the red velvet cake skirt

Otherwise known as don't look too close... I really struggled with this one for some reason. It's the layered version of Amy Butler's Barcelona skirt, and I'm perfectly willing to admit that it just may be beyond me. For now at least. I have no problem admitting that my sewing skills aren't all that just yet and that I have a long way to go. Heck, we all know that I'm making this stuff up as I go along. And seriously this skirt nearly kicked me in the butt. Let's face it. It did kick me in the butt...BUT. I persevered. I loved the fabric too much not to.

We were having dinner with some friends a few weeks ago, and I really wanted to wear this skirt. I sewed seams, I ripped out seams. I read and read and reread pattern notes. I sewed all damn day long in order to wear this skirt to dinner. I reminded myself of my friend Linda Wozniak's mother as she sewed her into her dress on prom night (Wasn't Bobbi doing that for you too, Sarah? Oh, man, that prom night is a whole other post isnt it?!) I'm not sure what made this so tricky for me, but I just couldn't wrap my mind around this pattern. Nothing seemed to add up. I feel like I have the plain old A-line down pat, and after finishing the layered version, I'm not sure I will try it again. With this fabric at least, I don't think that the layering really stood out they way I wanted it to. Maybe when it frays some more.

So nonetheless, here it is, the Red Velvet Cake Skirt, suited more to dimly-lit restaurants, like the one in which you see the actual red velvet cake, than flourescently-lit offices. I'll wear it again, for sure, but I'll probably save it for when there's some dessert in the offing. And the cake? Oh, the cake. Rolled in sugared walnuts, the only hint of sweetness were those and the carmelized sugar crisp on top. So lovely. Red-velvet lovely.

sigh of relief saturday

This is how it looks here today. All dappled sunlight after a week of heavy skies. Warm again too. All traces of autumn swept away. I'm not worried. It'll be back. But what a crummy week. Seriously, from sick cars to sick kids to misaligned to-do lists, I feel as if I'd been thrown curve ball after curve ball with no clue as to how to hit them. I've been gone a couple of days, but after my...well, lament on Wednesday, I guess I felt as if we all needed a break.

And here's the thing. I'm not really that sad. It was just something about what Alicia wrote that was so moving to me. I later told someone that I felt like James Joyce's Ulysses, all stream of consciousness welling up and it felt important to write it down. But what amazing and thoughtful comments you shared with me. I'm so touched to know that my sorrow somehow impacted emotions of your own. Liz, I love what you said about bluring the edges of pain. Maybe that's all we need to worry about. When the pain seems overwhelming, just think about bluring the edges of it and you can move on.

And Callum wants everyone to know that he's feeling much, much better, thanks.

I was at Borders picking up some birthday presents and made an impulse purchase for myself yesterday. This Book. I put it up on the sidebar too. Those who know me IRL know that when I'm feeling blue I have a hard time reading sad books. Really there's nothing like a book about dogs, knitting and traumatic brain injury to cheer a girl up! But oh, what a moving memoir. And not sad, exactly. I read it like a preteen devouring a Judy Blume novel, ranging from bed to sofa, even to the floor of my tv room. Go get it. It's good.

And Saturday is good too. Despite the fact that Lucy wanted to go out and play at 5:30 this morning. We've made the most of it since then. Laundry is burbling away in the background. Football is burbling away on the tv. We've walked Rebecca's dogs and will go back over this afternoon. I'm doing some straightening up, but soon I'll succumb to the lure of the sofa and knit and knit.

finally, it's raining

Alicia, over at rosylittlethings wrote the sweetest, saddest post today about grieving for her dog Audrey who died a few weeks ago. It moved me for so many reasons. Sometimes grief just slaps you in the face, and sometimes you're so grateful for the sting. I spent a few minutes thinking about what I wanted to say to Alicia about the death of her sweet pup and the new pup that's coming to them soon, and then I figured I may as well just say it all here instead.

It's raining today, finally after so many dry summer days. Callum's home sick with an unspecificed fever. I bought him a Playmobil boat when I got a new thermometer (ours was reading my temp at 96 degrees and his at 98 when he was clearly burning up last night), and he's distracted for now. He let me put it together and I'm so grateful. That's just about one of my favorite things to do.

We had to scramble a little bit last night and this morning when we realized that this might be a sick day. Unless I have a slew of meetings or face to face stuff that I have to do, I don't mind them really. Of course all you mama bears out there, I don't want the boy to be sick, but eight is a big kid. He snuggles so rarely. The way he needs me is so different now. He used to need me so intensely, and the closest we come to that is on days like these.

I really thought that I'd pop in here this afternoon with a quick post about smoothies and new thermometers and a funny bit about how Lucy kept "scalloping" Callum's police officers on the Playmobil Policeboat. (Instead of "scalping" them, that is.) And then I took a break from the work I was doing to check in over at rosylittlethings and saw Alicia's apology. An apology to some random guy who got caught up in her rawness. Her grief. Wrong place. Wrong time. And there I sat. Flubbered. Flustered. Feeling my own waves of tears and grief for a dog who died seven months ago and a whole host of other losses besides. Sweet Phoebe who was my our first born, who I still miss so much, like an ache. Who I still see sleeping on the rug in the living room when I come downstairs each morning. Who was, we keep telling Lucy, a good dog. And man, I did not want to love Lucy. She was fine to have around, especially for Neel and Callum who clearly needed another dog, but my heart belonged to Phoebe and I pretty much wanted it to stay that way. Thankfully Lucy (who sits under my chair as I write this) would have none of it. She follows me from room. She sits beside me when I pee and tangles herself up between my ankles as I walk...only without the fluidity of a cat, so I'm tripping over her all day every day.

Oh Alicia, if I were a better writer, I could say it somehow, sweeter, righter, nicer, and still lift you up about how I know what you must be feeling right now. How you want your heart to open with love for that new little pup, but how, if it does, you fear it might, even now, still break into a million pieces. And how somehow all the writing you are doing is connected to all of this, to opening you up and making you even more raw. It did that for me, even right here. Everything was muddled up, even these two quotes running around in my head, one from Margaret Widdemer ("Pain has been and grief enough and bitterness and crying...") and then "Western Wind, when wilt thou blow,/ The small rain down can rain?" which was written anonymously. All jumbled together like one poem until I started writing this here, and it cleared up, "No, two different poems." Both, ironically, from the reading I did during my raw and anguished teenaged years. But the end result is that apparently I'm sad today. Okay. Now I get it.

So sad. Let's take a look at this, shall we? Always still a lingering sadness about Miss Pheebes, and the art teacher at school who promised to make her an urn doesn't work there any more so her ashes still sit on the dresser in my bedroom. And I'm bypassing the Level One and Level Two books in the Chinaberry catalog now. Oh how I wish I could put a brick on that boy's head. And my parents are getting divorced. And everything is changing. It reminds me of an e-mail I got from my dad this morning. He's re-watching past seasons of The West Wing (apparently he likes works-in-progress as well), and I totally agree when he says that he disapproves of character development in television shows and that Sam never should have left The West Wing to run for Congress and Bartlett never should have been impeached. Mom, even if we know going in that the goddamned king dies, it still hurts to find out. You sometimes have to wonder if your kid's fevers aren't timed so you don't burst into tears in the middle of a meeting.

Callum just asked, "What's the blog post about?"

"About being sad."

"I thought it was going to be about me and the fever." He's indignant.

"It is, a little bit."

"Oh. Sad about me having a fever." He's relieved.

When I said earlier that sometimes you're grateful for the sting of grief, I meant it. It reminds me of how much I loved her. And of all the love around me now. So Alicia, if you really do come and read my "comment" to your post, remember this: It's funny about writing. You don't know where it's going to take you. I certainly didn't know today. And the same is true, I think, with healing and grief. You've been doing your fair share of both lately. Over the past several years, I've done my fair share of both as well. Let them take you where they will. You can feel all that pain and rawness and sadness and still not suffer from it. Let it feed your soul and grow you. Let it grow your writing. I feel better now for letting it lead me where I clearly needed to go and I hope you do to. And when you're done, go make some soup. That's what we're going to do.

a funny thing happened on the way to moving in

This dropped by. If it's the anniversary of moving into our home it's also the anniversary of this. To read the science stuff go here. Welcome to the East Coast.  Hurricane Isabel thought she'd throw a  little welcome party.  What a wild start to our life here.  Looking back I'm not sure I can even describe how surreal I felt as that storm bore down upon us.  If you weren't in her path, perhaps you weren't aware that for several days she moved back and forth between Category Four and Five status, and every morning I would creep downstairs to chew my nails and watch the morning news, surrounded by unpacked boxes and a too long cable wire. 

At first I didn't think much about Hurricane Isabel.  We had just moved into what we thought was the house of our dreams.  We had a yard!  We had neighbors!  We had a Pig Pick'n!  Neel was doing what he always does at this time of year:  writing a grant.  And Callum and I were getting us settled in.  For four-year-old Callum it was like Christmas as he opened boxes of toys he hadn't seen in a month, and for me it was much the same as I picked out paint chips.

I heard the first faint ping of a warning bell when Callum and I stopped in at The Home Depot for paint one day.  A young lady at the door said (before I'd really even stepped foot in the place), "If you're looking for generators, we're sold out."

Oh.

We just want some paint, actually.  And some switchplate covers.  Thanks. 

But then I started to look around at everyone else's carts.  About half the people there were like me.  Toilets.  Pipe.  A pack of washers or screws.  Your basic Home Depot Run that you make a bajillion times during any given home improvement project.

The other half of those Home Depot-goers had carts filled with cases of water, big drills, flashlights, batteries and sheets and sheets of plywood.  They were out of generators.  That's when I got a little nervous.  I got brave and asked around.  People made suggestions.  Get some of those tap lights (they last longer than flashlights), stock up on water.   Callum made our way back into The Home Depot and followed their advice and then we went home and called Neel.

And every morning as Isabel bore down on us, I watched my new local news station and wondered what to do.  Do we stay and ride it out or do we go?  I asked neighbors, but hey, I didn't know these people.  How rational were they really?  (Turns out, some of them, not so much.)  So Neel would beaver away on his grant and Callum and I would beaver away on the house, stocking up on spaghettios and water and batteries and we waited.

Fortunately as the storm creeped closer, it diminished down to a Three then (thank God) a Two and finally a One.  We decided to stay.  Our house is oldish (about seventy years), so I wasn't too worried about it, except for the fact that we have a new, untried addition and it was quickly becoming clear that said addition had been built mostly with masking tape.  And spit.  Maybe some safety pins.  Neel nailed plywood along the french doors and we crossed our fingers. And I had to hope that this tiny, tiny hill in this flat, flat land would really be enough for us not to need flood insurance.  It was too late to get it anyway.

As night fell on the seventeenth of September, squalls of rain started moving through. We noticed that a lot of women and children had left town, and wondered if we'd been foolish to stick around. On the morning of the eighteenth the wind had picked up, as had the rain. With the plywood up, the house was eerily dark for so early in the day. I was painting in the livingroom around ten when a particularly strong gust hit the house and the power went out. It stayed out for five more days, and we were the lucky ones. Lots of neighborhoods were without power for almost two weeks, but then the mayor lives a few blocks down (not that that has anything to do with anything). Around noon we got in the car and took a quick drive around. Remember the house that we almost bought? The one the migraine talked me out of? Totally surrounded by water. The water was a real concern. We're not on water here, but surrounded, only blocks away in any direction by tidal rivers, and as the hardest part of rain and wind was hitting our coast, so was the highest tide. Late in the afternoon, when we were safely tucked in, our neighbor Tyler took his car out for a look around. Twenty minutes or so later our other neighbor John was towing him back up the street.

I'm a casual studier of the hurricane. My friend Sarah once said that I like works-in-progress. Long before I lived on a coast so effected by these storms, I've watched their progress and studied their seasons. So I knew that we'd have it rough for awhile, that the wind would eventually shift and that after hours and hours things would calm down. We bedded down in the dining room, surrounded by the boxes which we'd kept packed thinking that if it flooded they'd be easier to move up and that if a tree fell on the house they'd be easier to move down. And although this room was the most protected in the house, that wind shift made it feel the most vulnerable. I kept a tap light by my side of the mattress, and when I woke up needing to go to the bathroom, I lay in the bed a long time trying to decide what to do. What was my safest route? The wind, although we should be on the back side of the storm, was screaming around the house now, and the night was dark as pitch. Was the guest bath on the landing of the stairs the safest? Or the one behind the kitchen, which may be closer, but deeper in the dark? This house was too new to me to know its secret safe spots yet. That was a long night.

We woke the next morning the way most communities do after events like these: to skies scrubbed scouring-pad clean. We loaded Callum in the wagon and leashed our old pup Phoebe and like many neighbors, ventured forth to check things out. Things had happened during the day before that we wanted to check out. I remember looking across the street thinking, "am I seeing more sky than I did before?" Turns out that early in the day those neighbors lost a Bartlett Pear. A branch from our gumball fell on Tyler's shed, pretty much killing it, but he was planning to do that himself anyway. Our tree just helped. And the plywood that Neel put up? Turns out that was a good idea. It looked like it had been pressure washed with twigs and branches and leaves.

Still, I remember standing on our front porch and looking around thinking we got off pretty good. But that was just our street. One street down, I thought was a dead end, and it was...but about six blocks further down. The trees that were down only made it look like a dead end. We still contend a twister touched down there. Further down in the neighborhood live wires littered the streets. Trees rested on roof tops and across streets and cars. We joined a gathering of people on a corner as a couple were working on exiting their house, by climbing a tree. Turned out it was our realtor. Welcome to the neighborhood.

Turned out some wonderful things happened too, though. Some neighbors came over during the storm so we'd have everyone's phone numbers in case anything happened. Every night that the power was off after the storm we were invited to someone's house for a cookout as they cleared out freezers (we were lucky, we hadn't even stocked our fridge). And I almost wonder, what would it be like now? I'm not at all saying that I want it now. But we did it almost totally alone. We didn't know anything. Much less anyone. It was terrifying. It was exciting. It was unifying. Even then. How different would it be knowing we could all open a beer together? Welcome to the neighborhood.

Got your own Isabel story? I'd love to hear it. Pop a post in the comments and let me know.

football momma

If you know me IRL (In Real Life), you know that we watch a fair amount of football around here. And I'm right in the mix. My dad played high school and college football and I've been watching football my whole life. I am proud to say that I taught my first-generation American and Quaker-schooled husband nearly every thing he knows. (This isn't entirely fair. Neel's a very quick study and has gained an especial interest in the history of the game, both college and pro.) I'm not scary into it (really!), although I have prompted some friends to say, "But Lauren, you're a girl..." and others, when August pre-season games roll around, to say, "Here is where I lose you." I have to admit that I'm proud of my football knowledge, and I like it that this is a fun part of autumn for me. I like it that my dad and I saw Peyton Manning play in his last home game at the University of Tennessee (and lead the Pride of the Southland Marching Band in Rocky Top). I like looking forward to certain games (like Penn State vs. Michigan next week because I feel sure there isn't a Tennessee game that I'll look forward to ever. again. But we tend to be glass half empty this morning). I like having an opinion about the punishment Roger Goodell handed down to Bill Belichick (not harsh enough, plus I think he should have been forced to give up those cut-off sweat shirts) and the Patriots. I like hearing the marching bands from the high school games down the street (As my Grandma Charlotte used to lament, "Why don't they ever show the bands?"). At some point this fall someone in my neighborhood (probably Tyler) will have a football party and it will involve chili and a tv that is set up outside, and let me tell you, that will be a great day.

Callum, like me, is growing up in a football house. Since he was a little, little kid, he's been watching what he called, "uh-oh man ball." He's very loyal to his California roots and is an avid Chargers fan. He'll pull for the Eagles for his Dad, the Colts for me (as long as they're not playing the Chargers), and Tennessee on College Game Days. I'm constantly being dragged into useless exercises like, "If the Chargers are playing the Vols who would you be for? Who would win?" Or, worse, after last night, "Can the Chargers still win the Superbowl?" (I'm not gonna tell him what I really think on that one.) He's definitive and seasonal in his love of football. As soon as the Superbowl was over last winter, away went the football and back out came the bike and the skate board. Once the preseason games started late this summer, away went Tony Hawk on the XBox and out came Madden 08.

I am, however, surrounded by smart and sophisticated women, and I have to admit that I worry a little about being too heavily slanted toward "football momma." I've been sewing skirts like mad these past weeks, just to help prove that I still am a girl. Neel and I hit on a great idea this weekend. What better way to show that I really am multi-faceted than to create a dinner that only a lover of Monday Night Football and Top Chef can?

Sunday night, in honor of the Chargers/Patriots Game we had Fish Tacos. The recipe is from the NRP site in their "Kitchen Window" Segment. Those change a lot, so if you've missed it, drop a note in the comments, and I'll e-mail you.

These are all the goodies that go in the tacos. An avocado sauce. Mayonesa sauce. Cabbage. Beer battered fish, of course. Some salsa. Neel took one for the team and did the frying. He says he'd thin the batter a bit more next time.

Here they are, ready for their close up. They were pretty freaking awesome, if you ask me. Not so the game unfortunately. Patriots 38, Chargers 14. Those of you who know Callum, again IRL, understand that sometimes a loss is the best thing that can happen to that kid even if it's the hardest thing to face on a Monday morning.

So tonight the food is easy. We have Eagles and Redskins (can you say cheesesteak panini?), but I'm going to have to do some thinking for next week. Sunday is Dallas at Chicago and Monday is the Titans (Nashville) at New Orleans. Suggestions?