Sprout babies, part 2

Since my last posting, I've transplanted my lettuce and radish sprouts to larger paper cups.  I've also killed off two more lettuce sprouts.  At this rate, I'm not sure if I will have any lettuce to harvest.  I need to order railing "saddle planters," such as the two pictured below since I can't find them locally.

picture courtesy of Gardener's Supply Company

I just started my pepper and tomato seedlings today.  Exiting possibilities...

What's in your garden?

Sprout babies

I've got babies! Onion, radish and lettuce babies, that is.  They are pictured below, although it's not a very good picture.  I have six onions.  I started with six radish sprouts, but only three survived.  I started with twelve lettuce sprouts, but only six survived. I'm so glad I followed the advice of a magazine article and planted more than I need on the premise that about half will die off before I even got truly started.  They like to hang out in this sunny window.

sprout babies

a close up of a radish sprout

another radish sprout on the left and a lettuce sprout on the right.

I intended to plant the lettuce in my front flower bed, hidden among the ferns and the hydrangea because they would get sublime morning sun and afternoon shade--just what lettuce like.  Planting them in the front flower bed would have been my one act of subversion against our HOA rules that stipulate that all food gardens are to be grown in the backyard.  

Now, I'm reconsidering that plan, however.  If I plant them out front, I'm afraid the deer would eat the lettuce since they chomp on my hydrangea leaves as it is.  (Our suburban deer are bold.) And recently, we've noticed that something has been digging tunnels in the front flower bed and along the foundation wall of the side of the house.  I fear that animal--maybe a mole?--is already nibbling on the roots of my hydrangea and the tulip bulbs on the side of the house.  Why add lettuce to that animal's diet? 

Instead, I'm gonna get those flower boxes that mount on the rails of the deck and plant the sprouts in there. Next, I will start the seedlings for tomatoes and peppers.  And herbs, especially mint for sweet tea and basil for the caprese salad.  These seedlings should be ready to plant outside by Mother's Day.  

What have you planted in your garden?

Algebra? Geometry? Oh my!

A few months ago, I attended a parent meeting at Elias' elementary school. Six Title One teachers discussed the county's recent transition to the Common Core Curriculum. That night's meeting specifically focused on math.  Essentially, they were reviewing with the parents what math concepts they would be teaching the first graders and how they would be teaching those concepts.

These teachers patiently explained that Elias, my first grader, among other students, would be learning the basics of algebra and geometry.  It's better to start them early, they insisted.  The teachers also mentioned algorithms. They sprinkled their conversation with this word as if I should know what it meant.

I'm a college educated woman with a bachelors of science degree.  I had no freakin' clue what an algorithm was or how Elias was supposed to understand.  But I was too embarrassed to ask for a clarification, fearing I would be the only parent in the room who didn't understand.  The fear and awe that my first grader was going to be smarter than me by the time he got to the fifth grade loomed large in my heart--my bachelors degree be damned.

Here comes the flashback: In the second grade, my math teacher was named Mrs. Rose. She was an African-American woman with buck teeth and there was a gap between her two front teeth. She tottered around the classroom in four inch heels because she was a petite woman (even with the heels on).  She always wore very sensible, professional pant suits in subdued colors--navy, brown, or black.

She was teaching subtraction. She wrote a problem on the chalk board--something like this:

                                                               2001
                                                            - 1996

Mrs. Rose expected us to solve the problem in our head. We were not allowed to count on our fingers or use a scrap piece of paper.

I remember raising my hand to let her know that I didn't understand.  That I couldn't do it.  She explained the concept about borrowing from the neighbor number and carrying the one and so on.

I still didn't understand. Or maybe it wasn't that I didn't understand per se.  Maybe I understood it in theory, but couldn't do it in my head without counting on my fingers or writing it down on paper.  (Quite frankly, I still use my fingers to figure out addition or subtraction problems. Forget the multiplication tables. I've since forgotten those.  I digress.)

Anyway, I didn't understand.  I don't know how many times she explained it.  I don't remember. But what I do remember is this:  eventually, Mrs. Rose asked "What are you? Stupid?"

Yeah, she said that.  Out loud.  In front of the entire class.

I shrank in my seat.  I told her I understood when I didn't.  All these years later, my eyes fill with tears remembering this incident.  My gut  twists with shame.  Embarrassment.
 
Mortified.  Still.  After all these years.

This memory whooshes back to me while sitting in a tiny chair designed for a first grader, listening to six Title One teachers say things like "we want your kid to learn basic concepts of algebra, geometry. Algorithms. The Common Core curriculum will better prepare your student for life beyond school."

Yeah, sure I understand.  What am I? Stupid? 

Those same Title One teachers went on to explain that it is vitally important to not influence your child's attitude toward learning. If you hated math as a kid--don't let your kid know it because they will mimic that behavior.  They will learn to hate math too.

Yeah, sure I understand.  What am I? Stupid? 

Every time Elias struggles with his homework, I have to bite my tongue--literally--to prevent myself from agreeing with him that math is stupid.  Instead, I tell him that he must use his brain to puzzle out the answer.  That it's okay if he doesn't get it right the first time.  Erase it and keep working it out until he gets the correct answer.  Even if it takes 100 times.

That word stupid--it's banned at our house.

It's that time of year again--seed catalogs

Okay, y'all.  Get a cup of hot tea--any flavor will do, a blanket, your seed catalogs and curl up on the cozy couch and start shopping.  Or daydreaming.

Y'all know that I love my seed catalogs.  Johnny's Selected Seeds.  New this year is the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds catalog.  Pages and pages of glossy photos of vegetables and flowers.  All the possibilities.

That's really what the seed catalogs hold: possibility.  The possibility of growing your own nourishment in your back yard. Or in my case my deck.  

Photo Credit: adamr from freedigitalphotos.net

But the truth is I won't be buying many seeds this year since I have so many left over from last year.  My attempts at growing radishes, lettuce, and peppers failed last year.  I started too late with the lettuce. I didn't plant the radishes deep enough or in a large enough pot.  The peppers didn't mature.  I had minor success with the tomatoes.  I think I got about 8 good ones, but I started too late with them too.

All those mistakes don't matter, though.  I'll keep trying.  I've got a better plan for starting seeds courtesy of an article in Heirloom Gardener Magazine.  And this time around I will actually take the advice of my Aunt Jane.  Like it's really important to harden off your seedlings.

Starting in February, I will start the seeds for the lettuce.  Then in March I will start the seeds for the radishes.  April will be the beginnings of the pepper and tomato seedlings.

Ah, the possibilities.

Oh, Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree...

Two Sundays ago, we rushed out to a local high school to purchase a Christmas tree.  (The high school sells them as a fundraiser for their boosters club.)

The boys are excited; they can hardly stand still.  They are solicitous to help Joseph carry it into the house and prop it up in the tree stand.

I start to rummage through the dusty boxes of all things Christmas stuff, looking for the tree lights.

Box #1.  Only two strands of lights.

Hmm...That's odd.  I thought we had four or five strands of lights for the tree.

I love the lights of the holiday season.  Outdoor icicle lights along the roofline.  Lighted snowmen and reindeer.  The neighbor has a lighted Christmas pig, geese, red birds, among other creatures in her front yard and I love it.  I like indoor lights draped over the mantel greens.  Moreover, I like lots and lots of lights on the Christmas tree to dispel the gloom of darkness that blankets everything by five o'clock.

I plug in the two measly strands of lights to double check they are in working order before we begin to circle the tree with them.  Half of each strand is out.  What good is a half strand of Christmas lights?  None.

This won't do.  Surely, I have more lights somewhere.  You can never have too many lights during Christmas.

Box #2. I poke around, hoping that more lights are shoved into the bowels of this sturdy plastic box with it's organized five layers of ornaments.

No such luck.  Sigh.

There will be no Christmas tree decorating this evening.  It's too late to run out to the nearest discount store to make a quick purchase.  Our bellies rumble for dinner.

The boys are disappointed and understandably so.  While I throw spaghetti together for supper, I let the boys choose a few ornaments to put on the tree anyway.  An act of appeasement for the savages.

For a week, the Christmas tree sits in a corner of our parlor--a foreboding dark green mass of gloom.  Sometimes, when walking through the house, I see its hulking mass out of the corner of my eye and mistake it for a giant house invader.

Even though I manage to find time to dash off to a discount store to purchase four boxes of multi-colored lights, we have no time to devote to actually decorating the tree.  School.  Work.  Homework. Dinner.  Baths.  Goodnight cartoon.  Good night reading.  Bed.  That's our evening routine.

I didn't want to decorate the tree by myself after the boys went to bed, although that thought crossed my mind more than once as each day of the week passed by.

I proclaimed the following Friday as the official tree decorating day.  By 4PM, everyone was home and eager to get started.

Que the Christmas music.  Elias and I drape two strands of lights on the bottom half of the tree.  I realized rather quickly that I should have bought six boxes of lights instead of just the four.  Four wasn't going to be enough.

Oh well.  We must forge ahead.  Four boxes of lights, (each strand twenty feet long) will have to suffice.

Joseph and I put the last two strands of lights on the top half of the tree.  The tree looks sparse--like we don't have enough and are stretching them out.  Making do.  I don't say anything.  The boys have already started putting ornaments on.

Where's the Star of Bethlehem?

It's not in box #1, nor in box #2.

Joseph produces a third box.  An unlabeled box that I hadn't noticed before.  Viola.  The Star of Bethlehem and four strands of lights packed neatly in box #3.  When I plug them in for a test, they light up perfectly.

Sigh.  Why didn't Joseph produce this box last Sunday since he was the only one who knew anything about it?  Sigh again.

I want to remove the few ornaments the boys have put on the tree and the four strands of lights already on the tree and start over.  Will have eight strands of lights on a six foot tree.  It will be glorious!

No.  Joseph insists that the four strands of lights already on the tree are fine.  Not too much.  Not too little.

I give in since this tree has been standing naked for a week in our parlor.

Elias is having fun, carefully considering where to put each ornament.  (He's so like his mother.  Yay!)

Ethan, on the other hand, has lost interest in this thing called Christmas tree decorating.  He's listing reasons why he should be allowed to handle the saw that Joseph used to cut the tip off the tree to make room for the Star of Bethlehem.

Joseph, Elias, and I carry on decorating the tree while Austen watches us with indifference.   Eventually, Ethan contents himself with one of his toy tools.  

Our humble Christmas tree. 

I carefully consider where to put each ornament, taking care to spread out the different color orbs so as not to have all the reds ones grouped together and all the blue ones grouped together, etc. I quietly circle behind and rearrange what other family members clump together all willy nilly.  Then it hits me.  I wonder if we should start a tradition of giving the boys their own ornaments to collect.

I still have ornaments from my childhood.  The one from Alaska my cousin Melanie gave me.  One my Aunt Jane gave me engraved with my name, among others.  My parents were careful to preserve these and pass them on to me.  Joseph, however, doesn't have any keepsake ornaments from his childhood.

So what do we do for our kids?  Keepsake ornaments or no?

A Book Review: An Outlaw's Christmas

I adore Linda Lael Miller (LLM).  She could write a how-to article about "How to Sew on Buttons" and I would buy it just because her name would be the byline.

I've read LLM for years, first stumbling upon her McKettrick series while browsing the stacks at the public library.  I've been hooked ever since; she is that good.  No. Better yet. Great.

As much as I enjoy reading LLM's novels, however, I haven't read every single title that she has published, which is more than a 100 books.  I don't do pirates.  Or paranormal.  Or time-travel. She has strayed into those sub-genres, although she is most  regarded for her romances set in the American West, both historical and contemporary.  In fact, LLM is often referred to as the "First Lady of the West."  Her McKetterick series, spanning both historical and contemporary times, is part of that legacy.

Over the years, I've enjoyed watching LLM's style evolve.  Some of the first books of the McKetterick series, for example, were a bit convoluted.  The antagonists were often two dimensional, erring on the side of a cartoonish evil villain stereotype.  Where LLM excelled, however, was the characterization between the hero and heroine--the essence of any strong, good romance novel in my opinion.

That tension between the initial attraction and overcoming lack of trust to forge a solid relationship--that's what fascinated me about LLM. With her novels,  I read late into the night, never mind if I have to get up early to put Elias on the bus or go to work.  Doesn't matter.  Again, she's that good with the characterization and the pacing that her books are unput downable.  

As I've mentioned earlier, LLM's style has definitely evolved over the years.  Now her plots are straightforward in such a way that she focuses more on characterization.  By doing that, the focus shifts from the action of the plot line to the inner turmoil between the hero and the heroine.  You, dear gentle reader, see the emotions for each main character--emotions that are tangled and conflicted--slowly loosen and unravel. The story is the very untangling of that knot as the hero and heroine learn to trust one another and build a solid relationship.  As a writer, I appreciate this.

LLM's latest release, An Outlaw's Christmas, is a fine example of this.  Set in 1915 Texas, the hero, Sawyer McKetterick is ambushed and suffers a gunshot wound to the shoulder.  He makes his way, nearly unconscious, to the schoolhouse door where he collapses.  The heroine, Piper St. James, lives alone at the schoolhouse.  Of course, she can't leave Sawyer to bleed to death on her doorstep, but 1915 propriety standards also dictate that no unmarried woman will share a house with a man who isn't her father, brother, or uncle.  

Piper nurses Sawyer back to health and her reputation is ruined in the process. Ultimately, Sawyer and Piper marry to save her reputation.  Here's where the excellent writing comes into play.  A good portion of the book centers on why Piper agreed to marry Sawyer in the first place. Why she bowed to society's pressure when she didn't get involved with him sexually since he was unconscious some of the time anyway, nearly bleeding to death from a gunshot wound and all.  Piper notes the hilarity of the very notion but feels trapped just the same.  LLM gives equal measure to Sawyer's way of thinking lest you think his thoughts don't count.

If I want to be snarky, I could complain that the length of An Outlaw's Christmas doesn't really qualify it as a novel.  It's really a novella; it wasn't 200 pages long.  And even though I purchased this as an ebook on my NOOK Color I paid the same price as a paperback mass market.  I did it because it was LLM!

And yeah, I had to suspend my disbelief that 1915 Texas was still an unruly place that a man carried a gun on his hip, lawman or no, and shoot outs occurred on the main street of town.  Really?  It's 1915, not 1881 when the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurred in Arizona. And I'm a bit disappointed that Piper never explains how she came to be named in the first place even though  Sawyer asks, persists for an answer even.

I'm even willing to concede that the book has a neat and tidy ending that leaves me wanting more.  Beyond Piper and Sawyer sorting out how to get along as a married couple despite not loving one another at first, a series of misfortunes occur that are ultimately righted in the end.  (After all this is a romance novel and a happy ending is required.) But still, the ending is a little too tidy, if you know what I mean.

Having said all of that, An Outlaw's Christmas, is a quick, fun read.  For two nights, I was transported to the fictional town of Blue River, Texas where Piper St. James learns to love Sawyer McKetterick, a mysterious man of dubious reputation and after much ado about nothing, all's well that ends well, to borrow shamelessly from Shakespeare.

But really.  Isn't that why we adore a good romance novel to begin with.  To escape the realities of our own lives, even if for a few hours.  Forget about the dirty dishes and the unvaccumed floors. The kids and hubby are asleep.  Turn off that stupid TV. Relax with a good book.  An Outlaw's Christmas by Linda Lael Miller will do just fine.  

My Second Lesson

Today, I rode on Andy, a chestnut colored pony.  He's been with Joan for twenty years; she acquired him when he was four.

Joan had me trotting and posting.  That's when you lift your butt out of the saddle with the rhythm of the horse's jog.  I bounced more than I posted.

An hour later, my left knee screamed in pain and my foot and ankle tingled from going to sleep.

I didn't feel elated after this lesson as I did after my first one. Andy had a stubborn streak.  There were times he would just stop.  Just stop.  He was so well trained by Joan that he would follow her voice commands.  Moreover, he was so trained on what to do that he did it out of habit.  So by the end of the lesson, it was apparent that he just ignored me.

Combine that with my tendency to give him mixed signals by holding the reins too tightly or too loosely while he trotted and I posted--I mean bounced--in the saddle while trying not to fall out of the saddle.  Well, no wonder Andy ignored me and paid more attention to Joan.

At one point, Andy moved from a trot to a canter.  Somehow, I managed to stay in the saddle while Diane, the other instructor, chased after me to catch Andy by his bridle.  I pulled back on the reins.  Joan yelled "Andy stop."

Holy shit!

It was all over within seconds.  No harm done.  The situation just illustrates that I have much more to learn about riding a horse.