Washington, D.C. January 2010

Days in Washington D.C. include:

Watching the Rink Guards at the Sculpture Garden trying to corral a passel of schoolchildren into a picture in front of the National Archives.

Posing in front of a new sculpture in the same place: a tree made out of stainless steel.

Merging Dave into the picture of the Saltimboques at the National Gallery of Art.

Enjoying a new take on Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art.

Watching Calder's mobile move; same place.

Seeing Julia Child's kitchen in the Smithsonian's American History Museum.

Enjoying Thiebaud's cakes.

Framing up Whistler's Lady in White through the doorways of the National Gallery of Art.

Eating a lunch of quinoa, barley, Japanese noodles, beets, greens and a roasted tomato--a delicious offering from the National Gallery of Art Cafe, downstairs by the waterfall.

Checking out the icicles on the railing by the waterfall (I took this from inside--they were outside!).

Photographing the details of the renovated National Portrait Gallery.

Seeing a Thiebaud landscape for the first time (I'd only seen his food pictures).

Admiring the floating roof over the courtyard of this same building, reminiscent of the roof over the courtyard of the British Museum.

Wandering the Great Hall in the National Portrait Gallery, thinking about Lincoln's guests at his Inaugural Ball doing the same so many many years ago, when it was the Patent Museum.

Going to dinner with Dave's nephew Nathan and his new wife Michelle, who then took us over to a very cold (and quick!) visit at 10:00 p.m. to the Pentagon Memorial. We were back in the car in a flash as it was a balmy 19 degrees, with a stiff wind.

Surviving the predicted 1" of snow, which turned out to be 6" !

I'm coming home tomorrow, if all goes well. They canceled all Super Shuttle busses to the airport before 1 p.m. and the "sedan driver" charges two arms and a leg. So we're hotfooting it to a Metro station, then catching the bus to the airport, and then home, where hopefully, there will be no snow.

What's Up With Apple?

Tomorrow's the day for Apple's Latest Reveal. Wonder what we'll think about at the end of this Wednesday?

Something to Think About

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O'Sullivan on Vimeo.

Rain, Rain, Went Away!

Riverside's wide, dry river called the Santa Ana, filled up with the constant rains we've been having. Here's some shots of our walk over the Rubidoux bridge.


Usually this is like a sandbox, with a small stream trickling down on one side.

I stop and focus on the belongings of some homeless person; they have a large community in these river bottom bushes, but have obviously been washed out.

It's a quilt, and underneath that, a bag that looks to contain another quilt top or two. Who does this belong to? Where'd they get the quilt? The quilt top? Are they newly homeless with this economy? Or older and more saavy, knowing how to procure these kinds of luxuries. Luxuries that are now washed down the Santa Ana.



The water is muddy, roiling with foam and belongings.



And when we woke up today?

The rain was gone, leaving white mountains robed in snow.

Pillowcases

I've been busy today. I made little treats for little people in my life for Valentine's Day. If the rain lets up (yes, we're still here and not washed away) I'll trot over to the Post Office and mail them off. I had already made two little treats for two little boys who lived nearby, and felt like I should finish some for the rest.
The babies, who don't have pillows yet, will have to wait until the next round.

Return to Cranford

Return to Cranford is the new show this week on Masterpiece Classic, and is a sequel to the first tale, Cranford, which aired last year. This new one is just as delightful, just as wonderful and was well worth my time at the computer, streaming it down from the PBS website.

Judy Dench leads a wonderful cast of actors who portray citizens in the small town of Cranford, just as the railroad comes to town. Hurry, though. The episodes are only available for a short time, and you don't want to miss them.

Happy Birthday, Elizabeth

So, January is my birthday month. Yep. All month.
I used to (when I was younger and my mother put on the celebration for me) think it was only a day--as in, Today is my Birthday. Getting older changes things, as when you receive birthday greetings from family and friends a few days late, or the gift arrives a week later. It's all good, but I'm happy to report that those closest to me--the children, my parents and Dave--nail it on the day, every time.

This is a picture of what I served: sole-wrapped scallops. It was delicious (check for the recipe over at elizabethcooks.com, plus notice the new website design). Cake recipe is over there as well.

Since Dave's busy with a huge project, I offered--for the first time since we'd been married--to make my own birthday cake, largely because I wanted to try one out of my $175 cookbook: Julia Child's first tome that I'd picked up at an estate sale for $8.

Dave did the candles honor, arranging six candles in the shape of a "six." No, I'm not sixty.

I'm six.

The cake was different than the birthday sponge cakes we're used to. This was dense and rich and lovely to eat.

Matthew had timed the books, wrapped!, to arrive on the day, perhaps intentionally. I had a day of lovely phone calls, lunch with Judy, nice cards, and now this celebration.

Birthday gifts: winners all.

On Sunday, we went over to Chad's house to see him set apart as a new Elder's Quorum President, a sweet experience. Dave helped Alex and Andrew put together their Buzz Lightyear loop-de-loop track.

It was fun to see this family in their house, everyone interesting and happy. Chad and Kristen cooked us a delicious meal of salmon, potatoes and asparagus and we had another birthday cake as well.

Now this is excitement over some birthday candles!

First Day of School

Back to school this afternoon, teaching one class from 1-3 p.m.
I like how this girl's backpack appears to show the story of Little Red Riding Hood, where the wolf attempts to overwhelm and devour the lone little young woman. Somedays I feel like Miss Hood. I haven't even started class and have received two emails from my future students. The first informed me that they were going to have surgery and would be gone from the class for some undetermined period of time after attending the initial class session. Okey, dokey, we can work around that. The second informed me that they had "Disleaxia" (dyslexia). That's all. They were just telling me.

What am I supposed to do with that information?

Welcome back, teacher.

Foodscapes

Carl Warner, a photographer, designed and photographed these Foodscapes. Click •here• to be taken to his website, then navigate to "stills" then "foodscapes" to see more.

This is definitely a stylized version of an Italian hilltown, in my estimation. Love the cheese buildings on top of the hill.

Garlic huts--kind of reminds me of where hobbits might live. It took me a while to figure out that the ground is made from some kind of purple leafy vegetable.

Half Dome in Yosemite, done up in bread and broccoli. Given that we just watched the Rose Parade, with its mandate that everything on the float be done in flowers, I like that I happened on these foodscapes, where everything is done in food. (And yes, they got an exception for the snowboarding dogs in the parade.)

I also like Warner's ironing/laundry mountains--it's just how I envision my laundry chores.

Headlong. Ruthless.

I have had this book for many years, so many that I can't remember, although the initial publication date was 2001. Then the movie came out and I studiously avoided any mention of what happened, who did what, how the book turned out.

I wanted to discover it for myself, for one of the few pleasures of reading is turning pages, building up anticipation, hardly waiting for the climactic denouement and knowing that no pages can be skipped, that a reader must doggedly keep at it until the last page is turned. I wanted to savor a story.

It centers around forgiveness, the lack of it, repentance, atoning for one's errors and misjudgments and sins and mistakes. It's our lives that this book reveals, for as I've gotten older I realize that life really is all about repenting of mistakes, forgiving others for theirs.

Briony, the center of this book, is a young girl of 13 when the novel opens and she wants to be a writer. She's begun by writing plays, stories, and in her mind, struggling to see the future, half-seeing it, half-imagining it. She takes after her mother in this regard, and in one scene, the mother--fighting off a migraine--lays in her bed and imagines that:

"There was a presence in the room, her aggrieved, overlooked ten-year-old self, a girl even quieter than Briony, who used to wonder at the massive emptiness of time. . . . It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. . . and she, Emily, would grow stiffer in the limbs and more irrelevant by the day; . . . And here was the ghost of her childhood, diffused throughout the room, to remind her of the limited arc of existence. How quickly the story was over. Not massive and empty at all, but headlong. Ruthless." (141-2)

The tangled web of mother, father, family, lovers, war, sacrifice, error, injustice all combined to propel me through the book. I finished last night, interested in the structure that was built, yet dismantled in the end.

I do recommend it.

Kids! Try This At Home!

Reality Bites

Back to reality, after a week of fun. I pulled out the syllabus that I had carefully sent to Printing Services two weeks before, feeling so smug with myself that I'd done something ahead of time for the upcoming course I was teaching.

But what to my wondering eyes should appear? The date of "Spring 2009."

Right.

So I'm now in the middle of reprinting, collating, and stapling in order to reflect the correct date. What a dummkopf I was.

Butternut Crunch Toffee

I've posted another round of recipes on my other blog: Elizabeth's Kitchen. One of them is this one, Butternut Crunch Toffee. I have also put up the menu from my husband's work Open House, and a TON of recipes from that event. In addition, I updated the caramel recipe, adding a few more pictures showing how to wrap those little bits of goodness. Enjoy.

On a side note, my son Matthew hooked me up with a domain name, so now I'm a full-fledged contributing member to Web 2.0 as elizabethcooks.com. He also set it up so it refers over to the current Elizabeth's Kitchen. I'm completely impressed with his skills. My other son, Peter, is trying to work some kind of magic somewhere as well on this. Should be a fun Christmas break, as we pull out the laptops to see what will go down. Thanks, boys!

When I'm Eighty-Four

Okay, this is an example of the zeitgeist at work in my life.

I just awoke from a dream where I was playing one-on-one basketball with Charles Barkley. Like I know who he is, but there you go. It was a dream. He had a normal ball, a normal goal, but my "ball" was shaped in the form of a soft black oblong with a handle at one end, and my basket was about twice as high. When I would attempt to throw my "ball" up, it would get stuck. Meanwhile, he was cleaning my clock with all his scores. I know, in regular one-on-one there's only one ball. It was my dream so you have to stay out of it.

Then I awoke to read in Ben Schott's column in the New York Times a gradient of National Social Life, Health and Aging Project for Americans aged 57-84, and the section on Difficulties in Daily Living caught me eye, providing me the interpretation for my (silly) dream.

Getting older is like they change the rules for a simple pick-up game: the shape of the ball, the opponent, the goal--they all change, and as an older person you know you can't compete. At that point you can either walk off the court, or challenge Charles Barkley to a game where you know you can beat him, say, a Spelling Bee or something. I think the point is to stay in some game, somewhere, and to keep at it.

I guess.

By the way, in my dream? The ref was just as baffled as I was, kept shaking his head as he called foul after foul on the The Round Mound of Rebound (one of Barkley's nicknames). I woke up tired, as I do after such dreams. But this morning I've got my walking clothes on and am heading out the door today, trying to get back in the game.

P.S. Click on the image to go to complete chart.

Not Quite That Dusty

This is a photo from the horrendous red dust storms in Australia this summer. Someone opened up their laundry room door and took a photo. I'm sure she shut it quickly, so as to keep the dust outside.

Besides blogging, another thing that's been neglected is the housekeeping. I keep the living room fairly tidy, swiping it with a rag every now and again and with just the two of us, it doesn't get too dirty.

But this computer desk, and the desk over there loaded with Christmas fabric in swaths of unfolded glory are another story. The fabric came out mid-November on one of those days when I felt well and thought I'd just whip up a Christmas quilt for our bed. Then the research papers came in, then the homework, then the. . . you get the picture.

That's when I just shut the door, like the woman up above. However, I'm keeping the dust IN.

Student Evaluations--the Dichotomy

I had my conference with the Dean yesterday. He's a great guy, relaxed, so that makes the nervous adjunct who just came out of the rain and is sitting in his office, relaxed. Our college evaluates adjuncts every six semesters, although except for meeting some internal administrative criteria, I can't figure out why: I receive no pay raise for a good evaluation, nor is my job made more secure (painfully illustrated this semester when our college's goal--as delivered to them by the financial office--was to cut 1/6th of our classes, and most of the adjuncts lost one of the two classes they were teaching).

But here it is, delivered out of the mouth of babes, as written by two of my students:

A lot of the instructions and materials are scattered and disorganized. There are so many pieces of information for any task that is is often stressful to know what's expected. Aside from that, she is very helpful, kind and caring as a teacher and as a person.

-------and--------

Not only does Professor Eastmond do her duty to make sure everyone understands and completes the basic knowledge and meets minimal standards, she goes far out of her way to guide those who wish for it even further, beyond the constraints of the class.

The first was written (I'm pretty sure) by a nice kid--I like him--who comes late to class. Every class, every time. For yesterday's class, where they were writing an in-class essay, he was 30 minutes late, cutting his writing time short by a third. He can't find things in his binder, and an expedition to clean out his backpack could receive national funding.

A Typical Experience: He sat down yesterday, pulled out a piece of paper and then looked around. He raised his hand and asked if we were supposed to use a Blue Book? I nodded, and then he began searching for that in his backpack, and not finding it, kind of looked back at me quizzically. K., who was watching the whole thing, reached into his well-organized backpack, and donated one to The Cause.

The only reason I think the comment above is from him, is because not only do I pass out a detailed Course Calendar, listing and showing nearly everything that is expected, I also provide a (detailed) handout for each of our five essays. And for those techno-students, we also have a blog, where I update any small changes to these documents. One day the above student complained to me that it was confusing to have to look everywhere to get information, this after he missed the news about some required reading regarding our novel, which was on the essay handout.

He's one of my favorites, though. I wish him well in his next class, where most likely, he won't get a woman who's raised four teenagers, and has the heart of a grandmother.