I Heart Sherlock Holmes

I heart Sherlock Holmes.

Ok, maybe that’s not TOTALLY accurate. Yes, in high school I had 2 different versions of the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries (one with the original illustrations, leather bound), and yes, I read them and read them and read them. I used to fiddle with our tv antenna so I could watch Jeremy Brett on the PBS Mystery version of Sherlock Holmes when I was in 8th grade, huddling close to the fuzzy tv and trying to drink in EVERY detail of my beloved stories. I aspired to BE a Baker Street Irregular. When Young Sherlock Holmes came out during my high school years, you could have knocked me over with a feather, I was like a screaming teenager at an Elvis concert, without the screaming, or the music, or the white leather jumpsuit…just the smitten joy of the whole thing.

But still, to be TRULY accurate…it’s not Sherlock I love.

I heart Dr. Watson.

I do. I have had a major crush on a fictitious 19th century sidekick for 25 years.

Dr. Watson is just so…solid. He humanizes the fiercely analytical Holmes. He’s friendly, normal, reliable, occasionally even jolly. Holmes needs him, depends on him, seems constantly a step ahead and yet when Dr. Watson gets shot, it’s a distraught Holmes who saves him. Watson may not be on the cutting edge of mystery solving, but without him around, Holmes would be lost. Watson brings out the best in Holmes.

For a teenager who pretty much always felt lost in her own bleh, Dr. Watson seemed like a wonderful guy to have on your side.

In the Young Sherlock Holmes movie, Watson loves pastries, and his terrifying hallucination after the evil society shoots him with poison is about Pastries Gone Wild (ok, that seemed much more plausible when I was 15). Watson shares my passion for éclairs! What else do I have to say?

A few months ago, a modernized version of Sherlock Holmes appeared on PBS. In this version, Holmes is a “high functioning sociopath” and Dr. Watson a vet recently home from Afghanistan. The writers worked on Dr. Who, so the whole show has a sharp, witty, BBC-esque edge to it that frankly is almost better than chocolate for my brain. My spouse and I watched the series together, a rare moment when we actually enjoy the SAME tv program.
And in watching this remake, in the surprise of feeling that long lost excitement at

seeing a Really Good Mystery with characters I love, I had a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany, if you will, one that blew my adolescent longings to smitereens.

Guess what I realized?

I married Dr. Watson.

Bear with me here…I really did. For those of you who KNOW my spouse, think about it. I actually DID marry an Italian version of Dr. Watson.

Reliable? Check.

Hard working? Check.

A good listener, even if he doesn’t quite get it the first time you say it really fast? Check.

Generally thinking the best of others? Check.

Just a genuinely NICE person? Check.

Patient as all get out with the odd cluttery foibles of the people around him? Um, check.

Really good at what he does, even if it’s not always flashy? Check.

Deeply loyal? Check.

See what I mean? I MARRIED DR. WATSON!!!

The real mystery is why the heck he married ME…probably because I look like Heidi Klum, but I could be wrong. Hm.

So see, watching tv isn’t always a waste of time. Who knew PBS Masterpiece Theater/Mystery would be a celebration of marriage?

Of course the first 2 times I meant to post this I got randomly irritated with the resident Watson, and said forget posting this nice post. Ahem. I am so mature. And early winter was a rough season here on many levels. But really, at the end of the day, I am grateful for my spouse, and kind of tickled to discover this weird parallel to my teenage world, a world before I really knew my spouse at all. Now there’s a narrative arc for you…

Food, Glorious Food!

(my delicious crumb cake)

“Food, glorious food! Hot sausage with mustard!
While we’re in the mood—cold jelly and custard!”
--Oliver!

My love of most things edible is not a newsflash to anyone. Eating is one of my most favorite pastimes. I only really have two criteria for food:

1. No tentacles
2. Not a garden pest

If these two criteria are met, I will eat almost anything.

As a child and young adult I admit, I was picky. Once I had kids, and endured hyper-emesis for 9 months straight 3 times, I could eat nearly ANYTHING. I have to be careful of certain rich foods and sadly cannot eat Mahi Mahi or Chilean Sea Bass (alas! I was a slow learner on both of those), but generally if it can be eaten, I will eat it.

Granted, my family picked up where my pickiness ended, almost as if I birthed my pickiness right out of me with the delivery of my kids! My eldest will try nearly anything, but Kids 2 and 3…eek. We have pictures from Easter several years ago of all of us around the table of feasting…and Kid 2 has a bowl of Cheerios in front of her.

It took the squashing of certain key portions of her brain for her to become a good eater. Now we have trouble making her stop. But still, vegetables are taboo.

Anyway, we have never wanted for food. There are about a half dozen grocery stores within 10 minutes of my house. We have a couple of big box stores only a bit further than that. I generally hit one grocery store and one mega store at least once a week.

When life looked a bit bleak at the end of last summer, I created a food hoard. I still have pasta from that time…my pantry was PACKED with canned foods, sauces, pastas, peanut butter. I was afraid, and I met my fear of the unknown with cases of Orville Redenbacher.

But this isn’t the situation for everyone.

This isn’t even the situation for most people, I’d say.

Our family volunteers at an urban soup kitchen about 25 minutes from our house. Just over a week ago we arrived at St. Ann’s to discover that it was not a meal day but a food pantry day. Lined up on the floor in neat rows were brown shopping bags full of groceries. Most had one bottle of juice, a bag of rice or pasta, some random canned goods, and a bag with some meat and cheese.

Each client had to present ID to get a bag, and multiple IDs (for kids, etc) to get 2 bags. The system is strictly adhered to and runs pretty smoothly for the most part.

As we worked to distribute the bags, alongside clients who help out before they take their bags (I love working with them), I was struck by how flipping lucky we are.

The idea that THIS could be our food for the week: a bag of random what not, all healthy and generously given, but beyond my control as mom, was staggering. Folks asking if there was any toothpaste to be had, folks wishing they could change what they had in their bags for something different (not allowed, chaos would ensue)…it was staggering.

The idea that I would have to get a number, wait on a line, present ID, and then get a bag of something that would become my family’s meals: I just felt flattened by the psychological enormity of that.

When my kids need food, I run to the store. When I was first married, and our budget was really tight, we ate more simply. We made do. My kids have NO CLUE about those days. Not that we are eating filet every night, or only drink Perrier (we don’t), but still: I buy food in packages (! The Tightwad Gazette lady would have my head!) , we always have cheese and meat in the house, we have plenty of milk and I no longer only get half and half on holidays.

We are so lucky.

I love being able to go work at St. Ann’s, and I wish we could go more often. I need that reminder to be grateful. It’s not like we did anything to be lucky. We are just super blessed that life, while smiting us in an awful lot of areas, hasn’t messed with lunch.

With new energy I am getting a bag for our county food pantry for collection next week at church. If we all gave one can of corn or one can of tuna, just imagine how many more people we could feed? Even if we don’t have a ton, just one can could really help someone who has less than we do.

Food brings people together. Sharing food with those who are hungry brings the world together, I think.

Add That to the List

My lists have lists.

It’s true. My lists sprout other lists, and those grow little piles of paper, and from there a jungle of lists spreads throughout my house.

I can’t help it. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m a little unfocused (understatement!), or stress has finally gotten to me, or my brain just works in circles, but if I don’t make lists, I’m lost.

The problem lies in the where of it all. I list things on envelopes, on the backs of notepads, on post-its and index cards. I list things on calendars and official letters from school. I list things on a whiteboard and on library receipts. These lists get all mixed up, and then start wandering my house in a hungry pack.

I am not particularly more organized because of my burgeoning List Herd, but I do derive extreme satisfaction from checking things OFF whatever lists I can find.
One helpful list I’m trying to keep this year, in my so far completely unsuccessful attempts at a year of zen, is a calendar list. I took an extra calendar and I am trying to list the things I do that are steps towards my goal of positivity. I write down when I exercise & what I do (Gilad! Or “run 3.04 in 36 minutes, knee at 2.6  “ ). This way I can see that I am not as much of a lump as I usually think I am—and I can keep track of my preparation for the Jersey Shore Relay in April.

I am also writing down a little “V” for when I remember to take my new vitamin, Stress Plus Zinc. Really. That’s what it’s called. How could I NOT buy that? I’m not sure taking stress in pill form is a good idea for me, but the bottle made me laugh. Normally when I buy vitamins I take them for a week and then forget until the bottle reaches its expiration date. Hopefully the calendar will help me remember to try and be healthy.

This blog and my daughter’s Caringbridge page also get a notation. I need to keep on top of writing. Filling in “blog” or “CB” on the calendar keeps me up to date on getting the blender-y ideas out of my head and into a computer.

I also decided to write down what books I read. In childhood I was a voracious reader, I devoured any book I could get my hands on. After college my reading dropped off, and once I had kids, reading got relegated to vacation time. Once I went back to work I HAD to read a lot, and now I am trying to read more for my own mental health, fun things not about modern history. So far this year I’ve read “La’s Orchestra Saves the World”, “A Thousand Sisters” (a must read, but NOT fun at all), and a book on cd for the car about “An Organized Mind “(yeah. Still working on that). I am midway through “Founding Foodies”. . .

Honestly, I only really started reading for fun again when my daughter started needing to get books for school from the library. The new releases are right next to the Children’s Section. But writing these down lets me see progress. I am not always floundering.

I also note roadblocks like “hospital day” or “felt like road kill”, just so I can avoid beating myself up over days where I AM a lump. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to call a doctor and actually get some annoying things checked out. I listed local doctors to call. Ahem. That’s a step, right? My calendar will hopefully help me narrow down some of those roadblocks to health that I need to ask a professional about, and guide my understanding of what issues are perhaps stress related . When Road Kill Day is the day after Hospital Day, it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out there might be a connection.

I guess my calendar is really a list AFTER the fact, almost like writing an outline after the essay or story is done. But this list in reverse helps clear the cloud of incompetence I normally feel like I live under.

The other day I found a list my 8 year old made to cover What We Need To Do at the fundraiser we run in March. She included pictures and numbers, and left her list in the pile o’ lists I have in my kitchen.

Huh. Who knew list making was genetic? I should make a note of that somewhere. . .

Cookies for Breakfast

As usual, there is a song stuck in my head.

It’s more of a jingle, really, but it is stuck. Maybe because I am eating Cinnamon Life in an attempt to not eat leftover Christmas cookies.

“Well, you can’t have cookies for breakfast, but you can have Cookie Crisp!”

I have several thoughts on that.

When I was a kid, we never had cookies for breakfast. We had cereal. Generally store brand, always healthy. Toasted Oats, Krispy Rice, Corn Flakes, and the occasional
Grape Nuts. Never did a cookie masquerade as part of a complete breakfast in our house.

Granted, my mother did pass on her childhood lesson of “put sugar on your cereal”. So even though I wax on about how we never had sugar cereal as kids, except for the uber-treat of the occasional vacation box of AlphaBits (which is hardly a sugar cereal), we sort of ALWAYS had sugar cereal.

Only when I had children did I realize you don’t have a natural instinct to sugarify cereal. To paraphrase South Pacific, “you’ve got to be taught”. Somehow, in one of my rare moments of early maternal competence, I realized this…and thus my children have never put sugar on cereal. I am still agog about this. They don’t know that people do this.

Granted, I face a tricky situation on those rare occasions I eat cereal for breakfast. Old habits die hard, and I have had to become a pro at stealth-sugaring. Ahem.

For years my husband only ate dry cereal because he thought he hated milk in cereal. Eventually he realized he hated sweetened milk, sugarified by the cereal. Yes, he is weird that way. Thankfully, this was not a deal breaker for our marriage.

I do find it kind of obnoxious these days that in the push for Healthy Eating, the really good for you cereals are exponentially more expensive than the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs and anything with freakishly tinted mini-marshmallows. Cereal with marshmallows is a Rubicon I have never managed to cross. Ew. But to be budget conscious AND healthy is a very challenging prospect.

I do make my own granola now, which is both healthy and naturally sweetened with honey and applesauce. Yay me!

But more days, I just have cookies for breakfast. Yay me?

Because in the final analysis, I am a grown up. Who says I can’t have cookies for breakfast? Cookies have grains and eggs in them. Some cookies even have fruit. So I can have eggs and toast with a fruit cup or one Linzer tart cookie. Really, a cookie is so portable, and such an efficient way to get all of those healthy foods in a few delectable bites.

I exercise regularly, and try to make healthy meals…so I find the world is a better place if I have a well timed choco chunk cookie before work.

As a mom, I did finally actually buy a box of Cookie Crisp. My kids were enthralled—you CAN have cookies for breakfast!—even as I was underwhelmed. I make really insanely good cookies. Cookie Crisp just doesn't compare. Alas! The disappointment after all these years of pining after those tiny cookies that stay crispy even in milk!

I can't complain. I’ll just stick with the leftover Christmas cookies, because really, those are the breakfast of champions.

Movin' Right Along...again

I would like to say I have blogged reams in the last months and that some mysterious blogosaurus simply consumed the posts, leaving nothing for anyone to read.

I would like to say that I have filled screen after screen with witty commentary and reflections on my fascinating existence.

To quote Groucho Marx, I would like a trip to Europe.

If I had ruby slippers I could tip tap tap them together and voila! these wishes would become reality. I do have a pair of exceptionally cute red shoes (ok, maybe more than one pair. Maybe more than 2…ahem), but none of them seem to possess the key wish-fulfilling properties of ruby slippers.

Alas. But I am resolved, as much as I ever make New Year’s Resolutions—which is never—to actually try to put some words in this blog on a regular basis, even if a roaming blogosaurus threatens to devour them, and even if I have nothing witty or fascinating to say. Red shoes optional.

My one true resolution for this year is to work on being happy so I can be a real support to my children, the ones who have something to truly put happiness in peril. My spouse asked me the other day, in response to me stating a need to avoid an annoying conversation (oh, the holidays!) by going to my “happy place”, “Do you even have a happy place?”

He was kidding, but I, of course, was utterly crushed. (I haven’t made any resolutions about melodrama, so I figure that was an appropriate response.) He’s right. I have to re-locate my missing happy place. As part of that, I need to keep writing. Writing keeps me from hiding under a rock, or the bed, or anything I can manage to fit under. Writing gives me the path to FIND the happy place, because if the words get all glommed up inside me, I can’t navigate a path out of myself. Does that make sense? Silence becomes the rock for me to hide under.

I’m not sure if that’s deep or cheesy, but hey, that’s the vaguely self indulgent perk of a blog, walking the deep/cheese line.

Seriously, I may be brief, or silly, or just meh in this blog, but I am determined to not let 2011 roll over me until at least February. “Movin’ Right Along” was NOT supposed to represent the Steam Roller of Life working its inexorable progress over my formerly 3 dimensional neurotically creative self. I need to reclaim progress, live my life (instead of letting life live me), and WORK at happy.

As inspiration, I am using Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project as a handy reference…I highly recommend this book, it’s a really entertaining and insightful read, and at least for me, I felt like GR was talking out of my head sometimes, which was both unnerving and endearing at the same time. Check out her facebook page for a great community of people who are thinking Happy is a good thing. : )

Carpe 2011!
Peace,
Kristin

Stuck on the Shoulder

Life can never be exactly what you want it to be—
I could be satisfied, Knowing you love me…
(This is dedicated to the one I love)

I’ve reached epic fail on the blogging front.

For both of you who read here, I apologize. Not because I have some deluded sense of Sin of Word Deprivation, but because I’m a creature of habit who obsessively checks several blogs regularly. I know that twinge of disappointment when there are no new words to be read.

I’ve hesitated to post this. Nobody wants to read Confessions of a Waaaambulance Rider, and I feel like the descent into whine is never more than a step away. But I hope that by at least putting some words on screen I can take some kind of step, even if it’s a slippery one.

When I began this blog, I called it “Moving Right Along”. As a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, my life tends to hurtle forward, kind of like Daffy Duck in the Robin Hood episode…

“ I trip along merrily! I trip along merrily! I trip I trip I trip I trip I tri-hip up and down! I trip trip trip trip (falls down hill)…trippity trip trippity…I tri-hip it up and down!” .

Well, that, and I like Muppets. Inordinately.

But recently, for whatever reason, I am not going anywhere.

I’m still busy as all get out. School has been a challenge: a good challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. My teenager defines Challenge, generally not in a good way. My little ones…well, one isn’t so little anymore, and she’s trying to make sense of growing up. My baby is my heart, a balm to my soul (albeit one that can NEVER find her socks or her ballet tights and forgets herself in a game or movie when I send her to do a chore). Everyone has activities, everyone has projects, everyone has needs and wants and the washer is broken and my spouse’s running clothes REEK and I have no clue what to make for dinner.

In that respect, life is moving right along just like it always does.
But somehow, lost in the late summer, my heart is stuck, my mind is frozen. Well, frozen in the sense that there are 57 million ice cubes racing around inside the frozen brain and yelling at any given second. This is most annoying at 5 a.m., but it gets old at any time of day.

I can go into a store, and see something that puts me right back in 2004. Yesterday it was those crazy erasers, the little Japanese collectible erasers my girls are nuts for. I saw a sushi set…and instantly was back in the onco playroom, where the play kitchen set had a somewhat disturbing plastic sushi play food collection. Today it was a song on the radio, more accurately a conversation about radio songs that meant something, followed by the thought of the song that was playing when we headed to Philly for biopsy results in 2006. It’s like my mental TARDIS is broken (not unlike the actual TARDIS often is, which I guess should be comforting).

It’s like the crazy vines in the movie Jumanji, or Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors”. The vines catch my ankle and drag me down…and darn, they just keep
growing.

Many of our long time friends in our community of woe are really suffering. Many are reaching that point in the journey that is the nightmare of every parent, but an acute agony for the parents who walk this long road too. Every child suffering, every parent suffering, is another tendril that holds my heart from moving.

Why, after 6 years, this is such an issue, I have no idea. Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Last night I saw a quote on Facebook that said, “Anxiety is the crippling fear over some possible future evil. The irony is that, except for sin, anxiety is a greater evil than any evil that could possibly come upon us -- for anxiety disquiets the entire soul and renders it unfit for any good work.


While I don’t know that anxiety is a greater evil than any ACTUAL evil –about 10 minutes in a pediatric intensive care unit with your child kind of puts the doubt on that—I do see that the disquiet of anxiety, the noise, the 57 million ice cubes, can get a gal stuck. The noise makes all other words, all other blog entries, just seem meaningless.

I am waiting and hoping that the poster of that quote posts the “and so you do this and live happily ever after” follow up quote…

And waiting…and hoping…and waiting…and hoping…

But in the meantime, I am trying to make sense of things, trying to embrace once again that life really can never be exactly what I want it to be, but love truly makes things bearable, if not better.

Hopefully as we get into Thanksgiving I can get some of my verbal and mental mojo back. I don’t really know how, but as a Jersey girl/manic mom/sugar addict/high school teacher/wannabe runner/bearer of an NF-brain tumor flag, I really don’t have the time to be caught in some mental game of Chutes and Ladders, where every step forward leads to a big twisty slide down to yikes.

Really, NOBODY has time to be “merely a flesh wound!” everywhere she goes.

I’m not sure how to do this; but I hope that I can start moving right along again, that I can formulate coherent sentences and get the washer fixed. Until then, I’m going to see how many more movies I can reference in a single blog entry… : )

Jim Cantore, Go Home (please)!

Last weekend we did not get hit by a hurricane.

Granted, I wasn’t all that worried about getting hit by a hurricane, but weather reports were full of breathless meteorologists pointing at maps and standing by beaches, updating Hurricane Earl’s progress about 87 times an hour. Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel was on site in North Carolina, waiting for the Big Hit.

If Jim Cantore comes to your town, prepare to be smote by Mother Nature.

I don’t live on Long Island, or in coastal North Carolina or Cape Cod, or maybe I would have been more concerned. But even for folks living in those beautiful, vulnerable areas, Earl ended up being much less than anticipated. I almost felt bad for the weather people, even as I felt relief for the coastal residents.

Our resident elephant went back under the couch yesterday, and left behind for me a whole new understanding and empathy for people who live in hurricane prone areas.


When a hurricane is predicted, people in vulnerable areas have to take certain precautions. Board up the house, get the boats out of the water, tie down loose stuff in the yard, get provisions, prepare an evacuation plan in case that becomes necessary. I would imagine that with each passing weather report and computer model of the approaching storm, hurricane survivors would remember the one storm they weren’t ready for, or the time their preparations were not enough. The lessons of past storms converge with the potential yikes of the incoming weather.

I would imagine that anxiety would rise, and within the 24 hour mark of landfall residents just start throwing things in the car, or the shed, shoving things in safe places, grabbing cans of Spam and grape jelly from the store even if everyone in the family HATES Spam with our without grape jelly.

But then…what if, like Earl, the storm peters out, or moves off shore and just sits, or takes a new unpredicted path?

Obviously there’s intense relief. A reprieve! An aversion of destruction! Woohoo! Jim Cantore is going home! Yay!

But at the same time, I think there’s probably a sense of…lostness, for lack of a better word. I think of those people looking at the boarded up windows, the boat on land, the case of Spam, and think, “now what?”

Dismantling preparations is a weird thing, especially when you can see the eye of the storm circling just out of the corner of your eye. You know you still live in hurricane zone, but you have to dismantle, find some culinary creativity or donate the Spam, unboard the windows, search for all the stuff you threw in the shed in a panic (“Mom! Where’s my ZhuZhu pet?). This is the easy part, even if it’s a bear to do.

But what do you do with the anxiety? The fear stoked by the storm, the legitimate terror that comes with past experience and knowledge that the storm isn’t gone, it’s just off course for a while?

What do you do with that?

How do you explain to people that yes, you are SO RELIEVED you don’t have waves crashing through the front windows (not that you would, they’re still boarded up), but you see the maps. The maps of the storm are always in your mind. YOU KNOW THEM. The experts told you what the maps said…you’ve been hit before. You know today’s reality is all we’ve got, but you are cognizant of what reality has been, what it was predicted to be, and what it could be down the road.

So even though today is all we’ve got, it’s hard to just zip back to ok.

I appreciate that. So thanks, Earl, even though you disappointed the Weather Channel folks. Poor Jim Cantore will find another storm to cover (he may already be courting Hermine, I don’t know). Thanks for giving me the perfect analogy for the day after the elephant hides again.

We are so grateful, and so relieved. And still reeling a bit, even though the news was good. Unfortunately for humanity I had to return to work today, where the elephant is well known. Hugging a dear friend whose prayers joined with so many others on our behalf almost put me over the edge. Answering the question “They can’t just cut it out?” was ok, having a discussion about a change in services for my child, not so much. Out of the corner of my eye, the eye of the storm waits. I know after a few days I can block it out again, but not today.

But now, baseball practice awaits. A patio umbrella just went through my back window while I was typing this. And I have to figure out what to do with 12 jars of peanut butter…