Category: Live

Spectacular

A perfect October day. Not a cloud in the sky, a brisk breeze, an almost-empty park, and a trailer full of bicycles. We rode around the loop twice with the baby in her trailer; afterwards, the kids raced around an empty parking lot tracing lazy figure-eights and swerving between curbs. But then Marcus had to up the ante and instead of following the gradual path down the hill, he rode straight down the side screaming with glee.

And where Marcus goes, Becca must follow, only faster. As she stood at the top of the hill–out of earshot and unwilling to listen to common sense, regardless–I remarked to Matthew, “This is going to be spectacular.”

I hate being right.

She skinned her elbow and her bike helmet is a write-off. It bounced off the asphalt at the tail end of her fall, so we’ll destroy it and throw it out and get a new one. It saved her noggin, that much is certain. She made it most of the way down and only flew off the bike at the end of the run where her path crossed the concrete. A shower, some peroxide, and a cup of tea later and she’s recovered enough to wish she could go back in time and undo her actions.

Maybe she learned something this time, but I’m not really counting on it. Her ballet teacher was already impressed with Becca’s black eye and scraped up face from the incident involving the rope swing, the tree root, and Marcus, where blame is evenly distributed between the two of them.

That said… it was pretty darn spectacular.

P.S. Bike helmets save lives. Right now, she’s drinking her tea in the kitchen while teasing her brother.

Night Owl

Last night I was up in the wee hours moving a client over from Movable Type to WordPress. Easy peasy. She has 3477 entries and 8534 comments and 29 categories and I absolutely did not want to break her URLs so that meant writing a custom script and doing some @.htaccess@ fiddling as well. In the past I’ve seen WordPress’s import utility hang on @mt-import.txt@ because of the out of memory issue, forget categories, and fail to move over basenames, so I did this in chunks of 500 with PHP and SQL within the same database. (And I’d like to chime in that converting from PST to GMT is boring. And annoying. And I never want to do it again. Unless I’m hired to do it.) I kept the code; doing a plugin with it would not be a bad idea. In my copious spare time. Right.

To do today… Nine o’clock and I already have a list. Dishes, laundry, send the kids outside to play, another WordPress installation, and more tweaks for this one. Busy, busy, busy!

The Joy Of (gluten-free) Cooking

It has been an adjustment, to say the least. The flours feel gritty and dry, not soft and well, flour-y, like wheat flour does. The concept of bread that you mix, not knead, has been difficult to wrap my brain around. Matthew, on finding out that his pizza crusts would be spread, and not twirled and laid down neatly on a piping hot pizza stone, was sniffly about the lack of the Maillard reaction.

The glazed ham that I made last Friday had gluten in the glaze. I hadn’t even thought to check. Everything in a box or a bag or a wrapper has to be scrutinized and Google’d and deemed safe or unsafe. My kitchen is full of Ziplock bags labeled with their contamination status. “GF MUFFIN MIX.” “GF PIZZA MIX.” “GLUTEN – DO NOT EAT.”

My pantry is stuffed to the gills with flours and chemicals. Tapioca flour. White rice flour. Brown rice flour. Sweet rice flour. Sorghum flour. Garfava flour. Potato flour. Potato starch. Potato flakes. Teff flour. Egg replacer, because Bette Hagman favors that instead of cracking a damned egg and I’m not substituting eggs back into a recipe that is already finicky about the liquid ratio. Almond meal. Corn starch, enough to thicken the gravy of a nation, because it’s not just a thickener anymore, nope, it’s a flour. Dough enhancer. Gelatin. Xanthan gum and, because recipe writers can’t decide which is better, guar gum.

That said…

The cookies that I made got rave reviews from everyone, but most vocally from the kids. “I can’t even tell it is gluten-free, Mom.” That would be the raspberry jam topping speaking. The chocolate pound cake was eagerly inhaled. “Needs more chocolate chips!” The pizza crust could have used another ten minutes in the oven, but it was definitely pizza. I have plans for a cherry pie for Matthew’s upcoming birthday.

It’s food.

Cheap Knock-offs

My math class is doing derivatives via basic differentiation rules after suffering through doing them “the long way” (the limit process that apparently produces many groans and bad test grades).

So Mr. Riley taught us a cute math rhyme for doing the derivative of (u/v):

> Lo-dee-hi minus hi-dee-lo,
> Over the square of what goes below.
>
> derivative formula for u/v

So totally awesome.

A Funny Thing Happened

On my way home from class today, I stopped by the Manassas School of Dance and enrolled Rebecca in Ballet I. Drove home, unloaded the groceries from Costco (I was so well behaved, I only got milk and eggs and butter and half-and-half), nursed Madeline, and then threw everyone back into the car to get Becca her uniform leotard and tights and ballet shoes, oh my!

I do not think that there is a way to remove the pink stain from my soul. The dancewear shop… so… pink. And frilly. And full of pointe shoes and tutus and little girls’ dreams and satin ribbons, oh my dear God!