Borderline Savage

Borderline Savages in Ancient Egypt

There was a rare sighting (Okay, the *only* sighting. . . so far.) of both of your Borderline Savage co-pilots together this weekend. I know some people think that we are one in the same person, but we are actually two people. We have photographic proof:

That's us, with my kids. We went to the members-only preview of the new Lost Egypt exhibit at the Museum of Science. There was a nice staff member at the entrance of the exhibit taking this photos. If she had used a different camera angle, it wouldn't be so obvious that we were in the museum, but what can you do. Nancy's son declined to be photographed, and he definitely didn't have anything to do with this off-kilter photo.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the exhibit, but we all had fun, and I'd highly recommend it. We had a second grader, a fifth grader, and a high school junior with us, and there was something there for everyone. It was nice to go to the preview because it wasn't too crowded. There are some cool activities that we were able to enjoy without having to wait forever in line. Unlike some other Egyptian exhibits, this wasn't too morbid for my kids, either.

While we were there, we touched a little bit upon why this exhibit was different from most Egyptian exhibits you see in museums, and that was a topic that we discussed further when we got home. Most exhibits about ancient Egypt focus on the art (Indeed, Boston's collection of Egyptian antiquities resides in the Museum of Fine Arts.) or on the history (As in the fabulous collection at the British Museum.). The Museum of Science's exhibit was the first I've seen that really focused on the science behind ancient Egypt: how the giant stone blocks were moved when the pyramids were constructed, how hieroglyphics were decoded, how pottery shards are put back together to form vessels, and how modern diagnostic tools (CT scans, x-rays, forensic facial resconstruction, etc...) can be used to tell us how ancient people looked, lived, and died. Nancy and I both agreed that the ancient Egyptians could have used more dairy in their diets. They seemed to have a lot of issues with their teeth and bones.

One of the best moments (for me) of the day was when we were in the museum lobby having a little refreshment break. The names of some pioneers in the various sciences are engraved in the walls, and Nancy's son was reading some of the names and filling us in on what their contributions to science. When we reached Marie Curie, both Nancy and I said we liked her because she was Polish. Jinx!

I think the other possible highlight of the trip was when we were in the planetarium and my son asked why we had tickets that said Child and Adult for the planetarium show. I told him that we have a family membership to the museum and it admits two adults and three children. His response was to look at Nancy and me and ask,"Are you gay?" Apparently, my efforts to let my kids know that it's okay to love who you want have had the unintended consequence of my eight year old believing that I am romantically involved with *any* adult I know. There could be worse problems.

After the museum, we went to Kelly's Roast Beef, a Boston institution. If you eat roast beef in Boston, you have to eat it at Kelly's.  I'm not even a big fan of roast beef and I love Kelly's. My little guy got a second burst of energy because after lunch, as we were driving Nancy and her son to the station so they could depart for home, he treated us all to an original song called, "Mommy Had a Mohawk." I wish I had recorded it, because he was in fine form. Everyone in the car was laughing, and my daughter laughed so hard that she cried. I have to admit, I was tearing up a bit while I was laughing. We requested a command performance at my dad's birthday dinner later that night, and the little dude couldn't remember it, so that gem has been lost to history.

We had such a great time, I wish I could have kidnapped Nancy and her son and kept them for the weekend. We did a lot of other cool stuff that I wish they could have done with us. Suffice it to say, this was the first time we've been seen in public together but it is most definitely NOT the last time.

Black and White

Sometimes, random things happen, yet happen in way that makes them seem less than random, if that makes sense. Take the past week, for example. I started listening to 70's on 7 on Sirius/XM because I was sad about Donna Summer dying and figured that was my best chance of hearing some of her music on the radio. One of the songs that I heard was "Black and White" by Three Dog Night. I remember hearing this song a lot when I was five years old and taking dance classes on Saturday mornings - I have vivid memories of tap dancing to this song as a little kid, and hearing it still makes me feel a bit like putting my hands on my hips and slapping my right foot on the floor (which is the only part of the tap dance routine I remember).

There are videos of this song that show Three Dog Night singing it, but the sound quality isn't great, so here's a video of the 45 (remember those?) spinning on a turntable, which isn't too visually stimulating, but which features the exact version of the song that I remember.

 

The interesting thing about this song, which I didn't know until I was much older, is that it was written in 1954 (not by anyone in Three Dog Night) to commemorate the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which established that separate was not equal. The lyrics make a lot more sense once you know that. Even if you didn't know the historical roots of the song, it was a perfect early 1970's song, when peace and love and equality were popular musical themes in a country that had spent the last few years being rocked by the Vietnam Conflict, Watergate, and racial unrest, among other things. 

Peace, love, and understanding (Thank you, Elvis Costello!) are things we strive for in my household. It's sometimes jarring when we encounter people who don't feel the same way. This week El Esposo told me that a man who works at a supplier he frequently uses for work supplies told him, "Your wife must be lucky, to have married a hispanic man." I have no idea what that means, and when I asked El Esposo he thought that  the man meant that white women like hispanic men because they are latin lovers. But white women are supposed to like black men, as the stereotype goes, I countered. Then I thought about it and realized that, according to stereotypes, white women like any kind of man other than a white man. What's up with that? Why on earth do people care so much about race?

Why can't we think about race more in terms of "Black and White"? In the lyrics of the song, black and white complement each other, as in, "The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write." Without one, there is no other. Separately, they accomplish nothing. And what about mixing colors? Black and white mixed make grey. The world is grey. Very little in this world is 100% anything. Even the protagonists in the tv shows and movies we watch have serious flaws - we love them anyway and we keep tuning in to shows with these complex characters.

It's a grey world out there, people. Let's acknowledge and accept the beauty of black and white, and all the many colors in between. To quote Wonder Mike, "I like to say hello to the black, to the white, the red and the brown, the purple and yellow."

You can listen for yourself, Wonder Mike starts the song out:

 

Yeah, it's The Sugarhill Gang with Rapper's Delight - check the audience out. . . very diverse! I don't know if this song broke down barriers, but it certainly blew through some. I'm hoping to see more barriers knocked down.

Dim All the Lights

We lost Donna Summer today. I decided to scrap my planned Throwback Thursday post to remember her. And I'm starting with Dim All the Lights, which shows how strong and powerful her voice was. There are videos with better sound, but I chose one which shows Donna singing live.

 

I wasn't a huge disco fan, and a lot of those songs didn't age well, but Donna Summer made music that was cool even after the heydey of disco. I remember still listening to her music in the late 1980's. People still thought it was good.

Donna Summer was popular before Tipper "I'm Going to Restrict Your 1st Amendment Rights" Gore and her friends who don't believe in the Bill of Rights started the PMRC and attempted to tell Americans what we could and couldn't listen to, getting Congress involved, and slapping those stupid warning stickers on CD's. I'm sure Tipper and friends would have gotten on Donna's case for singing songs that seemed to glorify prostitution, and Donna herself turned to religion later in life and seemed to denounce some of her recording career. But I have to say, when my friends and I were singing songs like "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls" and dancing around, we took these songs as nothing other than fun songs about strong women. It certainly didn't motivate any of us to become prostitutes. I'd like to think that women like Donna Summer and Pat Benatar paved the way for other strong, talented female musicians to make music about women standing up for themselves.

I also have to give Donna Summer credit for aging gracefully. She wasn't one of those former stars who was stuck in the moment of her greatest success, laughably attempting to hold onto the era in which she was at the top. She aged gracefully and matured, and I was always happy to see how she was doing when a tv show or magazine would find her on her farm and interview her.

I have a question for all of you. What was your favorite Donna Summer song? I have a hard time choosing, depending on the mood that I'm in. I haven't mentioned On the Radio, MacArthur Park, I Feel Love, Love to Love You Baby, or many more.

I'm going to leave with another favorite of mine, Last Dance:

 

This was a staple song at the end of the night at school dances when I was in junior high, and it seems a fitting way to end this post.

Goodbye to my Boston-born homegirl, and thanks.

Curses!

Remember that sock I was knitting while I was watching the Stanley Cup playoffs? It's gone. I knitted it twice. The first time, it was too tight, even though I went up a needle size from what the pattern required. The second time, it was fine as far as El Esposo was concerned, but I thought it was too loose and floppy on larger needles. There wasn't a good marriage of pattern, yarn, and needle size.

And let us not forget, this is the sock that sunk the Pittsburgh Penguins and went on to do in the Boston Bruins:

Here's a camera phone shot of the sock (and the Bruins) before they both met their untimely demises.

I wasn't really sure what to do with the yarn after this debacle. El Esposo wants me to knit him socks. I need something portable to knit during my down time and tv watching. But there was some bad juju there, and the last thing I wanted to do was share some of that with Nancy and her beloved New York Rangers, who are doing really, really well in the playoffs.  (I like the Rangers, too. I will always remember going to New York for the World Cup in 1994 and arriving shortly after the Rangers had their ticker tape parade after winning the Stanley Cup that year. It was pretty cool.)

So. . . I worked on some other stuff for a bit, and then started a new pair of socks. Same yarn, different pattern. These are Diagonal Cross-Rib Socks by Ann Budd. They're in the book Favorite Socks, and I'm pretty sure they were also published in an old issue of Interweave Knits.

Here they are, well the start of the first one. I'm about that far along on the second sock now, only on the second sock the cross rib slants in the opposite direction. El Esposo loves them. The pattern is easy to memorize so they are a good project for me right now. The curse also appears to have been lifted, as they have not caused horrible things to occur to any hockey teams. I'm also helping the curse along by avoiding hockey.

I'm hoping to have these socks done in the next week or so, as I have decided to go to camp this summer, Camp Loopy that is. I'm planning my project for the first month of camp, May 27th - June 27th. Is anyone else out there doing this? The first month's challenge is to knit something using at least 400 yards of yarn, using a pattern from a designer who is not from your country. When my yarn arrives I will post more information. I would love it if someone else out there was doing this. I know you can go to Ravelry and find people who are doing this kind of stuff, but I'm not a big fan of knitalongs via the Ravelry boards. I prefer reading blog posts and getting to know the other people, and I get annoyed by people who post and post and post and post incessantly on the Rav boards.

I guess I'm getting curmudgeonly as I age. El Esposo used to laugh at me because I would tell him I wasn't going to do something (quite often, it was watch the end of a movie) because I only have so much time to live my life, and I'd rather do nothing than fill my time with nonsense. He definitely took it as my being grumpy, but he has come around and realized that it's not meant that way. I decided that there are a lot of unpleasant things in this world that you should push yourself to finish, so when there's something that really isn't going to make such a big difference, go ahead and give yourself permission to cut your losses and move on to something more enjoyable.

Clown Town

Jut in time for Throwback Thursday, it's almost Clown Town time again! That was the highlight of my spring when I was a little kid, the next big event after Easter. Clown Town happened every May and it was a sign of summer fun to come.

Clown Town is an annual event run by a local women's group. When I was little, the women's group members had clown costumes that they made themselves, and they ran little carnival games that even preschoolers could win (Okay, everyone who played won.). They also had rides that were hired from a carnival ride operator, most of them oriented toward the under-ten crowd. We don't have any photos of Clown Town from when I was little, but here's a photo from about that time:

I remember Clown Town being at this site, but I think they are a little before my time. Clown Town has sinced moved around the corner from the original site. I did take photos of my kids at Clown Town once I grew up and had kids to bring. Here's the Princess, enjoying a ride when she was two (almost three):

There aren't any photos of the little guy because he was only two or three months old when he went to Clown Town for the first time. I think the kids are getting a bit old for it now, and they haven't been in the past couple of years because they have been with their dad on Clown Town weekend and he won't take them. It's a little different for me now, too. The women who volunteer all wear professionally made clown costumes and there seem to be more rides. It doesn't have the same homegrown feeling to it any longer.

Still, it's nice to see some traditions continue, even if they change somewhat.

Right now, we've just started what has traditionally been an insane time of year in this household. It's dance recital season, so my attention to e-mail and blogs and the like has been very sporadic. But I'll try to keep posting. And, if I can get my hands on photos of me when I had my dance recitals, I will post them on another Throwback Thursday. Don't get too excited in anticipation - I only took dance lessons for a couple of years when I was little, so they're nothing spectacular.

Does anyone out there have any memories of something like Clown Town from where they grew up?

Shredded Chipotle Lime Chicken

I was inspired by the Food of the Month Club over at La Cocina de Leslie to try an original recipe with limes, as limes were the Food of the Month for April. I don't feel confident enough to have posted the recipe prior to the deadline for FOTMC, but here's a lime recipe that I created especially for El Esposo. I hope you like it, too.

Shredded Chipotle Lime Chicken (Crock Pot Recipe)

Ingredients

1    TBSP olive oil

1    small yellow onion, chopped

2    limes (You will need the zest from one and the juice from both.)

1    can GOYA chipotles in adobo sauce

1     clove of garlic, minced (or 1/2 tsp minced jarred minced garlic)

    cilantro, to taste

    black pepper, to taste

1/2    tsp. cumin

1/2    tsp. paprika

1/2 cup chicken broth

2     lbs. chicken breast (This is about 4-6 skinless, boneless breasts.)

Instructions

1.    Chop the onion  and cook for about five minutes in a medium sauce pan with the olive oil.

2.    Remove seeds and stems from chipotles and chop. Add chipotles to the onion, along with the cumin, garlic, and paprika. Cook for about four minutes, stirring regularly.

3.    Add chicken broth, cook on medium heat until it boils, then lower heat and simmer for two minutes.

4.    While mixture is simmering, put chicken in crock pot. Add pepper and cilantro to taste. We don't have fresh cilantro in the grocery stores here, so I used dried, though I would recommend fresh if you have it available. Add the zest of one lime, and then the juice of both limes.

5.    Add the onion/chipotle/chicken broth mixture from the sauce pan to the crock pot.  This should be enough to cover the chicken. At this point, the contents of the crock pot will look like this:

6.    Cover and cook in crock pot on low for 1 1/2 hours. I'm a little cautious about making sure chicken has been cooked all the way through, so I flipped the chicken over and cooked it for another 1 1/2 hours.

7.    Remove the chicken from the crock pot and shred it using two forks. Put the chicken back in the crock pot and mix well with the other ingredients. Cook for one hour more.

You can serve the chicken many different ways. The first night, I thought it tasted so good that I didn't want to do too much to get in the way of enjoying the flavors, so I made tacos with corn tortillas. I put a little shredded cheddar cheese under the chicken, but that's all I did. They were better tasting than they looked in this photo:

I think they would have been really nice with some slices of avocado, and El Esposo said that he would like to try the chicken in a burrito next time I make it. This recipe got two thumbs up from him. I trust his input. I tend to like things very, very spicy - it doesn't bother me at all to burn the inside of my mouth with hot spices, but El Esposo likes sweet and slightly spicy, and this recipe is for him. I have to admit, I really loved it, too. When the time came to eat the last of the leftovers, there wasn't enough to make tacos, so I shredded a tortilla, put it in the bottom of a bowl, threw the rest of the chicken on top, and microwaved it, like so:

It was delicious, just like that. This chicken is a little soupy - the liquid does not all cook off - because I like to store and reheat the chicken in a little bit of liquid, to keep it nice and moist, but for this last dish, I didn't have to worry about draining off the liquid before serving the chicken.

I hope you like it! Buen Provecho!

A Loaf of Bread, a Carton of Milk, and a Stick of Butter

Do you recognize that grocery list?

Today's Throwback Thursday idea came to me the other night while El Esposo and I were watching Top Shot. The contestants had a challenge where they had to memorize different types of targets and then shoot only those targets. During the practice, one of the contestants used the great memory device of repeating what he saw out loud, and it worked really well for him at practice even though it looked a little strange. So I told El Esposo that I use that same memory trick, and I've been using it since I was a preschooler. I learned it on Sesame Street, and to this day I remember the grocery list from the cartoon:

 

Pretty impressive, lol! I was actually the first generation of Sesame Street kids. Sesame Street started airing here while my mom was pregnant with my younger brother. She used the twice daily broadcasts of the show to earn some free time to get things done or rest. So, starting at the age of two, I was watching this show twice a day. Yeah, I remember the original cast, and when Snuffleuphagus wasn't even on the show, never mind being invisible to everyone but Big Bird.

The funny thing is that the result of my watching so much Sesame Street was that my mother thought I was a little bit mentally impaired. There were quite a few other kids in our neighborhood who were in my age group, and their moms were all so proud that they were learning their numbers or letters through Sesame Street. Remember, this was the infancy of popular children's educational programming. My mom never had anything to share with the other moms about what I had learned on Sesame Street because I wasn't showing any signs of having learned anything. And then someone gave me a chalkboard, either for Christmas or for my third birthday, and I sat down and wrote the entire alphabet on the chalkboard. It turns out my mom had nothing to fear.

When I was really little, my dad went to school at night to get his MBA. After he graduated, it was my mom's turn to go back to school, for her M.Ed. I am a little fuzzy about exactly when this all occurred, though I know that they had both graduated by the time I was eight. While my mom was in school, she and her other teacher friends had no end of ways to test me and try things out on me. It was actually a fabulous experience - I had no idea that other kids' mothers weren't putting together books and games and other activities to promote learning. That was my mom's homework, and it fit really nicely with my development. Although I do not understand phonics to this day, when I was four my mom worked on putting together a series of phonics booklets, and she used them to teach me to read before I started kindergarten. I don't mean that I was already into Nancy Drew when I went to kindergarten, but I was fully literate about that fat cat who sat on a mat. And I distinctly remember reading The Borrowers on a day home from school with strep throat while I was in first grade. Like my blog co-pilot Nancy, I was the kind of kid who didn't go to bed at bedtime. We stayed up to read.

I'm going to close with a clip that I remember *loving* when I was a kid. It's not about reading, and it's not the kind of thing they show on Sesame Street any more, but the baker falling down the stairs was one of my favorites. (Also, notice the voice. .  . it's the same person who voices Kermit the Frog.)

 

Progress Report and Monthly Questions

I had a little hiccup with Spey Valley. . . on size one needles, it was way too small for El Esposo. He graciously told me to just knit the socks for myself, as I was at the heel turn when we discovered this. However, the sock was too small for me. Grrrr! So, I ripped it all back and decided to knit it on size three needles. I was a little worried that I would use way more yarn than with the size one needles and run out of yarn, so I weighed the skein of yarn and marked the spot where I left off on the too-small version. I was a little surprised when I reached the heel turn again on the second attempt and was using about the same amount of yarn that I had used on the smaller original version. I suppose it's still possible that I will run out of yarn, but I'm going to keep checking with my gram scale. Here's the current progress:

I really like it, and it's coming along quickly. I started the new sock on Saturday and I'm already at the gusset. That also includes fixing some errors. As I was working on the heel flap, I noticed three purl stitches that should have been knit, and each one was 15-20 rows back. So, I dropped the stitches and fixed them. El Esposo was a little alarmed, but you can't even see the revisions and it was a lot easier than ripping back a few inches. If there's one thing I find myself motivated to do, it is fix knitting mistakes by only ripping back the stitches I need to rip.

Other than the sock, I've been working weird hours and cooking. I have a lot to say, but I'm feeling to disorganized to say it, so I'm going to do this month's monthly questions.

1. Name three things you have a fear of:

A lot of my worst fears have come true over the past couple of years, so I think there's only one thing that truly frightens me, and that's something terrible happening to my family.

2. Cheese or fruit pie? Cheese is better than pie any day.

Long or short hair? Either, but long right now

Small town or big city? Probably small town

Blue cheese or ranch? BLUE CHEESE!!!!!!!

White or wheat bread? Wheat

3. Have you ever won a contest?

Yeah

4. Would you rather camp out or stay in a Hilton?

Hilton, please, and the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico is a good one.

5. Have you ever had surgery?

Yup, wisdom teeth out at the hospital in high school, tubal ligation after doctor told me I would die if I got pregnant again. And that part of my body that people ask if I have had surgically augmented. . . nope, they're real.

6. Are you a planner or a go with the flow kind of person?

Both. I love to plan stuff for work and other things that need to get done, but I go with the flow when plans don't work out, and in my non-work life, I tend to build in go with the flow time.

7. If you could have anything to eat right now, what would it be?

Probably the Tillamook cheddar and Maytag blue cheese mac and cheese from Artist Point at Disney's Wilderness Lodge. I'm craving it.

8. What's your favorite type of flower? I don't have a favorite, though I'm partial to hydrangea, lilacs, gerbera daisies, and birds of paradise.

9. Do you remember your dreams? Do you have any?

I don't always remember them but I have them.

10. What do you miss most about your childhood?

I miss the innocence of it. I feel really nostalgic about that short period of time when I truly didn't know how complicated life was going to be. I remember when summer seemed like it lasted forever and I felt unconditionally loved by everyone. . . I felt so free.

I guess that last question is why I like going to DisneyWorld so much.

Stanley Cup, Yogurt Cup

I finally got around to starting my Stanley Cup knitting this week, timed rather coincidentally with the Pittsburgh Penguins' turning things around in their series against the Flyers.

My Stanley Cup knitting project is Spey Valley by Nancy Bush. This is actually a really good project for playoff knitting because after the little bit of pattern and braid at the top, it's a basic rib for the rest of the sock. That type of easy pattern could drive me insane if I was knitting on a plane, but it's perfect for a situation where I don't want to constantly have to keep looking at my knitting or referring to the pattern. These socks are for El Esposo. He has been nagging me about when I was going to start them. He picked out the yarn color, Grand Street Ink, because he loved the color of the shawl I knit in the same colorway (though in Helen's Lace yarn) last year. So I bought a skein of Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in the same colorway. Here's current progress:

This yarn is really dark! It reminds me of the color of the outside of a passionfruit. I found Chobani passionfruit yogurt at a grocery store in another town this week. They don't sell that flavor at my local store, though that might be because it is new. According to Chobani, there are three new flavors: apple/cinnamon, blood orange (which I also bought but haven't tried yet), and passionfruit. It's pretty good, even though I am not a fan of yogurt with fruit/syrup at the bottom. I'd eat it again.

I did repeat a recipe this week, using slightly different ingredients. I made the Guatemalan pan frances (aka Mexican mollete) using a bolillo from the Guatemalan bakery, red Ducal refried beans, and mozzarella cheese. I thought I'd try broiling it this time, because I really wanted to broil them last time. It only took five minutes under the broiler. Here's the finished product:

They were good, but I have to agree with El Esposo, the best way to cook these is in the oven, 350F for 15 minutes. When you broil them, the bread just doesn't get as nice and toasty and crisp as it does when you cook them in the regular oven.

I've got to run. . . hockey beckons!

First Birthday, with Trash Barrels

Welcome to another Throwback Thursday! I had a hockey post planned but I've been really busy this week, so I'm going to to have to that next week. I decided to do what I thought would be an easy Throwback Thursday - scan a photo from my childhood in, and, voila, a post is born. As El Esposo would say, simple like that. Only it's not so simple. My parents have most of the photos from my childhood, but I've inherited a few here and there. I looked through the photos, trying to find one that would be good for a post, and, guess what, they are all awful. So this is a post about that.

This is the one and only photo of me with my birthday cake at my first birthday. I don't know for sure who was there, but I can guarantee my parents, grandparents, and at least one great aunt and great uncle were present. I was the first grandchild on either side of the family, and the only baby around. I looked cute that day - there is one other photo of me near my grandmother's garden, and I look adorable. Yet for some reason, they decided to take a photo of the back of my head, looking at my birthday cake while standing in front of the rusty trash barrels next to the garage.

I'm sure you can imagine what the family albums look like.

So, I ask you all, do you have any photos like this in your family album? Let's see them, or at least hear about them! I know I'm not alone.