1) the costume department of a certain Spanish masked-hero film was making before-and-after clothing for its combatants;

2) the techies responsible for turning those symbols on your keyboard into words have figured out a new way to confuse the emoticon-impaired.

3) a rapper has come up with a new gangsta clothing line.

You would be wrong on all counts. It’s a very innocent item that might be on the school-supplies list of your middle-schooler come September.

I learned this from my volunteer stints at the homeless shelter, where people donate the darnedest things. These were actually useful and will find their way into someone’s backpack/looseleaf binder soon. Other items we had to pass along were…a wedding gown (OK, maybe one of the residents might be planning a wedding, but what are the chances?), and a few odd cans of dog and cat food. Unfortunately, people who lose their homes don’t get to bring their pets along to the shelter.

Back to those word compounds. Our fridge died and we replaced it with the French-door variety, much better suited to the space we have. Now we are always aware of which side of the door swings closed first because of that thingie that has to fold into place so both doors can come together and make a tight seal.

We’d been calling it a “flange” before we read the manual. Never in a million years would we have come up with the correct term: “flipper mullion.”

These newfangled appliances. Ours also came equipped with “Sabbath mode,” which turned itself on at random in the early days of ownership. Another reading of the manual…we find that there’s a setting in which opening the door (not work…?) will not automatically turn on the interior light (work) so that observant Jews can have access to cold things protected by (hardworking) flipper mullions.

Of course at this time of year, we have our auxiliary refrigerator going–the garage. It has no flipper mullions and no Sabbath mode, but I’m betting we could find a slash jacket or two out there, hanging out with the biscuit joiner.

One of these:

                                                             That makes slots for these:

In order to join two pieces of wood:

Wow. Half price! Includes biscuits and dust bag! I should be more enthusiastic about yet another power tool entering the household, since theoretically it will assist Bill in his quest to make furniture out of the random pieces of lumber he has been amassing since we got married. To add to the huge stock of 200-year-old maple (milled from a tree at Stony Brook Lodge that had to be taken down) quietly warping in the garage, Bill salvaged 80-year-old pine flooring from Gray Gables this past weekend:

I can’t wait until all this wood turns into bookshelves and occasional tables and storage solutions instead of storage headaches. (But I can’t complain about it because then I have to justify my huge fabric and yarn stashes.) Maybe the biscuit joiner will ultimately help Bill produce a home for a biscuit cutter or a biscuit cookbook –or even a pie safe for cooling just-baked biscuits. I’m not holding my breath.

It is truly great. Absorbing, funny, heartbreaking, and full of good food. I loved her description of the absolutely obsessive way Jacques Pépin teaches culinary students how to make an omelet. Shortly after I had finished it, there was a New York Times article describing Pépin’s process, which Bill read and is using regularly. Here’s a link to the video:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/10/18/dining/100000001116746/jacques-p-pin-how-to-make-an-omelet.html?scp=1&sq=jacques%20pepein%20omelette&st=cse

Bill’s method involves less stirring with the fork and more violent shaking of the pan, including whacking it on the stovetop. A friend for whom he produced one of these masterpieces asked, “What the heck is he doing over there?” when she heard all the noise. So now in our household instead of the phrase “To make an omelet you’ve got to break some eggs,” we say, “To make an omelet you’ve got to break the stove.”

It looks a little bit Halloween-y compared to last year’s:

But the Silent Auction committee chose this autumn palette over the other one I offered:

I almost donated both, but friends told me the one above would look great as a hat, so that’s what it became. I didn’t bother to sew in the lining or attach the straps. Here’s Margo modeling it:

And hard as it may be to believe, it was cold enough for her to wear it this past weekend in a snow storm!

Next year I’m back to the greens/blues/purple.

Before; everything stowed in boathouse

beaches empty

houses shuttered

During; Bill trying to get in the door after rescuing perishables from two other houses in compound

surf crashing on bulkhead of neighbor (2 hours before highest tide)

the road as a river, complete with electric lines dangling into puddles

docks underwater

and lake in backyard of neighborAfter; flotsam on beachseptic tanks unearthed

and perhaps the most depressing part–we parked our cars in a safe place close to the main road and away from trees, and they were both broken into

So apart from enjoying 3 days without power, we also had to deal with bailing out glove compartments and getting windows replaced before the next storm.

Are apricots really that unusual? Or that threatening?

Last year I suffered from a couple of silly mistakes, so this year I did a lot more checking before handing them in. And STILL I left a blank, on puzzle 7. Oy. Otherwise I would have had 5 perfect puzzles, one error on number 6, and one total clusterf**k.

But as everyone agrees, the best part of the tournament is the fascinating people, the commiserating, the joking, the thought-provoking conversation. For part of Saturday I happened to sit between two left-handers. We speculated that the percentage of lefties in the room was probably greater than in the population at large, and I agreed (Margo is a lefty and I feel attuned to living in a right-handed world) that even with a second copy of each puzzle, so they wouldn’t have to obscure the clues while filling in the grid, they were at a disadvantage. How hard would it be to print up a mirrored subset of each puzzle, grid on the left and clues on the right?

Another contestant (also left-handed) had been sitting at our table but moved over a section. When I observed that he had scored an empty seat between two attractive young ladies, my gallant neighbor said, “In my opinion all women are attractive.” I thought he must be in the diplomatic corps. We had a great discussion of opera and made amazing progress on #5 as a team (with his extra copy) after they had taken away our dismal official mostly-blank versions.

The biggest laugh riot I had was on the way home. My family had tagged along with me to the city to do cultural things while I puzzled, and they decided to try their hands at Puzzle #1 (which took me 6 minutes). Bill, Evan, and Margo labored for over 2 hours, with generous hints from me, while I drove. A typical exchange was:

Evan: One down: Like many a fast-food order.
Bill: Crappy.
(later, with the first three letters in place, they were guessing “toga?”)

Bill: How about 14 across: Like a big brother.
Evan: Crappy.

Can’t end without a photo. Here is my concession to the nerdiness of crossword-themed apparel, whipped together the Thursday and Friday before the tournament, of which I was inordinately proud, and which ony two people actually commented on:

the left-brain side:

the right-brain side:

And now it is a very long wait until March 16, 2012.

Girls who have red hair are very lucky.

Margo (the redhead), of course, had left it as is. No, according to the teacher. It should be:

Girls, who have red hair, are very lucky.

This is because the rule is to “separate the interrupter with commas.” Never mind that the meaning of the sentence has now changed from “redheaded girls are lucky” to “all girls have red hair and are lucky.” I think the teacher didn’t want to confuse the students with a longer sentence, but the length of the sentence is the point if you’re trying to improve its flow by the use of commas. A simple re-write of the example would have fixed the problem:

Irish girls, who are apt to have red hair and creamy complexions, are very lucky.

Maybe once Margo has graduated in June, I’ll suggest this for next year’s test. That would be after we go through this special session offered by the administration:

“The presentation by the Head of the Upper School will focus on 3 related topics:  ERB results, high school acceptances, and exist interviews with parents of graduates…”

I told Margo maybe I should go to see if I’m still alive. This may be a case of Spell Check Run Amok. Which brings me to Margo’s favorite new game of finding pairs of words always used together. Run amok (but “amok” does appear freestanding in crosswords) and wreak havoc (she said I was cheating by bringing up “Cry ‘havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” accusing me with “Is that Shakespeare?”) are her current favorites.

And for my parting shot, here is a sign put up by a different set of grammar-challenged educators at the elementary school all my kids attended in nearly consecutive years from 1990 to 2005:

Have they never heard of adverbs? And this is at a school with “Grammar” in its name!

and

The former, a semi-autobiographical novel by an award-winning Chinese author (his first set in the US) is a long, deliberately paced, exhaustively detailed story of an immigrant family pursuing the American dream. As I listened to CD after CD while driving, I went from thinking, “Do I really need to know this much about the Wus?” to wishing they lived next door and admiring the nuanced way Ha Jin portrayed them, never over-dramatizing. A visit to the Tenement Museum, which is all about earlier immigrant experiences on New York’s Lower East Side,  made me even more angry at the “close the border” idiots screaming about immigration reform. They need to read books like these and visit museums like these.

The latter title appealed to me because I live a homemade life. I’m the only mother of four I know who never once bought a jar of baby food–I just pureed this and that. Every once in a blue moon, a can of chicken stock, a container of bread crumbs, or a bottle of salad dressing sneaks into my larder, but 99% of all those things are homemade here. I make all the jam consumed in the household; I can tomatoes and sauce. I decided I was going over the deep end when I started making my own raisins.

Molly Wizenberg strikes me as a woman who would not bat an eye at kitchen-counter dried-fruit production. At first I was skimming along thinking “OK, another overgrown blog, no real depth here,” and then I hit the chapters about the death of her father. She manages to articulate all the emotionally laden aspects of food preparation and communal meals, and give yummy recipes to boot. (I shamelessly photocopied many of them.)

One of the more powerful parts of the tour we took at the Tenement Museum was an auditory one–a tape of the granddaughter of the Italian immigrants in whose kitchen we were standing, reminiscing about her childhood in that very place, accompanied by music they would listen to on the 1920′s radio in the corner. If only the curators could have piped in the smell of a pot of saucy meatballs bubbling on the stove and cigarettes smoldering in the ashtray…and if only all these books in which food figures prominently (Bangers and Mash for Keith Richards, anything in butter for Julia Child, the Chinese food the Wus learn to cook for their restaurant, and all the baked deliciousness described by Wizenburg) could have a scratch-and-sniff section along with photos or recipes…that would be a feast for all the senses!

and my car book about the Civil War and its aftermath:

Each of these was depressing in a different way–the David Grossman book incredibly well written but almost unbearably tense and sad, especially for someone like me, with sons 22 and 25. The main character is on an odyssey of sorts with an old friend, trying to avoid being home so that the military notifiers can’t knock on her door to tell her her son has been killed. I found myself dreading reading it while simultaneously being drawn to the characters, wondering throughout whether the son lives or dies, and admiring the author’s gifts. When I finished and found out that he had had a son killed before the book was published I was even more impressed and saddened.

The Steven Wright book was not as great a literary accomplishment, but still a good read. My standard for post-Civil War narratives is Cold Mountain, and it didn’t quite live up to that; the characters are a motley collection of dogmatic, venal, arrogant, and downright cruel Southerners and a few none-too-savory Northerners for good measure, and the plot is a little too heavy on violent incidents (only a few actually part of the war) for me. But I greatly enjoyed the description of a westward ride on the Erie Canal, and I did admire some of the less purple prose.

After all that killing and maiming and bereavement, I was “ready for a love story,” as one member of my book club said. We are reading this:

and it is indeed a love story: Julia loves her husband Paul, loves Paris (and then Marseilles, and then France in general), loves cooking, loves writing…loves life! What a woman. Instead of the cringe- and tear-inducing effects of the previous two titles, this one is literally making my mouth water as I read.

And for another break from human misery, the book club just finished this:

Actually, I think I was the only one who read the whole thing–my first outing on an e-reader (Phoebe’s new Nook). Much as I was annoyed by Keith’s sense of entitlement and “We can get away with anything” and heedless destruction of property, etc, the book was a wild ride through the 60′s and 70′s and I loved it. I even played some old Stones tunes while reading, and copied down the recipe for Bangers and Mash.

Now if only I can get the formula right–a book on CD that makes me cry in the car, and one on the page (or screen) that makes me laugh and/or salivate at home. Alternatively, a happy funny driving story, and a solemn thought-provoking pre-bedtime read. If I am taking in two escapist titles at the same time, I feel too dissolute.