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Picture this: It’s Tuesday evening, and I’ve just returned from the grocery store. Being a man, I am attempting to bring in all of the groceries at once, so I have 5 heavy plastic sacks looped over various appendages, a 12-pack of paper towels hooked under my armpit, and I’m trying to pick up a 6th and final plastic sack using my one free pinky finger.

But this sack is not structurally sound. It’s engineers never intended that it should hold a can of corn, some coffee creamer, and a large salsa bottle. I get it by just one loop, which immediately breaks, the bag plummets, and there is an explosive sound. Salsa fills this little plastic bag faster than a certain family member can fill a diaper.

Anyway, this happened Tuesday, and I was quite grumpy about it. I was looking forward to that salsa! I had plans for a hot date involving me, the salsa, some chips, and a pre-recorded episode of The Office. Alas, ’twas not to be. So, I put the other groceries away, threw away the salsa bottle, rinsed off the coffee creamer, and got on with life.

At some point during this, I should have thought, “Hey, didn’t I buy a can of corn?” But I didn’t.

So, yesterday (Wednesday) when we got home from work, I noticed an even spray of little yellow particles all over the driveway behind the car. Baffled, I walked around and saw this:

Apparently, I had backed over the corn that morning on the way to work, leaving it all day to dry out into little corn raisins that stuck to my driveway and were a real pain to clean up! What a mess. But still, on some level, isn’t that kind of hilarious? This story doesn’t have a moral, but if it did it would be something like, “Just because you dropped the salsa doesn’t mean you have to back over the corn.” Ponder that.

My sister pointed me to this painting she found on craigslist:

I can kind of see it! (Kaeta’s less likely to have curly hair though.)

It’s strangely disconcerting when two completely unconnected lines of thought suddenly join up.

Today I read this review of the movie V for Vendetta, which says that while the movie is ostensibly anti-fascism, the main character is actually (and without a sense of irony) a fascist. Further down in the article it mentions a book called Modern Fascism by Gene Veith, an author I can highly recommend.

So I popped on over to Veith’s blog, where he was talking about the death of humanism and that we should revive the Reformation term “Christian humanism.”

I didn’t know what that was, so I googled it and found this article about Christian humanism. It mentions a guy named Desiderius Erasmus as “the most influential of the Christian humanists,” so I looked up his book “In Praise of Folly.” It was written for Sir Thomas More, who I recently read a book about, but that’s just an aside.

Okay, here ends path #1.

Later, apropos of nothing, I was trying to remember the name of the pope during the Reformation. So I googled and found this page and read about him (Pope Leo X).

Right below him was something about Martin Luther, so I read that, and it mentioned that he wrote Bondage of the Will against Erasmus! (I knew I’d heard that name somewhere! I’m sure my liberal-artsy friends are chuckling at me now.) Sure enough, I found that Erasmus wrote Freedom of the Will against Luther’s theology of salvation!

It’s just weird to me. Why did (1) reading a movie review, and (2) wondering who was pope during the Reformation, lead to the same guy?

My knowledge of history is woefully incomplete, but little things like this are what make me want to read more history to fill in the holes.

Tonight Johnathan had a concert at his house that was really great! We played one song together, called “Decatur, or A Round of Applause for Your Stepmom!” by Sufjan Stevens. Although we are both really into music, we haven’t really played that many duets together, so this was really special for me (and fun!). Here’s a video of it; if you notice a baby cooing/squealing in a couple of places, that’s Kaeta singing her part 🙂

[Download Video, 12.9Mb]

This evening Karianne and I experimented with making our own version of a frappuccino! The Starbucks bottles in this picture are filled with “Kurfee” (yes, that’s Kurth + coffee. The marketing campaign practically writes itself! “Gimme anuther gal-dang Kurfee, Lorna Gene! I gotta stay up tonight and catch them possums!”).

First, here’s how we did it:
1. Sterilize some bottles. We boiled 5 Starbucks bottles (and their caps) for about 10 minutes.
2. Brew 12 oz. of vanilla flavored coffee.
3. In a pot, mix coffee with 6 cups of whole milk, 1 cup of sugar, and a little less than 1 tsp of powdered cocoa mix (might work fine with Hershey syrup, but we used Nestle’s Carlos V mix).
4. Stir it up and ladle it into the bottles. Done in less than 20 minutes!

This completely filled 5 bottles and would have mostly filled a 6th if we’d had that many. It tastes really good! Not exactly like a frap, but it’s our first batch, and it’s got its own personality.

Now, the cost: A regular 4-pack of fraps at the grocery store costs $5, or $1.25/bottle. A single bottle at a gas station is around $1.79.

Our total cost for all 5 bottles was $1.85. That’s $0.37/bottle. Unbelievable. It tastes even better when you know that!

As I was mixing it, I was amazed at how much milk there was. When you buy a frappuccino, you’re basically buying a bottle of milk with tiny amounts of other flavorings in it.

The next time we try this, we’ll cut back on the sugar a little (maybe 3/4 cup) and make the coffee a little stronger. Now that we know how easy, fun, and cheap it is, I’m sure we’ll make more batches of Kurfee in the future, dadgummit.

This is from Book Business, a trade magazine I get at work. The quote is from Dominique Raccah, CEO of Sourcebooks. A great observation.

Books change lives. I’m in this business because books change lives. They create a space in which you think about your life…in different ways. They create a silence for that, too, just because of the amount of time that they take and the emotional energy that they take. I don’t believe that reading text on the Net is going to have the same effect. A book is a book; it’s a complete object.”

As I check in on my baby girl sleeping so sweetly in her crib, I am amazed at how my heart swells with love for her. Even through the births of all my nephews (and a very recent niece), I’ve never experienced a feeling quite like this before becomming a mommy myself. And it’s totally different from being in love, although that involves a lot of heart-swelling too, paradoxically. All I can say is that there’s just nothing quite like “Mommy-love”. I could try to put it to words all day long but you’ll never truly understand unless you’re a mommy too. (I suppose “Daddy-love” comes pretty close, though I’m not quite qualified to make that claim.)

A lot of reflection comes with this Mommy-love, along with many new sensations. One day Kaeta and I were sitting on the couch, playing, cooing, and laughing together, as we often do. I was once again overcome with the heart-swelling love, as I often am, and I gave in to the urge to plant big wet kisses all over her little smiling face. I tell her things like, “Kaeta, you are so sweet! Yes you are! You are the sweetest baby in the whole world!” (And anyone can clearly see that she is 😉 “You are so sweet I could just eat you up!” I exclaim as I nibble on her fingers a tiny bit. She seems to think this is a funny game, because she grins ear to ear as she voluntarily puts her fingers in my mouth.

Have you ever said to a baby, or ever heard anyone say to/about a baby, “I could just eat you up”? I don’t think I ever said it, but I certainly heard other mommies say it before I became a mommy and found myself saying it too. I remember thinking how ridiculous it sounded. How could anyone get the urge to eat their own baby? Doesn’t that just strike you as inherently wrong? But now I totally understand! It’s not that you actually want to eat the baby, but maybe just nibble on her a bit. It’s totally innocuous, as repulsive as it may sound.

I can’t help but believe this must be a common mommy-love feeling. It suddenly struck me how harshly I have judged hamster-mommies in the past for eating their own babies. As gruesome and horrifying as this little fact is (and infinitely more so to see the evidence of it *shudder*), I now feel like I can relate with these poor brainless creatures on some obscure, disturbing level. I can’t help but wonder if maybe these little rodent mommies are just misunderstood. I can just imagine the mommy hamster and the baby hamster sitting there playing and cooing at each other, when the heart-swelling mommy-love overcomes the mommy hamster and she says to her baby, “You’re so sweet I could just eat you all up!” But then the sad truth is that she just doesn’t have the mental capacity, the moral judgement, or the self-discipline to refrain. There is no little hamster-angel in white robes and a harp on her shoulder to say to her, “Now, now, Mommy Hamster, you know it would be wrong to eat Baby Hamster….”

And tragedy strikes.

I am now convinced that the mommy hamsters are not evil, they are just misguided. Aren’t we all in this fallen world? So the lesson we can all learn from the pea-brained hamsters is that you can’t have your baby and eat it too.

This guy lists some holidays he made up, like:

4/17 – Learn something new day. It doesn’t matter how big or small but the day must involve learning a new skill. it could be a magic trick, or how to make lasagna. Ask people you know to teach you something they like to do.

and

12/9 – Low technology day. Pick a year from the past and only use technologies that existed in or before that year (1950 would mean B&W TV, but no cable, no internet, no cell phones).

Things like this can be really fun. Maybe we can make up some holidays.

Or, on a different tack, maybe we can better celebrate the holidays we already have. Today is St. Patrick’s Day, but that means nothing to me except that Karianne pinched me this morning until I put on a green shirt. Today Gene Veith writes briefly about the true meaning of St. Patrick’s Day. “St. Patrick’s Day should remind us that even white people first came to Christianity through missionaries.” Right on.

Some years for Lent I try to give up two things — one to benefit my physical health and one to benefit my spiritual health (refer to my post from 3/3/06, Giving Stuff Up, if you missed it). This year I’ve decided to give up junky snacks and complaining. So far I haven’t done a great job remembering that I’ve given up complaining (a little too “conveniently” I’m afraid), but I’m working on it. But it does bring to mind the last time I gave up complaining for Lent in 1999 (so hard to believe that was 7 years ago!).

I was a wide-eyed freshman at UT, fairly involved at the Catholic Center there. My friend Becky told me her friend Jason thought I was cute, and promised that he would be perfect for me. He called me on Mardi Gras Tuesday and asked me out for that Friday. I thought he was cute too, so I accepted.

Being two Catholics going out on Friday in Lent, we went to Joe’s Crab Shack (where else?). We had a great time talking and getting to know each other as we sat out on the front steps for an hour or so (because all the other Catholic couples were there too). Eventually we were seated, and our conversation drifted to Lent, and of course what we gave up. Well it wasn’t a secret, so I told him what I had decided to give up — french fries and complaining. (I hope you’re not wondering what he gave up because unfortunately I don’t remember. But don’t worry, it doesn’t affect the story at all.)

A little more time passed, we ordered, and eventually our food arrived. And in that moment my heart sank. What I had neglected to pay attention to when ordering was the fact that my popcorn shrimp platter came with a side of hot, crispy french fries. Talk about temptation staring me in the face. So I took a deep breath, smiled at my plate of french fries (which I swear were calling out to me in loud, seasoned voices) and said, “What a lovely plate of french fries.” Instead of: “Geez, I can’t believe I forgot to substitute the french fries! I’m such an idiot! Man these fries look so good. Why did I have to give up fries anyway?” which is of course, what I was thinking. But unfortunately, I had just told this guy I gave up fries for Lent, and what was worse — I couldn’t complain about it! It was a first date afterall, and I was trying to impress this guy… so neither french fry nor word of complaint crossed my lips.

And it was the best plate of french fries I’ve never had.

(Obvious update — turns out Jason was not perfect for me, I realized a few months later. Then about a year and a half later I found the guy who is. 🙂

This morning I got up pretty late. Now, I almost never do this, really, but I didn’t take a shower. I just got dressed and put on a little extra cologne. Which I almost never do. Honestly. Naturally, my hair looked ridiculous, so I put a hat on.

I went to work for a while, then left for Discount Tire, where I got a good deal on some tires. I decided to stop by the Taco Shack for a breakfast taco on my way back to work. So, there I am, sitting at a red light at Braker and Metric, waiting to turn left, listening to a Dave Ramsey CD, when CRUNCH.

I looked in my rearview mirror and saw a guy in a white truck cursing himself. He had just rammed my car from behind.

My reaction to things like that is kind of weird. I just wanted it to have not happened. As the light turned green and I started to turn, I had to say to myself (in my head, not out loud — I’m not crazy! ;-), “No, that guy just hit you, you have to pull over.” My instinct was to just keep driving like it hadn’t happened. Is that weird?

Anyway, we pulled into the Walgreens parking lot, and my car looked fine. I got his insurance info and went on to Taco Shack.

Later in the day, I was in the car with Barry (no, my work day is not all driving around). My neck had been hurting since the accident, and I was rubbing it as Barry explained to me who Oliver Cromwell was. In the middle of his explanation, I realized something:

“Hey, I’m not wearing my hat!”

“Okay,” said Barry (who is always very patient when I interrupt him). “I haven’t seen you wearing a hat all day.”

“Dang it! Did I take it off at the tire store? Wha?…” I was truly perplexed. But then I felt bad for interrupting. “Sorry, man, okay. Continue about Cromwell.”

Barry was barely halfway through his next sentence when it hit me. My hair had looked ridiculous that morning, so there is no way I would have taken off my hat. When could it have come off?

I spun around and looked behind the driver’s seat, and there it was on the floor. Apparently, when that guy hit me, my head whiplashed hard enough to knock my hat off! So dazed was I from my mild concussion that I didn’t even notice until hours later.

The moral here is, if you see someone walking around and their hair is ridiculously messy, don’t judge them too harshly. They may have suffered a minor head injury that deprived them of their hat.