What's for dinner?

A friend recently bemoaned the fact that when she eats crappy she feels crappy, too. Likewise. Garbage in ... . Anyway. It's the time of year when food utterly bores me unless it contains alcohol and grapes. So if you have any bright ideas for dinner, I'm all ears.

This is on the menu at our house the rest of this week:

-- Pork tenderloin, baked sweet potatoes, fresh spinach-red onion-craisins in balsamic vinaigrette

-- Whole wheat ziti with turkey meatballs in souped-up store-bought marinara sauce and some kind of salad

-- Nicole's great pot roast if I can ever thaw the danged thing in advance. She browns the roast, then braises at 300 degrees for about four hours in a sauce made of 8 oz. Coke Classic (with the sugar!), a can of cream of celery soup and a 1/2 envelope of dry onion soup mix (like Lipton). Weird but absolutely fabuloso. Throw into the roasting/braising pan your peeled tates and carrots and voila! Perfect pot roast!

-- A Lenten meat-free dinner on Friday: grilled cheese, tomato, avocado and red onion sandwiches and Campbell's fancy soup in a box. I like the tomato-basil kind myself, but they also make a great butternut squash soup, too. Comfort-o-rama.

I love to cook, but at this time of year it's nice to keep the grocery list at a minimum. Money's tight and it's too danged cold to be lugging bags and bags of groceries across the windy parking lot at Rainbow. Besides, if I slip, I'll break a hip or something and miss the gardening season.

Speaking of gardening, it's seed catalog time! Spring can't be far behind!

A chilly school day and other ruminations of parenthood

This morning is one of those that make me long for the days of former Gov. Arne Carlson, who famously closed schools when he thought it was too cold for man or beast. On my way to work this morning, the thermometer registered a balmy -13. And the windchill was -30-something.

Then again, I don't have kids in school. Thank God. I am so glad to be finished with those years. I feel like I went to grade school, high school and college at least four times: once myself, and once again for each of my children. When the first kid starts school, the experience kind of takes you back. It's a nostalgic kind of thing: You get a kick out of the wide-ruled notebooks, the No. 2 pencils, the first experience of detention, the challenge of dealing with a bad grade, a cold shoulder or a broken heart. By the time you've done this over and over and over again, it's just plain tiresome. Makes me wonder how those St. Paul Irish-Catholic moms with the nine or 10 kids managed to keep sane by the time the last one got on the bus. An old friend, a middle child among nine, said her mom "went on retreat" a few times. Only when she was in her 40s did she learn her mom actually went into rehab for alcoholism!

Today the whole "kids in school" phase of parenting is even more difficult. I notice that parents of students at the university where I work are involved to a point of being so overprotective that I think their kids will never earn their independence. But the world is much more a place to be protected from than it ever used to be. When I was in college I called my mom (or she called me) about once every couple of weeks. A long-distance phone call was like a bon bon: an expensive, short-lived treat. Today, college kids talk or IM with their parents every day.

Parents of young children, please note: You really won't want to talk to your children every day when they're in college. If you have more than one child, this practice will frazzle your nerves and wear you out. You don't need to know when your kid fails a test, had his car booted for unpaid parking tickets or yelled at a slobby roommate. He'll work it out without you, and he'll work it out better in the long run. Really. Look at it this way: When your co-workers steal your lunch from the employee fridge, who you gonna call? Mom? Seriously.

To be continued ...

If this is some kind of copyright violation, so sue me

One of my friends sent this wonderful cartoon today. It serves to remind me that in matters of life, love and money, you have to make room, above all, for laughter. Trite but true, laughter makes it all bearable. Happy Valentine's Day to everyone who makes me laugh so regularly. I think I'm losing weight because of it. Really, it's working!

OK, boys and girls. We're having a contest

To come up with the best Valentine's Day idea for our significant others. You first!

Psst. Right now I'm procrastinating, hiding and looking busy

My husband thinks I sit in my office and fart around on the Internet all day. Yes, I say, I do this for a living. They pay me good money (well, not so much) to do so. But today I really AM farting around and not working very much because I am tired, sort of depressed and feeling really quite desperate, and I just don't want to write or edit anything important. So I shan't. I shall fart around all I please until it's time to go home. Then I shall watch mindless television, drink a bit or two of wine, snack on something fattening and welcome Miss Barky McSchnauzer for the next two weeks.

Miss Barky is the purse puppy belonging to a pair of my husband's better customers, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell (not their real names), and so he volunteered us (i.e., ME) to care for her during their two-week jaunt to St. John (like that alliteration, you language geeks?). Miss Barky (not her real name, either) comes with her four little boots so her tiny little paws don't get raw with road salt when we walk her each day. Which -- and the Howells probably wouldn't believe this -- we don't do. I can't stand walking dogs. Hey, I tried it when we had one of our own. I just don't like doing it. You can't really get going at any decent pace when you walk a dog. It's not like the treadmill, unless yours is all herky-jerky and downright stops and sniffs sometimes. But we act like we'll dutifully walk Miss B morning, noon and night just so they won't worry that they're dropping off their little dog into the clutches of hell.

I still like Barky anyhow, even though Maisie, the cat who lets us live with her, will probably retreat into the rafters down the basement for the next two weeks. Barky really does bark, and Maisie just hates all that damned noise. Besides, she has to eat her food on top of the dryer, for godssakes, when Barky is around or there won't be any. It's enough to drive a kitteh krazy.

No, I am not drinking anything at the moment. I am in my office where no one is watching me. They should know better than to leave me alone with the Internet.

Merry Christmas!

OK, so I didn't get the cards done this year. I'm a little, uh, late. Hey -- if we were multicultural (or at least if some of us were tanned) and we weren't standing in front of the ginormous Christian symbol, I would wish you a happy MLK Day, a day late! Which I do anyway.

It's a nice picture of our family anyway, isn't it? We had the photographer son-in-law take it when we were in Florida (in the lobby of Disney's Vero Beach Resort) shortly after New Year's Day.

Photo notes: The young lovers in the middle got engaged on Christmas Eve. They're quite attractive, don't you think? And there's Emily's boyfriend in the yellow shirt. Isn't he handsome? They had to stand me on a high step so I wouldn't disappear completely. What can I say? I gave birth to these tall, Germanic children. The Reich would have been proud of me. But one day, one day, a recessive gene and poof! One of my grandchildren or a stray third cousin twice removed will be, like me, short and sunburnable. In the meantime, I have 3-year-old grandboys who look old enough to be in kindergarten, am dwarfed by everyone in my family and get the 30 sunscreen all to myself. It is a tad intimidating to scold with an index finger shaken to, uh, a belt buckle. Oh, well.

'Little boxes on the hillside ...'

There's a certain kind of twilight at this time of year that reminds me of how it felt to come home from school when I was a kid. I don't know why that is, but around 4:30 in the afternoon, when I drive home from work and pass the row of little '50s houses (read: ticky-tacky boxes), it takes me back. In the late '50s and '60s where I grew up, it seemed we didn't pay too much attention to people's houses. In the postwar building boom, they all looked alike. Yeah, some people had great gardens and gorgeous lawns, but everyone's houses looked alike: little "living" rooms, eat-in kitchens, a couple of bedrooms (if you had three, that was large) and a bathroom. Most had cedar-shake siding (making them a bugger to paint). Some had shutters or awnings, but most had little "curb appeal," to use a term foreign to our parents, beyond a "picture window" in the front.

These standard houses made visiting pretty easy; you could always see who was coming up the walk, and you never got lost in a friend's house because it was identical, in most respects, to yours. Because of that, you didn't spend a lot of time envying anyone's house. Neither did your parents. You didn't hear grownups talking about so-and-so's beautiful countertops in this pre-Pottery Barn world. You might have heard a mom or two sing the glories of coved-corners in her linoleum floors, but that's because they were easier to clean, not easier on the eye. Appearances weren't all that important, I guess - no, wait. Appearances were important, but not in the way they are today. It mattered that your home was tidy and squeaky clean because that elevated your moral standing in the community. It mattered that you tipped your hat or nodded when greeting someone on the street because friendliness was valued even more than privacy.

My musings have to do with trying to figure out how I can employ these basic values comfortably in the consumerist, individualistic world in which I find myself now.

I'm not done with this post yet ... to be continued.