d recently learned that one of his favorite pies was lemon meringue. My mother always made a wonderful lemon meringue, with flaky, tender crust, tangy-sweet lemon filling, and a shiny, billowy and perfectly-browned meringue heaped on top. I’d watched her bake all sorts of creations from scratch many times and thought how difficult could it be?

My mother was busy with other cooking and going up and down the cellar stairs with the laundry, so I just went ahead and read her recipe card of instructions as I completed the process of mixing and rolling the pie crust dough. After the first roll-out, it didn’t look right, so I scooped it all into a ball and rolled it out again. Then a third time. I wanted this pie to be perfect for my new boyfriend!

The rest of the pie-making went splendidly. The filling looked good and the meringue top turned out fluffy and pretty. I hovered over the oven as it browned, pulling it out when just the right shade of caramel touched the tips. Into the fridge went the pie, to await the moment of glory after supper at the Homestead that night with my boyfriend in attendance.

When the time came, I was wreathed in smiles, seeing how happy my boyfriend was at the effort I’d gone through to make one of his favorite desserts. We gave him the honors of cutting the first piece of pie. I felt a tingle of apprehension as he cut into the center…and then had to push down pretty hard to cut through (and he was a college football player with plenty of arm muscle to spare). He was still smiling, though, and I tried to keep a brave face – but it all came to a screeching halt when he put the piece of pie on his plate and tried to use his fork to get a bite.

His fork wouldn’t cut through the bottom of the crust.

He paused, a little flustered, and my heart fell. My mother looked at me and whispered, “Did you have any trouble when you were making the crust?”

I shrugged. “Well, I had to roll it out three times to get it just right.”

She started to chuckle. Anyone who has worked with pastry knows that it has to be handled lightly and as little as possible to be tender and flaky. The more it’s handled the tougher it gets. My boyfriend, who had a good sense of humor said, “Well, I can just eat it like this…” and he picked up the slice of pie by the fluted edge, lifting it from the plate and intending to take a bite that way.

Except the pie didn’t shift. The crust was like a rock, preventing the filling or meringue from moving even a fraction. If he’d tried to bite it, he’d probably have broken a tooth.

Everyone burst out laughing at that point, including me. In my quest for perfection, I’d created an inedible crust. But as my boyfriend reassured me, the lemon filling and the meringue tasted good!