her able hands

Watching this tonight, right after I watched a few video clips of Led Zeppelin’s concert in London last night, well…I’m just sitting here all goosebumped out and feeling like mush. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any live music. Well over a year ago when we went to see the Cowboy Junkies at the Kent Stage.

This song is so layered. It makes me feel like I’m traveling down a long tunnel of someone else’s thoughts. But they’re mine, too.

Wilco is playing Feb. 22 at the Lakewood Civic Auditorium and tickets go on sale tomorrow. I’m so splurging.

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This weekend was very productive, and the first one in over a month that I have felt like actively participating in my life here at home. I finally got up off the couch and did something. I made a menu for the week and a shopping list to go with it. Then I cleaned the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom while mulling over ways to organize our belongings in a more practical and user-friendly fashion.

All summer and fall we’ve lived with Tyler’s mountain bike leaning against the french doors in the kitchen because we don’t have a garden shed and the garage with lots of expensive tools and two classic cars (not particularly financially valuable ones) is off limits to a kid who forgets to lock (or even shut) doors. I would have preferred the basement, but every time he brought it upstairs he gouged a wall. So yeah, my kitchen doubled as a shed all summer. Well, it’s too cold for him to ride his bike to school anymore and I get up earlier so I can drive both kids. It was high time to reclaim my kitchen.

Lila has a great little Waldorf style wood kitchen that we set up in her bedroom when we first moved in, but it turns out we only use the upstairs for sleep and storage. She seldom wants to play in her room, preferring our company and enjoying her own internal solitude by sitting quietly nearby with a pen and pad of paper making lists of scribbles and letters. She also got a sweet wood table and chairs set for her birthday that we’ve had in the living room where it became the DVD and VHS repository (yes, another piece of storage furniture we need). So I turned the alcove by the french doors into Lila’s kitchen-within-a-kitchen.

She has plenty of natural light during the day and spent most of Saturday and all of Sunday hanging out in the kitchen with me while I puttered. She decorated her very own Christmas tree—one of the little shrubs we never managed to get in the ground this summer—with the tiny wood ornaments her Aunt Jen gave to her over Thanksgiving. I’m looking for a tall pantry style cabinet to set in the corner to the right of the table where I can store her art supplies, play-dough and a bunch of the other crap that clutters my counter tops.

Of course, I had much bigger plans this weekend and thought I would get the living room and dining room cleaned and organized as well, but that didn’t happen. OK, fine. One room at a time. If I can get the main floor of the house disinfected and well-tidied by Christmas, I’ll be a very happy camper indeed. Then after the holidays we have a date with a certain out-of-control basement.

Later in the week I’ll share some of the cooking I did. I roasted the free turkey we got at work (a Butterball which is not my first choice, but I am enjoying the fact that it’s giving us the basis for five entire meals).

Turkey dinner
Leftovers for everyone’s lunch
Turkey Burrito Layered Casserole
Turkey Soup (some to eat, plus five quarts of extra stock in the freezer)
Turkey Pot Pie (makings in the freezer for later in winter)

I also finally pickled the turnips and will do a post about that tomorrow. Ten more days before I can open them. This is harder than waiting for Santa.

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Making it to the 5:00 bell (not a real bell, just the figurative bell that clangs loudly in my head at the end of the day, dismissing me from my desk and back into my life) felt like a huge accomplishment today—ridiculously huge.

I cleared out my inbox (for the most part) and only brought one thing home to work on over the weekend. It’s proofreading an instruction manual that’s due first thing Monday morning. It’ll be the thing that keeps me from working on that essay I’ve been struggling with, but I’m in deeper doo-doo than I’ve been in all week if I don’t get it finished.

Can I tell you how grateful I am to no longer feel as if I just swallowed a bottle of vinegar and a box of baking soda? To be able to sit upright for more than ten minutes in a row? Really, really, really grateful.

Yes, lunch was a quandary and I definitely should have bowed out of the group trip to the local swill hole. I really botched it when I ordered a fish sandwich and french fries. But that was the only thing on the menu that didn’t come smothered in pepper jack cheese and chipotle sauce. Or bourbon.

Dear Damons,

Your menu sucks. Twelve bucks is too much for a salad. Especially one with iceburg lettuce. And the four bites of sandwich, three french fries and pickle that I ate gave me gas pains so extreme that from 4-5 pm I seriously worried that I might be having an appendicitis attack. I almost called you to transport me to the hospital. But then the 5:00 bell rang and I scuttled off to my truck. Fortunately I commute alone. If only I could have somehow used that gas for good.

Sincerely,

Kelly

I look forward to a good night’s sleep and beginning the deep disinfecting of the house tomorrow morning. I may even turn off the heat and open some windows and doors for a little while.

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I keep thinking it’s long past time for me to do a food post. I should be rolling out cookie recipes like my favorite food bloggers. My 25# sack of locally grown and milled flour sits waiting in the bin and the rolls of Amish butter crowd out the top shelf in the fridge. I bought good vanilla extract and ground cinnamon. Bags of pecans, walnuts and pistachios.

I’ve been invited to a cookie exchange and I have a brand spanking new pizzelle iron that’s eager for a workout (in a cutesy, holiday-ish, anthropomorphic sort of way). The iron’s got more gumption than me. I don’t know what all the nuts are for if I’m only making two kinds of cookies. That’s just the plan, but the kids will talk me into more. They always do. Tyler’s angling for peppermint pinwheels and chocolate kiss thumb prints. Lila wants sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles. I want my body/life back.

I’m not up to a real food post right now because I can’t really remember what I like about food. The only thing I’ve eaten for days is toast and well, there are only so many things to say about toast.

Butter or no? Light or dark? Cinnamon and sugar? Are you sure you can keep that down? Or in? Cut off the crust and feed that to the chickens. Nothing whole grain, and please, for the love of everything that is holy — NO NUTS. Have you no idea how much those little bits and pieces hurt on the way back out?

So yeah. Toast. I don’t think I need to give a recipe here, do I?

Am I crazy to be thinking some wonton soup from the local Chinese place might be a good thing tonight? I’m thinking it’s worth a try.

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Itching to gift a loved one with something homemade but feeling overwhelmed by the time constraints at the holidays? Are you a Last Minute Lucy like I am? Bath salts are easy. Super easy and fun to make. Don’t believe me? Go check out Angelina’s terrific tutorial on WhipUp.

Twelve years ago I made bath salts for my friends and family at the holidays. I designed a snazzy logo and called my fledgling effort Sacred Spiral. The labels had a kokopelli and a spiral and I printed them on earthy paper with lots of fleck. I used the book The Complete Book of Essential Oils and Aromatherapy: Over 600 Natural, Non-Toxic and Fragrant Recipes to Create Health - Beauty - a Safe Home Environment and sat up late nights listening to Indigo Girls and Jane Siberry. I had little pipettes and tiny jars of pure essential oils in scents that frightened me at first sniff—vetiver anyone? Phew. But as I blended the drops using Valerie’s recipes with specific results in mind, the fragrances became heavenly.

I’m not making anything for the holidays this year (except for Pizelles and maybe some cut out sugar cookies with the lingonberry preserves I picked up somewhere last year with that in mind. But I’m not throwing a huge, commercial Christmas this year either. Sure, I’ll end up making one trip to Target for a few things and will likely place an Amazon order next week, but I’ve already done the bulk of my shopping at Etsy and every day this week I’ve pulled small padded envelopes from my mailbox all bundled together with rubber bands. Can I tell you how happy these small packages have made me? Each one I’ve opened to find something handmade that I have picked out for someone I care about and a handwritten note thanking me for my order, a business card or two, and even some freebies—stickers, recipe cards, note cards, bookmarks. So, so delightful. No price tags to rub off with nail polish remover. No credit card balance racking up because I used the money in my PayPal account that has accrued over the last year, from advertising on this site. I’m very pleased to be circulating the money this way in the blogosphere.

I had the epiphany while traveling east for Thanksgiving, sailing past farms and rivers and wide vistas with mountains rolling out from beneath our wheels into the distance.

The world felt so quiet with the kids dozing in the back, Chris’ warm hand wrapped around mine until I slipped out of his finger tangle to snap another picture. I thought about the holidays and the madness and the pressure that I always feel. About the fact that the words I hate Christmas have come out of my mouth so many times in recent years and why. How the words simplify and balance, while ringing with the tone of truth, also make me cringe because they seem so unattainable anymore. As I thought these thinky thoughts, Chris slid into the passing lane and pulled out ahead of the answer.

Why not give a rousing f*ck you to the Big Box? But how? I don’t have the time or energy to make things this year. I just don’t. Images from browsing the blog world rose in my mind’s eye and I thought of all of the talented bloggers out there who create and sell so many different things that are both useful and inspirational. Which made me think of Etsy. And Christmas didn’t seem so awful all of a sudden. Still a little bit awful, but a little less so.

It feels daring to say no to big ticket holidays. Not that we have huge ticket holidays, but we all tend to rack up a little more debt than we should every December. I don’t want that anymore. Doing that makes all of our goals move that much farther away, and I realized as I burned up the miles of asphalt between here and there that what I want more than anything in the world for Christmas this year is for each and every one of the people I love to feel easy in their lives. To not feel worried about money because money worry eats us alive and puts a grimy pallor over everything else. I want to find ways to support those people reaching their life goals and somehow big Christmas shopping lists is tangled up with it all, leading us all astray from our goals.

Here’s an example: one simple goal of mine is to have a week with my family in the mountains or at the beach. One week. But we always spend that money at Christmas instead. Hmmm.

And there they were, those mountains of my dreams, the Catskills almost within reach. This close to waking in the morning to mist rolling through the valleys, steam from my coffee cup rising to warm my face, breath coming easy and moving deep. But we waved to them in the far distance north of the Hudson Valley as we sped through on our way to my family—where I most needed to be and was so grateful to arrive.

So no bath salts for Christmas unless I buy some from Angelina, which I just may. But I’m thinking sometime in February, I’ll pick up some Dead Sea salts and Epsom salts. Pull out my bin of essential oils and my little baggie of pipettes. Pop in Easy Tiger and lose myself in the scents and sounds. Then draw a bath because I’m going to try nurturing myself a little more in 2008.

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