Tales from the Shark Tank

“There’s only so much reasoning you can do with a woman who doesn’t believe in evolution.”

Conversation with my son number….

He commented that his pizza never had any meat on it.  My response was that this was as it should be.  What I referred to was keeping kosher, but that’s not how he took it.  Instead he looked at me quizzically and asked “Are you vegetation?”

About two weeks ago, as part of the process of getting ready for school, I had my son put on his sneakers to see if they still fit, or if he would need new ones.  They were fine; he could get them on easily and had plenty of room at the end of the toes.  With three weeks to the start of school, I thought we were fine.

Chaos ensued, as it so often does in my world, and the school-supplies shopping trip didn’t happen until this morning.  While we were wandering around acquiring such things as dry-erase markers and notebook paper, J. mentioned in passing that he also needed new gym shoes, as his old ones were almost too small.  I raised an eyebrow, but told him that the store we were in was not where I was going to get his gym shoes, and that I wanted to see how the old ones fit myself.  They might indeed be too small, but they also might just be suffering from “not-newness”.

We got home with our loot, and I bade him put on his current shoes and stand in front of me.  Guess what?  Over the course of two weeks, he really has nearly outgrown those shoes.

So now I get to find him new gym shoes at the last minute.  I tried to plan ahead for once.  I really did.  But my kidling outfoxed me, in particularly kid-like fashion.  He grew.

Yesterday afternoon I was very pleased to find that my cell phone was working again.  This morning it’s out again.  Oh well, eventually it will be consistent again.  But meanwhile, if you need to reach me, it’s hit or miss.

On the other hand, since my son and I are going to Mishewaka to visit friends for the day, it shouldn’t be a problem.  Once away from this tiny corner of ruralness, the phones work just fine, and hopefully by tomorrow it’ll be working consistently again.

I have a very psyched young gentleman here, so we’re off!

Yes, we had tornadoes through this part of Indiana last night. We also had a spectacular sound-and-light show; one lightning strike was so close my husband and I weren’t sure it wasn’t actually in the back yard.

We are just fine, though. Power went out about midnight, wherefore I took our son out for breakfast, but it was back on by the time we returned. Our cell phones don’t work at the house for the moment. Phone calls require going about a mile and a half. I noticed, as I was out and about today, that there are a lot of such dead zones, so I suspect tower troubles. If that’s what it is, then it should sort itself out as the cell companies do repairs.

And I had another follow-up visit with the oncologist today. She says everything is good, and that my chance of recurrence at this point is less than 0.25%. It can’t get much lower and still be quantifiable, which is a tremendous relief.

So that’s that. Tomorrow I register my kidling for school; the day after that J. and I will go spend a day hanging out with a woman who has been among my close friends since college and her high school aged son. That will be fun; I don’t see near enough of them. I’m very much looking forward to that.

And that’s enough to go on with. Both J. and I are counting the days until school starts, albeit for different reasons. But someone asked me today, just making conversation, what I would find to do with my time once he was no longer home all day. I had some ado not to laugh in her face.

I was talking to my folks the other day, and somehow or other the topic of conversation drifted to my grandfather. He was an interesting person, curious about almost everything, so it was no great surprise when the next step, after deciding that he actually liked Chinese food, was to announce that I was to teach him how to make it. (The assumption was that of course I could cook anything.) So off we went to the department store, there to acquire a wok, with me along as Trusted Advisor.

Wok duly acquired, we went back to the house, and I proceeded to clean and season it, then make something for him which he pronounced good. Then it was time for me to teach him. Now, teaching my grandfather anything was an exercise in fortitude, because to call him patience challenged would be like calling water wet. But I was willing, and so off we went.

This was a man who learned to cook, to the extent that ever he did, when he was well past 70. By the time he decided to investigate the mysteries of wok-cooking, he was in his mid 80’s, and however good his mind may have been (and his memory was no longer of the best), his body wasn’t in great shape. I chopped the veggies and chicken for him to save him standing at the counter. I intended a demonstration with step by step explanations, but he decided that He Was Going To Cook. So I stood by, giving instructions, pointing out when something was starting to burn because he was standing there arguing with me, and he cooked. The real problem came when he insisted on cooking the chicken longer and hotter, to make sure it was done.

It was done all right. It would have done credit to a barbecue - as the charcoal. It was hard on the outside, and it had not had any breading on it to fry up crisp. I’m not sure what it was like on the inside, because I couldn’t cut it. It was a classic entry for an exhibit on modern carboniferous objects.

After a few minutes of poking at it, Gramps accepted my insistence that it was unsalvagable, and we got in my car and went off to his favorite cafeteria. There we ran into an old friend of his. Their conversation capped the whole adventure.

Mr. T. walked up to Gramps, asking him what he’d been doing. Gramps said that I’d been trying to teach him how to do Chinese cooking. So Mr. T. turned to me, asking if Gramps was a good student. He didn’t wait for an answer, for which I was grateful, because there was no tactful way I could.  Instead he turned back to Gramps.

“So Nate” he asked “what have you learned so far?” My grandfather’s immediate response nearly made me snort my iced tea.

“I’ve learned to ask her to do it.”

We received a shipment of frozen stuff today that came packaged in a thick styrofoam container.  Once I’d gotten the contents into the freezer, I went back, expecting the ice block packaged with it to be one of the reusable ones.  Instead, I found that the white plastic bag read “Dry Ice.  DO NOT TOUCH” in large friendly letters.  My son had been hovering over the whole unpackaging process (and getting between me and the freezer, but that’s another matter), and so was right there.

Dry ice, eh.  And my favorite weather geek standing right there.  Would he like to do a science experiment on fog?  Wouldn’t he just!  So I went and ran some water into the tub, then went back, picked up the plastic bag containing the dry ice, took it into the bathroom, cut it open, and let it fall in.

Fog boiled up so quickly we couldn’t even see the splash we knew must have occurred.  It continued to bubble up from the locus of the ice, covering the water surface and then rising steadily to fill the tub.  He poked the fog with a finger, and proclaimed it cold.  He put his hand in it, carefully away from the block of ice itself, and lowered it carefully until the tip of a finger touched the water, and proclaimed it colder.  Then he tried to get a close look at it.  It was cold enough to hurt his face before he got close, so he came back and got his swim mask.  That took care of the eyes and nose (it’s a snorkeling mask), but it burned his mouth. Back to the swim bag.  He returned to his investigations with his snorkel in his mouth.  He finally got an actual look at how the fog developed, and said that while it was “burny-cold” on his mouth after a minute or so, the mask and snorkel let him stay close long enough to get a good look at the pattern of temperature currents in the fog over the dry ice, and off at the other end of the tub.  I was tremendously impressed by his persistence and ingenuity in getting the look he wanted.

So our unexpected package was a double gift - both the consumable contents and the means to do an impromptu chemistry lesson with my kid.  Or maybe it was a triple - the ice chest it arrived in is far the nicest foam one I’ve seen in a good while.  I’m thinking it should go in the back of my car, to get frozen things home from my favorite grocery in Indy.

And my son was so excited that as soon as dad pulled into the driveway, he was out the door to tell his father all about the bathtub full of burny-cold fog.  That was the best part.

My son and I went swimming at the municipal pool in the next town east today. I was taking a break when he came over to me with a swim-mask in his hands, which he handed to me.

It wasn’t his swim mask. That was up on his forehead out of the way. It was another kid’s, and it had come apart. “Here, Mom” he said. “It belongs to that kid over there, and it broke. Tell me when you’ve got it fixed.” I asked a couple of questions and found that the mask had come apart, and the kid had taken it to his own mother.  She said she had no idea what to do. So he simply brought it to me. Why? “Because you can fix anything!” he said, as if that were a self-evident fact.

Someday he will disillusioned of his belief in my abilities. But it didn’t happen today. Today I fixed the mask.

Being in need of comfort food and wanting to have something moderately healthy that fit that description, I set about making myself rice pudding last night.  Mom’s rice pudding was nice, but I thought a bit of creativity was in order, just because, well, it’s more fun that way.  It came out so well I’m putting it here.

APPLE RICE PUDDING

Heat 1 quart of milk in a heavy pot with a lid.   Add 2 Tbsp. turbinado or brown sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla power (or 1 tsp liquid vanilla), 1/2 tsp cinnamon, and  1/2 cup brown rice.  Cover and start cooking.  Peel and chop up 2 tart apples, like Granny Smiths, and add to the pot.  Put the lid back and cook on very low heat for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 300 F.  When the rice has cooked somewhat, stir the pudding, replace the lid, and put it in the oven.  Bake for 2 hours.  Remove and eat.   It’s a little chewier than the usual rice pudding, but the texture isn’t bad, just different . Hot, it was lovely with vanilla ice cream.  Cool, this morning, it made a really nice breakfast, as it’s not too sweet.

As to ingredients:  For milk I used organic 2%.  It really does taste different than the standard mass produced stuff.   The rice was sweet brown rice, a short grain rice that breaks down in cooking and so is used for desserts (hence the name), but long grain would work.  It would just be another degree more chewy than it comes out with the sweet rice.

And I have another quart of milk to use up before it goes bad.  I think the next experiment will be with mixed chopped dried fruit, slivered almonds, almond extract and a little ground ginger.  But that will wait.  Right now I want to take advantage of a sunny day with a good breeze and moderate temperatures and go for a walk.

“I know what it is; it’s Communication Lite! None of the content, none of the context, but all the sincerity of Regular Conversation!”