Oh Heck Yeah, It's Friday!

First Order of Business:

1.      Parker Milsap

2.      Lillie Mae

3.      John Mellencamp

4.      Dan Auerbach

5.      Valerie June

6.      Feist

7.      Rhiannon Giddens

8.      Devil Makes 3

9.      Justin Townes Earle

10.  John Mayer

11.  Pokey Lafarge

12.  Willie Nelson

13.  Sheryl Crowe

14.  Chris Stapleton

15.  Jeff Tweedy

16.  Ani DiFranco

17.  Shovels and Rope

18.  Adele

19.  Lumineers

20.  Regrettes

For posterity, my Prairie Home Companion list, if you’re playing along at home. It counts as a point if they appear on the show in any capacity, even just sitting in with the band. Although nobody on this list sat in with the band or appeared as featured duet artist last season, because that’s just way too easy. I’m really annoyed that I didn’t make the right call Fiona Apple, who is appearing this week as the featured duet artist. I considered her. She toured with Nickel Creek in the early naughties, but she’s been pretty quiet lately so I didn’t put her on the list.

Last year he stayed pretty consistent with Sarah Jaroz, Aoife O’Donovan, and Sara Watkins. This year he seems to be spreading the featured duet artist love around a bit more. Earlier this season he featured Rachael Price from Lake Street Dive. That episode made me ugly cry repeatedly. Damn you Thile!!! No, seriously, it was actually cathartic and I felt a little less alone in this crazy fucking world. Thile can be really effective at making one feel all of the feels when he sets his brilliant little mind to it.

Some of them will depend on timing. I almost left Chris Stapleton off the list because he’s pretty big and fairly mainstream, but it just happened that he was playing the arena across the street that night and was willing to take the time to appear on the show. I think that John Mayer and Adele would both be down with coming on the show for standard PHC pay scale if timing allows. I don’t think they would divert from a tour though. The show is produced by Minnesota Public Radio and just doesn’t have the budget to make that worth their whiles.

I’m still really tickled about being right on the Auerbach call. I can’t wait to see Thile go all fanboy over the Black Keys guy. He’s totally going to go all fan boy and it’s going to be adorable. He’s totally what Andro would refer to as a Cinnamon Roll. I’m not sure where she got that. I can’t keep up with the things the kids are saying these days, but when I get ahold of what she’s saying I sure do love mangling it just to annoy her. Yes, I’m THAT kind of mom.

Speaking of moms, I had a lovely bit of texting with mine last night. We just started talking again a few weeks ago. We had a bit of a falling out after the election and didn’t speak for a few months. Either enough time has passed to give us some distance from that shit, or she’s maybe starting to see that the current political climate is causing chaos and craziness and it’s out of control and the angry mango was as bad a thing and I’d feared.

We had a post-election conversation that went something like this:

Her: At least he isn’t a criminal. Benghazi and her emails. She’s had people killed.

Me: Yes, mom, yes he is, and a dangerous, narcissistic one at that. And those other two things aren’t actually real things and no she hasn’t.

Her: Well, that’s your opinion.

No! It isn’t my opinion. Whether or not actual events did or did not happen is a matter of fact. An opinion is a stance on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza (it does). How did this woman raise me to have such acute critical thinking skills when it appears she has none of her own?  Now that we are on speaking terms again, she is carefully avoiding politics and religion. (Which I had been previously avoiding, but she always managed to bring them up and then proceed to call me hateful and intolerant for my views about things like, you know, facts, and whether or not the NYT is a credible news source. It is.)

In the time since we last spoke, she has learned how to insert GIFs into text messages and has become for all intensive purposes (the Word Murderer used that this week and I also spit coffee out of my nose, but more on her later) a texting tween girl. She also uses the tween text abbreviations like 2 and u and b and ur and 4 – like she’s writing lyrics to a Prince song or a DJT Jr. tweet. (Seriously though, he doesn’t know the difference between Maxine Waters and Frederica Wilson and then proceeds to slut shame her over a HAT??? How the fuck is a hat slutty?) And it makes me insane! This is the woman that raised me to be a grammar Nazi (although she said last night that she prefers the term Word Warrior, which I agree is much less fascist) and from whom I inherited my knack for writing and editing.

So, the Word Murderer. Well, this week she’s used the word “understandment” repeatedly, as in “It is to my understandment that…” and she’s referred to the Hawaiian word for hello and goodbye and thank you and welcome and probably a few other things like chicken, tree, papaya, and the color mauve, as “Haloha”.  She did this on Monday like six times in the space of an hour. She’s also been bragging about her IT skills dropping terms like “chat room” and “disc drive”, because those have been relevant at any point in the past ten years, but yeah, I totally believe you’re an expert. And of course continued discussion of the ubiquitous Swifter.

And proof that I’m a Word Warrior and not a grammar Nazi? I haven’t even attempted to correct her.

Thank the fucking goddesses it’s Friday. This week has been about a month long and I’m ready to go home and sit on the porch with Grumpy and Bucky and declare it wine-thirty. 

I am not Amish, and I am devastated.

Also, Amish potato salad is a lie.

I’ve been told my entire life that on my mother’s mother’s mother’s side my heritage is Pennsylvania Dutch. I’ve always taken that to mean Amish. Pennsylvania Dutch means Amish, right? Everyone knows that Pennsylvania Dutch means Amish, or at least everyone that knows that the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t actually Dutch, like from Holland. The name came about because the English speaking population couldn’t differentiate the word Dutch from the word Deutche, which is the German word for German, but I’m sure you knew that, and I bet you thought Pennsylvania Dutch meant Amish too, am I right? Or at least Mennonite, which is just like Amish-light.

The mere mention of Pennsylvania Dutch evokes images of horse-drawn carts and men in plain black suits with broad-brimmed hats. It brings to mind ladies in homemade dresses and bonnets, selling hand-crafted cheeses and pickles and fruit preserves and that wonderful old-fashioned potato salad made from the recipe passed from mother to daughter, generation to generation, from the Old Country.

I’ve been seeing a lot of Amish/Mennonite culture since having moved to Ohio. On our Saturday drives deep into the rural back country we see Amish and Mennonite churches, horse-cart crossing signs, farmers plowing fields with mules, and road-side market stands everywhere. One time I saw a bearded guy in a thrift store in a small town in Indiana. He was wearing a white shirt, vest, and black pants with stove-pipe legs and I thought maybe he was a hipster (I mean, that kind of is the default for quirky-looking bearded guys in the city here) until I saw several more men wandering around the store sporting matching outfits, then it clicked.

On one of our drives out towards the Appalachian foothills of the eastern Ohio River Valley I got hungry, so we stopped at a small market with a deli that offered both regular and Amish potato salad. Now, I need to set up some back story here about my history with potato salad. I am PASSIONATE about potato salad. The only other food that rivals the emotional depth that potato salad evokes in me is squash casserole, and that is another story for another day. I learned how to make potato salad from my mother who learned from her mother – very simply with boiled potatoes, chopped boiled egg, finely diced onion and celery, maybe relish but that’s iffy, lots and lots of mayonnaise, and never EVER mustard. Almost every potato salad I’ve ever had that wasn’t made by either me or a family member has had mustard in it and it’s nigh inedible. So, when I walked into this small market and was given a sample of the Amish potato salad to taste and found that *sound of angels singing on high* it tasted almost exactly like my potato salad, I immediately felt a sense of connection. This Amish potato salad was all up in my personal DNA, flowing through my veins.

I immediately went home and started researching my Pennsylvania Dutch roots, searching for a documentable connection to my Amishness. I went on an ancestry website and started building a family tree that started with my mother’s roots in Indiana and followed my lineage back through generations to Lancaster, PA, and Lancaster, PA is Amish, right? Isn’t that why Lancaster, PA exists? I found generations and generations of German names and surnames, farming families with dozens of children. Oh the thrill of discovery – all of these Amish grandmothers passing along the recipe for their wonderful potato salad until it reached me.

I traced my line, grandmother to grandmother – Hubert to Neier to Figert to my great-great-great-great grandmother, Susanna Neifertin, (have you ever heard a more German list of surnames?) born in 1794, and here’s a really cool fun fact – my grandmother Susanna is buried in the cemetery of the oldest church in Lancaster County, known locally as The Old White Church. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and was founded in 1842 as St. Paul’s Union Church.

A quick Google search gave me some insight into the history of the Union church in relation to the German population of Pennsylvania and across the Midwest. The Old Country ancestors of this group of immigrants were primarily followers of Lutheran theology until Calvin and his cohorts came along and started arguing certain details of Luther’s interpretation of biblical text which then split the church into the Lutheran Church and the Reformed Church of Germany. The members of the two denominations among the New World German communities often opted to join resources and form one congregation that politely agreed to disagree with each other on whatever points of theology that separated them. One thing that the Lutherans and the Calvinists did agree on, however, was that neither of them were Amish. Not even remotely.

I went back through my research, rechecking records. Every church where we have been recorded as being buried, married, or baptized was either Reformed, Lutheran, or Union. I am not Amish. The deliciousness of potatoes, egg, and mayonnaise in Amish potato salad is not imbedded in my DNA. Disappointing, yes, but still, my ancestry is decidedly Pennsylvania Dutch farm stock and they immigrated from the same region of Germany as the Amish and had access to the same Midwestern farm ingredients and probably cooked food very much like the Amish, right? I mean, Unionist potato salad isn’t a thing I’ve ever heard of, but it could be, right? German potato salad is a thing. Maybe Reformed German potato salad is also a thing?

No. No, it isn’t. Also, Amish potato salad isn’t some magical recipe passed down mother to daughter from the Old Country.

Another quick Google search gave me some insight into the history of mayonnaise, without which, potato salad as we know it is not possible. Recipes for mayonnaise first appeared in British and German cookbooks at the end of the 1800’s. I traced my family to Lancaster County to the mid 1700’s, before the invention of mayonnaise. Mayonnaise wasn’t even introduced to the US until the 1920’s and even then was considered a luxury item – the sort of thing a private chef might serve a president (Calvin Coolidge was a fan) – until the Kraft Foods company made it commercially available in the 1930’s. At best, my potato salad recipe is 3^rd generation. Mostly likely, my great grandmother’s first taste of potato salad as I know it came from a batch made by one of her children, possibly my grandmother.

So where did Amish potato salad come from? The very devout Amish eschew modern technology. They don’t drive cars or plow with tractors. Their houses aren’t wired for electricity or plumbed for running water. They make their own candles and clothes and grown their own food. I highly doubt a mass-produced Kraft Foods product is a dietary staple. Also, every recipe I found online for so-called Amish potato salad has mustard in it. What even?

So that’s disheartening. But in my search for a DNA connection to potato salad, I learned something that almost makes up for the disappointment. My family’s religious history centers around congregations that politely agreed to disagree on certain points of theology while worshipping together as a community. Before I was born, there was some diversion from this religious path, but as an adult I’ve found my way back to it as a Unitarian Universalist. The whole agree-to-disagree-while-worshipping-as-a-community thing is just kind of what we do. So in a way, I have come full circle in the search for my family.

And my potato salad is still the bomb. 

My Trivial Tragedies

It’s been a tragic weekend and this morning isn’t panning out to be much better.

First off, I have $0.13 in my bank account because the ancestry website I was working with are idiots. I signed up for the free two-week trial with the expectation that I would be charged $19.99 a month to continue because, well, because I CLICKED THAT OPTION! My two weeks were up on Thursday of last week and instead of charging my account the expected amount, they charged me $99 for the six month plan instead. What the fuck? And even though I called and had the charge refunded, it will be 3-5 or maybe 5-7 business days (the customer service lady didn’t quite seem to have it all together) until the money shows back up in my account. Goddammnitmotherfucker.

We didn’t starve over the weekend however because even though Grump’s account was down near empty, it allowed him to make a couple of purchases that threw him into the negative (we will have to pay the overdraft fees). We filled the tank of my car all the way and did major grocery shopping because if you’re going to throw your account into the negative, make it worthwhile, right?

So we had everything we needed for a road trip and a picnic on Saturday, which was nice. Although the day started off crappy because Grump decided to pick a fight over nothing (nothing being my pickity grammatical habits) and we squabbled until he had satisfactorily annoyed me (I may have referred to him as Mr. 3^rd-Grade-Math because he had to take the remedial refresher math course when he went back to school and still sort of struggles with fractions, as does, I realize, almost everyone else who isn’t a giant nerd and I do try really hard not to rub my giant nerd-ness in people’s faces until they start pushing my buttons and then it really isn’t my responsibility if a get a bit snarky and condescending, maybe) and then he was fine but I was seething – and feeling a bit guilty for the below-the-belt insult.

Why is this game even a thing? Has anyone else experienced this absurd game? The “I’m going to poke at you until I’ve succeeded in pissing you off and when you react I will call you a bitch and then proceed to move along with my day. Then I will act clueless as to why you are still acting like a bitch even though the fight is over” game. Ridiculous man behavior.

We made up over the making of egg salad and subsequent sandwiches, kind of. I was a bit touchy for a good while after that. We finished packing the picnic and gathered Andro and the puppy (10 month old lab-mix mutt, Bucky, after the Winter Soldier – because when he isn’t acting psycho, he’s just sort of vacant and confused and sweet), picked up the Goth Child, and drove out to a park in the foothills. We had our picnic and a lovely little walk and then *just* as I was getting into the car, something stung me on the ass. Ow! I felt fully justified in whining about that all the way home, much to the delight, I’m sure, of everyone else in the car.

We got home in time to watch the live stream of A Prairie Home Companion on YouTube. I’m a tad obsessed with all things Chris Thile and Punch Brothers and now PHC because I’m a great big progressive-folk-to-post-punk-indie-pop-music-spectrum nerd. (The scope of my nerdnesses is absurd.) When everyone in my office was excitedly compiling their fantasy prediction of sportsing things during March Madness basketball last spring, PHC had just wrapped its first season with Thile as host and I devised the game of guessing who is going to be on the 2017-2018 season. (Predicting sportsings just doesn’t seem fun to me, but I wanted to predict SOMETHING so as not to feel left out, which totally didn’t work in the end.) I picked 20 artists based on a matrix of scoring that included things like new album releases, previous participation in NPR music activities, especially Tiny Desk Concerts, and a few other really nerdy things I’d noticed as patterns from last season. (I think there was one guest last season who had not done Tiny Desk, and I’m guessing he just hasn’t done Tiny Desk *yet*.)

So far out of my list of 20 I’ve gotten two points and we are only a few weeks in to a 26 show season. I’m particularly proud of my call on Dan Auerbach, who is (if you didn’t know) half of the Black Keys and also released a folky solo album in late spring. I KNEW Thile would be a Black Keys fanboy. I mean he DID have Jack White on the first episode of his first season and acted like SUCH a giddy little fanboy and anyone who gets that giddy over Jack White is a White Stripes fan and thus is also going to be into the Black Keys because the Venn diagrams on those fandoms almost completely overlap. Neither The White Stripes nor The Black Keys would really be appropriate acts for PHC, but Jack White doing throwback-to-old-style-country-music things was perfect and solo Auerbach doing folky things is just too good to pass up. Am I right? Of course I’m right. He’s going to be on next week.

Sadly, I have nobody to compare points with because, despite several pleas to my fellow music nerds on my FB feed, nobody else will play this game with me. Tragic, right? If the Regrettes end up on the show, I will have nobody over whom I may triumphantly gloat because nobody else really…..cares. Why must my life be so tragic? (And if you haven’t, check out the Regrettes cover of Fox on the Run on A. V. Undercover on YouTube. It is AMAZING.)

Right before the beginning of the show, I managed to add insult to injury. Or injury to injury. Or something. On my way down to grab the wine – because one MUST have a tasty beverage while watching the YouTube livestream of PHC – I fell down the stairs and bruised my ass in the exact same place where I’d just been stung. The fuck?

And this morning – this morning – I walked my sore, bruised, stung ass all the way across the very large campus of the complex where I work to the cafeteria, because of course the cafeteria has to be as far away as possible, to get a piece of toast (costs 50 cents, which I happen to have on me) because I have half an avocado in my lunchbox and the idea of avocado toast for breakfast seemed lovely. There was no bread and the toaster was turned off and there were no cafeteria staff around to help. And because I have 13 cents in my account, I could not afford to buy something like a muffin or pastry that cost more than the 50 cents I have on me. So now I’m getting close to hangry and that usually gets ugly fast.

I’m telling you. Tragic. 

The Word Murderer

I love words. They are my playthings. I tell people that when I was a child my favorite toys were string, dirt, and words. (And if I’m being honest about this list, probably also paper. Lots and lots of paper. And scissors and glue. Paper and scissors and glue can provide endless amounts of rainy afternoon amusement.) But words…. Oh how I love them. They are physical objects that have shape and form in my mouth. Plethora. Pink. Bohemian. (You’re saying these out loud right now, aren’t you?) Maneuver. Slacks.

Slacks is my very favorite word of all time. It fills your entire mouth, rolling from the front of the mouth to the back to the front again. I’ve been known to just say the word “slacks” over and over and over and over without any context whatsoever. Some of these instances may have been booze-fueled, but I openly admit that many of them have happened while I was stone sober. I just really love saying “slacks”. And if anyone else happens to casually drop the word into a conversation in proper context, I will start giggling for (unless you know me well enough to know my obsession with the word) what seems to be absolutely no reason. And then trying to explain why I just started giggling at what the speaker probably thinks is a perfectly sane and valid word is just……inexplicable.

Akin to my love of language is a certain, hmmm, let’s call it pickiness, in regards to grammar. I inherited this pickiness from my parents, who inherited it from their parents. Grammar mistakes at the dinner table did NOT go uncorrected. If I were to say “Me and Hortense went to the hippopotamus store today,” my father would immediately have responded with “Hortense and I, Butternut, Hortense and I!” My grandfather tried to be a bit cleverer with his correction. He would ask, “Why is Hortense mean?” Because, you know, “me and” sounds so much like “mean”. (I said *tried* to be cleverer. I didn’t say succeeded.) Other linguistic quirks that were not tolerated were misuse or mispronunciation of words and/or sayings or phrases. Family pet peeves included “whole nuther”, “for all intensive purposes”, and “could care less”.

All of this drilling has resulted in me having the same sort of cringe reaction to poor grammar and word usage as I do to things like the sound of people chewing or the sound of styrofoam rubbing against itself. (It makes a most horrid squeak. The sound causes me actual, physical pain.) I’ve social skills enough to know better than to go around correcting other people’s grammar, pronunciation, and word usage. (Unless by other people we mean my husband and children, and they are oft corrected. And that is only because I love them and do not want them to sound illiterate.) But the cringing, oh the cringing. The speech patterns of a certain current political person – whom I will not dignify by naming or even labeling by position, but who much resembles an angry mango – are to me much like an ice pick to the eardrums.

I’m also kind of persnickety about the written word. I know it would be best if I just avoided the comment section of Facebook altogether, but it’s like gawking at an accident on the side of the road. The egregious mix-ups of they’re/there/their, to/too/two, and your/you’re make me sad for humanity and certainly render the commenter’s point moot. (Note that’s moot and not mute – the point is not incapable of speech, it is invalid. They’re two totally different words. Really y’all.) Also, I have very strong opinions about the Oxford comma. I am a big fan. I am also a big fan of Vampire Weekend even if they don’t give a fuck about the Oxford comma. And I would NEVER lie to them about how much coal I have. Why would I lie about something dumb like that? Why would I lie about anything at all? (I love that song so very much.)

So, having established this as background, let me tell you a bit about my job. I work for a very large, very well-known, multi-national corporation in a marketing/PR sort of-ish position. I and my coworkers (note that I did NOT say “me and my coworkers” because they are not mean) spend a good portion of our time on the phone with people outside of our organization. I spend most of my time talking to young mothers about poop. I am the Poop Whisperer of my shared office space. The other ladies in the room talk to consumers about things not related to poop. There are five of us in our shared space, along with a supervisor. And this is where the story gets sticky.

My supervisor, who, along with supervising us, the phone-talkers, also does a good bit of phone talking because that’s primarily what we do in this office. We talk to people outside of our organization as representatives of our very large, very well-known, multi-national corporation. And she can’t speak English. Like, she can’t say words. It’s baffling. I have never not once heard her say “supposed to”. It’s always either “opposed to” or just “posta”. She says fessball for festival – today she was going on and on and on about a punkin fessball, which she went to last year. She said”punkin” about twenty times in the span of about 90 seconds. This year she went to a batato fessball where she ate all kinds of batato foods like mashed and fried and SHE SAID BATATO!!!!

She adds the letter T into words randomly, but takes it out if it belongs there. The mop thing that you use to clean floors is a Swifter. Makes me wonder if there is perhaps a Less Swift or a Swiftest. You can buy said Swifter at a Walmark’s. She also said she wouldn’t check baggage on a plane because she was afraid it would get ramshacked and someone would steal her stuff. Today she told a lovely little story about a boy and his gadora – you know, the old fashioned hat that men wore with suits.

Also, any anecdote she tells will involve her saying repeatedly, “I says I says I says I says” like some female, nasal sounding incarnation of Foghorn Leghorn. And her grammar. Oh my sweet lord. She has a gift for mismatching her tenses and subject/verb number agreements. And I just sit here, without comment, wanting to bang my head on my desk. It wouldn’t be so awful if she weren’t my supervisor and in charge of representing our company on the phone to the public. I mean, how did she even get through the job interview? Why would anyone hire this word murderer to be their representative to the public? The other big gear grinder that makes things so much worse is that she is ever so condescending. My god, this woman can shut you down so hard that not only do you not know what you’re talking about, you aren’t even actually saying the words that are coming out of your mouth. That level of shut-down is a special talent.

So there’s that part of my life. I do really, really love my job. I love talking to moms about poop. I’m not being sarcastic or ironic about that. I like the interaction with people and poop is amusing. And almost everyone else I work with is amazing. It’s just this one woman. This one word murderer. 

Escalating Quickly

I started this little blog adventure off with a sweet enough little story, and now I’m going to escalate quickly to darker territory. I’m going to tell you about myself and introduce my family.

I’ve already stated that I am a wife and mother, and I’m going to be straight up honest with you – I have NOT enjoyed parenting. I doubt that I’d have taken to it even if I’d given birth to perfectly gifted little snowflakes. I have the kind of mind and personality that craves challenging employment and the company of adults. But my children, through no fault of their own – or mine, for that matter – weren’t the easiest children to raise. But I’m jumping ahead maybe……

My husband, who shall henceforth be known as GrumpyNut, is retired military. We have three children. Two boys, NutOne and NutTwo, who are in their late teens and living on their own in the house they grew up in (and which we still own and pay the mortgage on) in the smallish town in the south where we landed as our last duty station and where we stayed for the next several years.  They wanted to make an attempt at adulting so we allowed them to remain there when we moved to Ohio last year. N1 is old enough to be on his own, legally, but has some difficulties here and there with mild autism. He wasn’t diagnosed until he was nine. Our previous duty station was in a very small, backwater town and had no pediatric behavioral health services and all we could get from that particular military medical community was that he had ADHD and we should take parenting classes. The diagnosis (once we were transferred back to civilization) was a HUGE relief – he had something neurological and his issues weren’t a result of my poor parenting skills. We got a much later start with him than would have been ideal, but he did respond to some of the therapies we tried with him and he is functioning fairly well as an adult.

N2 isn’t quite old enough to legally be on his own yet, but is quickly approaching, and it’s perfectly legal for him to live with someone else who is of the age of majority. He has made it more than abundantly clear that he has zero interest in being parented. We certainly did try. We started worrying about his behavioral issues when he was just toddling. He was prone to horrible tantrums for no reason and extremely violent outbursts that were physically hard for me to deal with even then – tantrums and outbursts that lasted well past the “terrible” years. We had him evaluated when he was pre-K and got a diagnosis of ADHD. (They liked that diagnosis down there in Backwater.) Even at that age he refused to cooperate with any form of therapy or medical intervention. Later, he was diagnosed with “intermittent explosive disorder”, which means his mental thermostat goes from perfectly fine to Incredible Hulk without passing go or collecting $200. This is an actual neurological condition I did not know about until right at that moment.

Growing up, he stubbornly resisted every attempt to help, advise, discipline, treat, motivate, etc. We are a tall family and he shot up well over 6’ before he was 14. His violent outbursts became more than we could handle and the police had to get involved on several occasions. At 15, he decided he was done with school and that was that. On the rare occasions we were able to get him up and in school, he would act out until the school just sent him home in frustration. It’s like the school system just lost him, and I feel much like I’ve lost him too.

My daughter, AndrogyNut (she chose that as her blog name, btw), lives with us in our new home in Ohio. She is a large part of the reason we made the move. She is an odd little muffin too. She also was diagnosed early with severe ADHD and anger issues not *quite* as bad as her brother, but close. The school system was failing her just as hard as it had failed her brother and by middle school she seemed on the brink of just dropping out of life. She had no friends and spent all of her time alone in her room reading and drawing. She also resisted every attempt we made at therapy or medical intervention. I knew if I didn’t get her out of that school system and out from under the weight of her brother’s behavioral issues, I’d lose her too.

Since the move, she has made HUGE strides. I’m overwhelmed by the transformation she’s made from a feral, Nell-child thing to being an actual person functioning in society. I mean, she’s still a little weirdo with ADHD, but she is a freshman in high school working in an independent study program run by the school system and actually engaging in lessons and learning. She has a little group of friends that are just as geeky and adorkable and she is, and, as of about three weeks ago, is in her first romantic relationship. Her girlfriend is the most adorable little goth thing you’ve ever seen – like straight out of 1993. The boys never really dated so the whole teen-angst-romantic-relationship thing is entirely new to me. Oh boy.

I also made this move for myself. The situation I was in had gotten so bad that I had not only lost myself, but my sense of reality. I didn’t even know how dysfunctional my living situation was until I came up here to visit a friend (a fellow military wife from when we lived in Backwater) and got some distance and perspective. She convinced me that I had to get out and that I had to get Andro out if either of us were to survive. Grumpy was not initially very receptive to the idea, but I kind of only gave him the choice to come along or not, and he chose to come along.

So this is our life now – in the Midwest – which wasn’t even really a real place in my head until a couple of years ago. I mean, I knew it existed, but I knew it existed in the same way I know Mozambique exists.  I figured my chances of living – or even visiting either place – were probably about equal. I’ve survived the hardest part of the parenting thing. I’m finally in a place where I can actually hold a full time job. I kind of randomly stumbled into a position at a huge corporation in a capacity that is somewhat related to PR. Grumpy, who’s worked 40+ hours for the past nearly 30 years at the same basic job (he got a position with DoD directly after retirement doing pretty much exactly the same thing as a civilian as he did when he was active duty). He is working part time now and going to school full time to be a nurse. Our roles are almost entirely reversed with me being the 9-to-5-er and him being more the house-husband.

We have a cute little house with a front yard garden that is, for the most part, a pleasant place to be. Keeping house is much easier now without small children making messes faster than I can clean them up. The environment is much less stressful – enough so that Andro and her friends have decided our house is the best place to hang. I’m happy, for the most part, if a bit fragile. I still have some difficulty wanting to do anything but work and sleep unless Grumpy convinces me to go for a walk or a drive through the countryside. I’ve always been an extreme extrovert but found myself withdrawing over the past couple of years. I feel like I am finally beginning to regain my personhood.  We found a church we like and last spring I sang in the choir. I haven’t seemed to be able to motivate myself back to choir practice yet again this fall, but baby steps.

Baby steps. 

An introduction and also a funny story. 

Also kind of a metaphor for how my life pretty much works.

I moved to Ohio last year, so this summer was my first summer in the new house. The new house doesn’t really have a front yard. It is a very narrow house with a covered porch and below that a garage door that connects to the basement. An 8’x8’ raised flower bed runs alongside the porch steps at about waist height. The new house is in a neighborhood full of gorgeous front yard gardens – urban farming is all the rage where I live – and I wanted to join the party. I knew just what I wanted. I wanted lots of herbs, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and squash – the yellow crook-neck kind you use for squash casserole because squash casserole is my very favorite thing in the entire world.

We went to the farmer’s market on a Saturday in May and a nice farmer man had lots and lots of healthy looking seedlings in plastic crates clearly labeled in front. Summer sweet peppers, Japanese eggplant, chocolate cherry and sungold tomatoes, and summer squash – everything we were looking for. We carefully arranged all of our new babies in the cardboard flat he provided and carted them home to lovingly plant them in the flower bed.

Our babies were thrilled with their new home in our front yard garden. The tomatoes sprouted up tall and proud and had to be tied to the railing of the steps for support. The eggplant and peppers flowered. We kept the herbs well-trimmed and they bushed out as desired. Lemon basil is one of the most delicious things you will ever smell. The squash plants had some trouble taking off, but eventually they grew strong base stems and began to vine and flower as well.

Along with our lovely seedlings, we hung baskets of a mix of vivid pink and purple flowers from the porch roof, and those flowers, along with the wonderful herbs, helped to attract all of the bees and butterflies we needed to turn the blooms into fruits. It also attracted hummingbirds, which don’t help the garden but they’re amazing little buggers.

The peppers started out as tiny green bumps pushing out from a closed bud. The eggplant pushed forth tiny, oblong, deep-purple blobs from deep purple pods. They looked like alien egg pods growing. They're amazing. The tomatoes just went nuts with the fruiting.

The squash vines grew out from the bed and down along the driveway in front of the garage door. They reached out forward between the herbs and toward the street. They worked their way backwards and behind the tomatoes to climb the porch rails. And bloomed like CRAZY. And then finally, FINALLY, the squash blooms began to sprout tiny fruits – tiny, green striped, very-not-crook-neck shaped fruits.

I took a picture of the very-not-crook-neck fruit and posted it to my Facebook page. It was agreed among my Facebook friends that it very much resembled a butternut squash. But…..I didn’t plant butternut squash. I didn’t WANT butternut squash. I like eating butternut squash but I hate trying to cook it because I do not have the table saw one needs to get through one. I’m not a fan of cooking winter squash in general. And dammit, I wanted that yellow squash for casserole!

I did some research. Summer squash, like yellow squash and zucchini, do not vine. They bush. Winter squash, like butternut and acorn, vine. More evidence that I was not growing casserole squash. And then, upon further examination – well, upon actually bothering to look – I found the little plastic thing you stab in the dirt by a seedling to identify it – the one that comes with the seedling when you buy it.  It said butternut. The nice farmer man had mislabeled the crate of squash and I hadn’t bothered to look at the tag. Typical.

Our butternut squash thrived. Our fellow urban-farming neighbors often walked up and down the block and complimented us on our lovely garden. We ended up getting about five healthy, heavy, hard-fleshed fruits from our vines. I gave them all away to the fellow-farming neighbors. We bonded. Now we’re friends.

And that’s how my life goes – not as planned because most of the time I’m just not paying attention, but not badly either because the little things I don’t plan for end up pretty cool anyway. And my neighbors promised me pie. So there’s that.