Marriage is more of a “I love having coffee together” than “let’s braid each others hair”

The other day I saw a post on a (younger) friend’s facebook wall that said, “Can’t wait to move into a simple apartment with the love of my life & cook dinner with them & have random midnight trips & be spontaneous.”

And the only thing I could think is, “So, you want to have a sleepover.”

My husband and I met in the same grade in high school, and we got married 3 years after we graduated. He tells people that he was ready sooner than that, but I “made him wait.” Which is kind of true…we both come from dysfunctional, broken homes and we met in high school.  That is just fraught with statistics saying the relationship wasn’t going to last; so, I wanted to get married after I turned 20. I didn’t want to get married as a teenager. That was my condition, and, so, 6 days after my 20th birthday he proposed to me and we were married a couple months later.

We have been together for 21 years, as of this May, and we have been married for 16 years, as of this July.

And I don’t really have the heart to tell girls, who are  in their early 20s and have Pinterest pages dedicated to their future husbands, how it isn’t going to be.

Marriage is great. My husband and I have been able to conquer things together that would have been impossible on our own.  When I was 20, it was my husband who happened to see a poster in a doctor’s office explaining different types of seizures, and he went to every EEG and MRI with me when I was  finally diagnosed with epilepsy.  Before then, I just thought I was crazy; you see, I didn’t have grand mal seizures. I didn’t haven have complex seizures that result in a physical seizure. I had partial simple seizures, so my aura is panic and my symptom is hallucinating; and I had been having them ever since I was 11, after a car accident; I just didn’t know what they were.  As a junior high and high school kid, I had to accept that I was crazy, and I couldn’t tell anyone, or I would be “sent away.”

I had warned him  that something was wrong with me before we got married, and I told him he needed to be prepared for it.  However, I wasn’t prepared for the unconditional support he gave me in finding a diagnosis, and ways to control the epilepsy. It has been with his support and his holding my hand the whole way through that has gotten me through the worst times, and by now I haven’t had a seizure in about 5 years.

In our marriage we have never gone to bed at the same time. He stays up to study and work late in the garage, and I tend to wake up much earlier than he does.  In our marriage we have put each other through college and stayed up together to watch “Blacklist” after we put the kids down for bed.  We haven’t had spontaneous midnight trips to…I”m not really sure what’s open past 9, so it would be a spontaneous midnight trip to realize everything is closed at midnight?  He doesn’t braid my hair while I am watching  a movie, and I don’t fetch him beers while he watches F1 racing.  We don’t have pillow fights in our pajamas, and we don’t paint our fingernails while talking about friends.

We do go exploring with our kids a lot, and we do spend hours on the front porch drinking whiskey and talking about theology.  We do ask the other person what they think about what we are wearing…and what we aren’t wearing. I love cooking dinner for the family, and he loves taking the kids hiking in the forest.  We enjoy laughing together and debating together, and living together.

Marriage isn’t a sleepover, I’m sorry to break it to you.

But sleepovers end when the sun comes up; marriage lasts past morning coffee, and that is what makes it great.

I posted a question on Facebook: how do you fry your zucchini?

Lemme ‘splain.

It is still zucchini season, and so I am still finding ways to fry, and cook, zucchini.  And let me tell ya: fried zucchini is one of my favorite foods on the face of the earth.  Good fried zucchini.  Gluten free fried zucchini…that actually tastes good.

The way I have always done it, and the way many recipes I have read, is to slice the zucchini, dip in an egg bath, coat in gluten free flour/gluten free corn masa and then place into boiling oil until cooked.

Egg Bath. Then Flour. Then Oil.

But then, I started noticing…some recipes had the Flour, THEN the Egg Bath, then Oil. This concept is blowin’ mah mind. Could I have been frying zucchini wrong my whole life??

I have to know….which way is it??

There is only one way to find out!

And…I am just saying, that I am only making plates and plates of fried zucchini for you.

I wouldn’t voluntarily make plates heaped with gluten free fried zucchini  and a little bowl of Ranch just for myself…that would just be silly.  Who does that? (me)

So, I have to know: what came first? The flour, or the egg bath?

First, the flour, egg bath, oil.

The flour didn’t stick to the zucchini very well, and some of the batter actually peeled off when I flipped them. They did come out pretty crispy and golden, but the batter didn’t stick to the skins at all.

I also noticed that they were very watery afterward. I noticed more water under the zucchini on these, and when I ate these they were very juicy.

Now, the Egg Bath, Flour, Oil.

These are on the right, and you can see the difference between the two pretty clearly.

These turned out significantly better, I think.  The batter was evenly coated around the entire zucchini, and it was a thicker batter.

There was also zero juice on the plate, and very little/no juice running down my hands when I ate them. I liked these significantly better.

Now, round 2! …just to be sure.

The Flour, Egg Bath, Oil combination did better this time but still a bit lacking on the  sides.  The  batter doesn’t seem to stick to the zucchini very well with this method.

The Egg Bath, Flour, Oil combination did just as well the second time.  Still evenly coated over the whole zucchini, and a consistent golden brown.In the end, I would choose the Egg Bath, Flour, Oil method.

But…they still all tasted amazing.

For science!
Also enjoying the fruits of science 😉

~ Thought For Wednesday  ~

I am half tempted to do a week’s meal planning menu, solely based on what I can put sprinkles on.

But maybe not on me.

There was some breaking news from Iowa today:

“Donald Trump is willing to fork over a billion bucks if that’s what it takes to win the White House…

 Trump answered: “I would do that, yeah, if I had to.”

He added: “I make $400 million a year so what difference does it make?”

Ugh. The chutzpah on this guy, I swear.

I can’t get any of this out of my head. It’s like brain-tar…it just sticks onto your brain and rots it into a toxic goo just thinking about it.

Money is clearly not an object to Donald Trump; but that isn’t big news. He has been loaded ever since, forever. And he isn’t royalty, like Prince Albert II from Monaco, who is estimated to be worth 1 billion, himself. Even the Queen of England has a personal net worth of $500 million (not counting her government stipend of $12million per year, nor the property she owns, which comes out to something like 20 billion; and probably a few other things, like countries/planets).

But just the notion that Trump would pay 1 billion dollars, like it was a drop in the bucket, to buy…I mean win…the presidency is just disturbing.

At a time when the middle class is being threatened, food prices are skyrocketing, unemployment is a serious problem for people, education budgets are out of whack, Social Security is being threatened and the national debt, alone, is somewhere around 19trillion dollars….

There are so many things families forgo in order to make a home for their kids, and Trump is basically taking a $1billion vacation by running for President.  A trip to the Bahamas? Nah. Too much sun.  A Mediterranean cruise? Nah, there is no yacht big enough for his ego. But a helicopter trip around the USA, running for President? Oh, sure. Why not? YOLO, amiright?

“I’m fairly certain that YOLO is just Carpe Diem for stupid people.”
― Jack Black 

But this entire brain-tar thought train has me thinking.

What else could a billion dollars buy you?

1. Cars– For 1 billion dollars, you could buy 56 of the most expensive Ferrari. “The top car by sales price was a 1964 Ferrari 250 LM that went for $17.6 million.”  image link
2. Property- The most expensive castle in the world is not located in Transylvania, Austria or even Itally.  It is actually Ashford Castle in Ireland, and is valued at $68million.  So, for 1 billion dollars, you could buy 14 of these, no sweat!site link
3. Teachers- According to Forbes, the “average” salary of a teacher is $56,740. So, for 1 billion dollars you could pay for the salaries of 17,724 teachers. Maybe in North Carolina, perhaps? As we can clearly see here, there is nothing on the budgets for teachers! Next question?
4. Food- Let’s get more real, though. Food prices are skyrocketing, and all of us are feeling it at the store.  So how much does the average family spend on food every week?  According to Gallup, it ranges between $146-$289. So, let’s just say it is on the high end at $289, which would be $1144 a month.  How many homes could 1 billion dollar feed? 874,125 homes. Zillow
5. The Presidency of the United States of America- According to Politico, “Barack Obama, Mitt Romney both topped $1 billion in 2012. That’s the final fundraising tally in the most expensive presidential election ever, according to reports filed Thursday with the Federal Election Commission by the rival campaigns and party committees.”

Straight outta corporate.

So, there you have it, folks.

1 billion could, actually buy you the White House!

pencils. my favorite smell.

Mmmmmm…..back to school season.

There are a few things I sincerely love more than chocolate. Shoe sales, dress sales, free gluten free pizzas (I’m a cheap date, what can I say), and back to school shopping.

There is a primal thrill of grabbing a fresh pack of yellow pencils and throwing them in the shopping cart, right next to the stack of new spiral notebooks just waiting to be filled with doodles, hearts and tropical landscapes dripping with mermaids.

…and schoolwork. Around the doodles.

Fresh binders, new packs of binder paper, pink erasers…I love them all!

And I am buying…them all!

Because we homeschool, and we are not going through a charter school or receiving public funding, we are buying everything for school.  The paper, the projects, the pencils, the erasers, the notebooks…as well as the desks, the chairs, the teachers’ log, the math curriculum, the language arts curriculum, the science curriculum, the history curriculum…

You get the idea.

Every time this back to school season comes around, I will admit something very, very selfish:

I am awfully jealous of teachers.

This is why: “DIY Teacher Appreciation Gifts!” “Back to School Gift Ideas For the Teacher!”

image link

I have been homeschooling my kids for 8 years now.  We have kept up with the 3 S’s: standards, socialization and schedules.  I was a teacher before my husband and I started having kids, and I have my degree and have passed the state certificates/tests necessary to be a public school teacher, and I also enjoyed some private school substitute teaching, as well.  I loved being in the classroom with the kids and teaching them about the Constitution, or doing math games on the blackboard. I remember this one time when I was substituting for a few days in a Kindergarten class, there was a little girl who was always goofing around during math, and I could tell she was just stalling on her work because she didn’t understand it. So I took her to the front desk during naptime and we quietly worked out how to add apples from apple trees together on the whiteboard. All of a sudden, there was a clarity in her eyes as she finally realized what addition was. Suddenly, she was finishing her entire math worksheet…and I helped her get there! That happened well over a decade ago, but that moment when I helped her understand the concept of addition is a magical moment I will never forget.

When we decided to homeschool, I was excited…and terrified. It seemed like there was a safety net in a school classroom that mystically exuded knowledge; but at home? Would school just be on the chore chart, or could we actually make this work? Could I still hold the authority of a teacher when I was still wearing pajama bottoms at 4 in the afternoon? Would the kids learn how to read under my guidance?

Not only have they, but I now have 8 years worth of magical breakthrough moments under my teaching belt; which is awesome.

There are the very little details which the schoolroom has, which doesn’t come with homeschooling. My kids don’t come home with hand turkeys at Thanksgiving, they don’t bring home paper plate snowmen in January, and they don’t bring handmade cards for Mother’s Day.  There have been times when I had no idea it was Columbus Day, or that some schools take 3 weeks off during winter break.  I take homeschooling very seriously, and sometimes I have to remind myself that all the knowledge and information my kids have learned is not going to fall out of their heads if we take a day off…or a week off!  They need a break, and I need a break. Otherwise, we are all going to burnout; and that won’t help anyone develop the love of learning, which is the entire point of this adventure.

Yet, around this time of year, seeing facebook and sundry websites littered with the teacher appreciation gifts, I do get a little forlorn about missing that aspect of school.

So, what should I do.

Am I going to mope around, and drive very slowly past elementary schools?

No. That’s creepy. Come on.

I am going to do what I always do…

go to Oriental Trading and buying myself some bootstraps, baby!

We’re decking out our schoolroom with classroom management posters,

Scientific Method posters,Dry erase schedule keeper magnets,First day of school picture frames,

And, of course, turkey crafts for later.

It’s going to be a great year, I just know it  🙂

I remember when I was in the 4th grade I was in Mrs. Dawson’s class. She was a pleasant teacher with a warm smile who was very interested in educating her students.  She had a blonde helmet of hair that was as immovable as her tenacity for teaching.

She also gave me my first C in Math. But, that’s beside the point.

Mrs. Dawson had a spot in the mornings when a few other classes crammed into our room before we started Language Arts, and we all watched an hour of Reading Rainbow.

I loved Reading Rainbow. LeVar Burton was pleasant and charming, without being puerile or condescending. He showed us how the flint of a book could spark the imagination, and take you all across the world on the flame of the story.  Reading had always been my favorite pastime, and I remember at the time going through the length of Nancy Drew books we checked out of the library.  So, listening to LeVar Burton tell us how exciting books were was right up my alley, and I was able to see other kids who loved reading almost as much as I did! They had to be the luckiest kids on earth, just reading books and doing book reviews all day.

This was definitely my first aspirational dream: to read for a living.

So, how excited was I to find out that Reading Rainbow was now available on Netflix??

SO. EXCITED.

Laundry Day… kind of half-happened.

What I would like to teach my kids is how reading is crucial to life. Through reading, we learn about what has happened in the world, what some people think will happen in the future, what is happening now, and more importantly how people feel about it all.  We are able to hear the voices from across the world tell us what the wind smells like in Nepal, or how the bread tastes in St. Petersburg, or what the caribou sound like in Manitoba. I would like my kids to see books as the perspectives that continue to carve out the story of mankind, and the instrument that represents the soul of the world.

I still have a set of books I got from a month-by-month book club when I was a kid.  These were only about 20 pages long, and heavily illustrated; but they were the deeply abridged stories of Classics. 

However, when I read these books, I found I was drug into the stories so deeply that I forgot that time existed.  The noises around me were silenced. All the problems I had in school disappeared, because no longer was I an average kid in LosAngeles…now, I was was on the submarine in Jules Verne’s books, or sailing down the Mississippi with Huck, or being scared of ghosts in James’ gothic stories.

The doors of possibility kept opening with each turned page, and my ideas of what the world was developed into what the world could be. 

Reading opened doors of imagination for me in ways other media can barely fathom. Reading has been a gift of creativity that has sparked the incurable flame of curiosity in me.  There is nothing more I would love than to put the gift of flint into my children’s hands so they can spark their own curiosities.

We already have a weekly library routine, and the kids have read through a few short volumes of books available on their shelves.  Already, I have seen their tastes in literature change and grow as they read more and explore further down their reading rabbit hole.  So, how much fun would it be to incorporate the spark of Reading Rainbow into the reading routine, where they get to see other kids, who are reading different books, and  who get excited about reading along with them??

So much fun.

The only thing that makes reading better is sharing your ideas and experiences with friends!

According to a book you can find in the Reference section of the library, the definition of friend is:

I am so excited LeVar has continued to share his experiences with reading well past our childhoods, and into the lives of our own children.  LeVar is absolutely a friend for life  🙂

Last night, I had a beautiful dream.

I was in a cafe in SanFrancisco that was furnished in all Victorian decor. The wallpaper was faded roses with wide lace pillars that went all the way up to the vaulted ceiling.  The ceilings were creamy Victorian ornate designs garnished with draping crystal chandeliers, and I remember just laying on the couch and staring at how beautiful it was. There were varnished oak endtables everywhere with reading lamps gently glowing next to the low bookcases filled with old books, and leaning against the overstuffed and comfortably worn couches, on which I lounged in ecstasy.

The waiter kept bringing me glass mugs filled with frothy lattes, and plates upon plates of wonderful layered cakes. Just endless cakes and lattes, all night.

It was like this, except neverending.

There was a bluegrass band in the corner who were practicing quietly, and I was in heaven.

WHEN SUDDENLY….

I realized it was 6:31 in the morning, and I still had the kids with me, and Ben had gone to work hours ago….like…as in yesterday… to fix an emergency, and I had been lounging in this beautiful SanFrancisco cafe all night and the kids were still awake, and I had to get home before Ben got home, and it is going to take an hour to get home, and there is already morning traffic, and we can’t find the car in the garage, and we keep trying to go down more stairs in the garage trying to find the car, and the kids are miserable because I have had them out all night…and what was I thinking, staying out until 6:31am. Worst.Mother.Ever. 

That’s what Mommy Brain looks like.

You can’t even keep a dream with endless cakes and lattes without remorse kicking in.

I might retaliate with cake and lattes tonight, just to show it who’s boss.

Revenge is served… with steamed milk.

When 5 hours in a NRA gun class you reach, look this good you will not. Or maybe you will. Who knows. Have you taken a 5 hour NRA gun class?

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am a big supporter of knowledge.

Knowledge of ideas, philosophies, literature, politics.  I have tried sewing (and rocked it), knitting (not so much), painting, writing, singing, trumpets, running, roller skating..I don’t know, what else ya got?

So, when I found out there was a NRA women’s handgun course happening, I was all over that.

Because I wasn’t raised with guns. I don’t know the first thing about guns. I am not entirely afraid of guns, but I see them as a very powerful tool that can be used for good, or for bad.

But the worst part about gun ownership is ignorance of guns.

What I do want is to be able to see a gun, identify a gun, know how to load and unload a gun, and make the gun safe.

What I don’t want is to be afraid of a gun, be panicky around a gun, not know how to handle a gun and thus make the gun unsafe.

Knowledge is the key to gun safety. And there is nothing better than being in a room full of women for 5 hours learning about guns together.

I was there to learn more about guns and feel more confident with them, because I am a total noob with guns.  Last night my husband was in the garage with me going through gun basics, so I entered the class with some foreknowledge, at least.  At first glance, I didn’t really want to touch it.  It was like touching a cold, dead fish. Kind of gross, kind of creepy, and I don’t even know where to start with it. Do you pick it up by the tail? By the belly? Do you hold it pointing down? Is it okay to make gross faces when you’re doing it?

So, that was why I was there.

One woman was there because she has recently been widowed and is living alone with her young kids, and she wants to know how to safely protect her home.

Another woman is graduating with a degree in international relations, and will be going to 3rd world countries and wants to know how to defend herself.

Other women were there to brush up on their skills, or to enjoy the sport with their friends.

One young lady in particular had reconnected with her father after her parents divorced, and they found that they both loved shooting; so she was taking the course so she could spend more time with her dad in the shooting range.

It was interesting to see what different things brought these ladies to class. We weren’t looking to become expert shooters, or action movie stars, or badasses…we just wanted to know more about guns, so we were more educated than we previously had been.

At the beginning of class, the instructor asked us who had firearms. Most of us did. Which was interesting…to suddenly be sitting in a room where 90% of the people in the room had a firearm.  Then he asked who had active firearms, and 3 people did. So they used that opportunity to show how to safely unload a firearm and make it safe.

Normally, if I suddenly discovered I was next to a person with a loaded firearm, I would feel extremely nervous.  What were they doing with a loaded firearm? What was their intention? Should I be nervous…should I leave?  The instructor was a retired lieutenant, and he said a large percentage of our area actually had concealed carry permits, which was even more surprising.  This is an extremely liberal area; and most of them have concealed carry permits?  I suddenly thought of all of the people I live around and see every day…very interesting.

What was most interesting in that moment was not how scared I was with the prospect of suddenly being in a room with a total of 7 loaded firearms…but how happy I felt that I was in a safe place with qualified instructors who were going to teach me what they know.  This was not a wild place. This wasn’t boot camp.  This was just a room with a gigantic moosehead on the wall, with a retired guy sitting on a stool answering every single question we had, and stepping us through the basics.  This was the safest place I could be, and I was suddenly very excited to learn about guns.  That reaction was very surprising, and it made the rest of the class much easier to enjoy.

On my way to the class, everything packed up to go!

This is the pistol range. We were shooting at paper plates on cardboard. Easy enough.

I will happily report back that I did astonishingly well for a noob!  The picture is a little blurry because the range was in the shade by then, but see the hole in the middle?  That’s mine. Nice, consistent grouping in the middle.

And this is my poor trigger finger.

I did okay with the 1911s, the Glock 19 and even the 9mm Beretta…but the revolvers’ triggers were so hard to pull, it left little welts on my poor finger.

What I was left with?

Well, a pretty sore finger…but a very confident feeling at the end of the class, and looking forward to some more classes they have coming up!

I really thought that writing a book would result in me catching on fire, or for the heavens to open up and swallow the Canary Islands, or for volcanoes to erupt en masse, or something.

Apparently, the world just kept on spinning. Which is nice.

I, on the other hand, spent most of the early morning in bed staring out the window when I realized that the color schemes were all wrong in the first scene and I need to change that. Plus, I needed to add some more dialogue to the second scene. But the third scene was pretty good, and I’m happy with it. I also like the motifs I am using.

And I like the names I’ve chosen. I’m even using the name “John,” which is a very boring name for a character. But, he is a very boring character.  I guess I could name him Bob, though.

I would love to get to 5000 words today…so! Back to it!

I’m not nervous at all.

It totally isn’t starting as of today.

I am totally not in denial about what I got myself into.

So, here we go.