Hey! Did I ever tell you about the time my friend Janina and I canned a bunch of produce over the summer? No, I didn’t. I meant to, but right around the time I was going to write about it I had a baby. Talk about distracting. Anyway….

Beans!

Carrots!

Peppers spicy and sweet!

Jars! (So then why do they call it canning?)

Herbs and spices!

Various bounties of summer!

Marcel!

Beans!

Ate some of these last night. ‘Twere good.

Morning

Afternoon

Evening

Unattended

1. For a long time, even when I worked in a coffee shop, I thought a cafe au lait (French for coffee with milk) was a cafe olé. Or rather cafe olé! Because it just needs an exclamation point. But “olé!” like what bullfighters supposedly shout.

Since I was wrong, and there is no such thing as a cafe olé!, I have decided to invent one. It’s a mocha made with Mexican chocolate, and I would bet that it’s delicious. If you open a coffee shop, you can serve cafe olés! but I get them for free, for life. And yes, I know, Mexican chocolate and a Spanish word. But hey, there’s no such thing as Mexican pizza and that never stopped Taco Bell.

Bonus fact (that I stumbled on while trying to figure out how to make the diacritical mark for é): the dots over the lower case i and j are called a tittle.

2. Awhile back, we got a bunch of old flash cards from Saffron and Genevieve, a store that, if instead of having a wee person who is about to start wreaking havoc on breakable items I had loads of expendable income, I would want my house to look like.

Anyway, the flash cards are super cool (pronounced like the French do, please, soo-pair kewl), they have the desired vowel sound and an illustrated example and the name of the illustration on one side

And on the back, some more examples, that sometimes read like a little poem

Of course, as a fey, liberal arty, English teacher, I can’t help but think of how much these flash cards depend on cultural context. For example, I would be pretty screwed were I trying to learn the hard u sound, as the picture is of a fuse. So, I think for our next collection I would like to find flash cards from another country.

Now you know what to get me for my birthday.

3. My dear friend Lacy started a cooking blog! It’s called A Grain of Salt and you should read it. To give you an idea of the kind of food Lacy creates: sometimes I want friend chicken, and I’m like, “Eh, too hard. Oh well.” Sometimes Lacy wants fried chicken and it’s near her birthday and she’s all, “I’m going to make nine pounds of fried chicken for my birthday party!” And then she goes, “Oh yeah, and also coleslaw and macaroni and cheese!” And then you go to her birthday party and you’re 40 weeks pregnant and you eat all her amazing food and then the next day you go into labor. That’s how good her food is. Also, she will tell you to eat pancakes in your underwear.

They play on tummies

I play with the macro setting

Rain plays with the Gypsy wine label and adds a fearsome scimitar

The beet plays at having horns

They will play endlessly

I don’t really mind that I gained a cool 50 pounds during pregnancy. Calvin and I are both healthy, and I’m again able to walk around Santa Cruz at a normal pace (compared to the half hour it took me to cruise around the block in my 39th week of pregnancy).

However, I am rather bummed about my clothing situation. I don’t want to spend money on new, larger clothing that I won’t wear for very long, but this means I don’t have very many fabulous outfits. Boo hoo, I know; but I can assure you that maternity jeans don’t look as cute when you’re no longer maternity-ing, and maternity jeans are the cutest ones I currently own and fit.

When I was about four months pregnant, I followed the advice of my (pregnant) midwife, and removed from my closet all of my non-maternity clothes. Many of these ended up in our upper closet, a chaotic wasteland of free tote bags, clothes used for painting and gardening, and approximately 83 t-shirts belonging to Larson (who works for a company that gives him clothing, and who hasn’t thrown out any clothing since high school). Sometimes, I like to drag a chair over to that closet, climb up, and gaze at my size two cigarette pants that I will never, ever wear again.

Struck by the urge to poke around in the upper closet today, I clambered up and, after digging through the aforementioned tiny pants, bathrobes (plural), and various Larson gear (I found your Fleetwood Mac shirt, by the way), I stumbled on an old pair of jeans from my larger days. When I consigned these jeans to the upper closet, I didn’t think I’d ever wear them again, but they were rather expensive, so I hoarded them.

I tried them on, and lo and behold, they fit! “Could life get any better?” I wondered. And folks, a moment later it did. You might not know that in addition to hoarding clothes, I also never empty my pockets. And right then and there I found 13 dollars in the pocket of these glorious jeans. Basically, we’re having Christmas in February here at my house.

I leave you with a picture, wherein Calvin and I do not express the joy I felt at my discovery today.

From CWBlog