To some of you this is going to be like me saying, “You guys, I made toast!! Toaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast!!”—but I made potato pancakes for the first time ever. Making mashed potatoes regularly is a bit of a new thing at our house, and it took several occurrences of the “making mashed potatoes” —> “putting the leftovers in the fridge” —> “throwing out the leftovers because I never wanted to heat up leftover mashed potatoes” cycle before I noticed the Potential Deliciousness Alarm going off in my head.

I looked up the recipe in the red-and-white-checked cookbook (Better Homes & Gardens, though I almost always accidentally call it Betty Crocker), and it said to take the leftover mashed potatoes, mix in a raw egg (it also had a part about sautéing a mild-onion-type thing, but I sprinkled mine with garlic salt instead), and fry up pancake shapes in butter. Okay then, I like the sound of that! So I tried it and it was soooooooo good. I had one for breakfast and then another for lunch and then another at snack time. And now I make extra mashed potatoes on purpose, and I stir a raw egg or two into the leftovers before I put them in the fridge so they’re ready to go. (I mark the container with masking tape, because imagine thinking it was regular mashed potatoes and then SURPRISE RAW EGG.)

The main glitch is that they rarely hold their pancake shape nicely and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Too much milk at the mashed-potato stage, maybe? Or not ENOUGH milk? They’re still delicious as Scrambled Potatoes, but if anyone knows how to make them hold together that would be even better.

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I found the Dunkin’ Donuts Strawberry Shortcake coffee at Target for 50% off, so I thought it would be fun to try. Instead I ended up following Holly‘s advice for cleaning the coffee pot with multiple cycles of vinegar and hot water, and the lid STILL has a whiff of nightmare about it. (I think I’ll soak that on its own in vinegar for awhile.) As Elizabeth said, “Seemed like such a harmless bit of whimsy when I tossed it in the cart…”

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I’ve finished Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy. It’s apocalyptic fiction of the sort that Raises a Lot of Issues, and I found those issues interesting, depressing, and paranoia-inducing. As presumably intended.

Except for the few lead characters, I found it difficult to remember which character was which; I don’t know whose fault this was, but since I have trouble if two characters have names starting with the same letter, I’m guessing it was mine. I also had a lot of trouble remembering the minor characters and even the medium characters—I had no mental pictures of them. The first book was hard for me to get into at first: I don’t like it when a book starts out with NOTHING MAKING SENSE and then gradually explains it, so I was happier once things got going. I found the whole “misspelled/mashed-up brand names to make them seem annoying and modern” annoying in a “kids these days with their misspellings!” way instead—-like the author was over-making her point. It reminded me of Stephen King and his overkill on the cell phone topic, YES WE GET IT YOU DON’T LIKE THEM. I don’t blame either author: it’s hard to quit harping on something when it drives you crazy. But it can still be annoying for the reader. The third book seemed to me to have about 100 pages of material it needed to get through to finish up the trilogy, filled out with a bunch of interesting but mostly unnecessary backstory on a couple of characters from the other books. I was basically pleased and satisfied with the ending. There was one mystery that never got cleared up, and I wished it had.

Overall I liked the whole trilogy, and I put it in the Worth Reading / Will Likely Want to Re-Read category.

Two teenager things.

One. We were going mad–MAD–about William’s little rubber bands for his braces. His orthodontist had strongly emphasized to him and to us that he MUST wear them, he MUST. But every single time we said, “William, do you have your rubber bands in?,” the answer was NO (and/or “I was just GOING TO,” and/or “I just took them out to EAT”—when eating had last occurred hours before), followed by a scramble to find some. And we kept having Firm Talks with him, and going over the importance of blah blah, and how much he’d appreciate his effort NOW when he was an adult, and how the orthodontist SAID, and look she sent us a BUSINESS LETTER about it, and so forth.

And yet the situation persisted. Sometimes I would realize it had been a few days since I’d remembered to ask him, and therefore it was likely he had gone several days without wearing them, and I would feel both panic and despair. This is not MY job! This is HIS job! But he is not accepting it as his job, and the natural consequences (his braces completely fail to work, the orthodontist continues to Speak Firmly to both him and us, we stretch out this situation for years) are not ones I’m willing to accept.  WHAT TO DO.

Here is what I did: I said it was not my job to remember his rubber bands, and that if he was going to MAKE it my job by not doing it himself, he would have to pay me for that work: 25 cents per reminder. I made sure his siblings overheard me, knowing they’d LOVE to get in on a costly tattling opportunity like this. RUBBER BANDS ON EVER SINCE, BABY.

Second thing. I would like to give you an example of the kind of argument Rob likes to have. The pediatrician had recommended melatonin for William’s periodic stretches of getting-to-sleep troubles. I’d warned William that one side effect can be vivid dreams. In the morning, William reported that he had slept well and hadn’t had any vivid dreams, and I said good. Rob then wanted to argue that we didn’t Really Know if William hadn’t had any vivid dreams, since maybe William just didn’t remember them.

Now, that is a fine point to make, very nicely noticed. Perhaps another time we can have the late-night-college-student discussions about whether maybe this could ALL be a dream, or about what if anesthetic was completely ineffective except in that it made us completely forget the pain so we THOUGHT it had completely worked, what THEN. But right NOW, in THIS discussion about melatonin, when we are BUSY DOING OTHER THINGS, let’s NOT get into it, and especially not in that tone of voice. That is, if we CAN’T KNOW, then we CAN’T KNOW, so we have to go with what we CAN know. If we must define “not having vivid dreams” as “not REMEMBERING vivid dreams,” then FINE. We are not going to attach William to wires to make sure that he is not having vivid dreams, before allowing him to report a happy lack of side effect. BEEzus.

Yesterday I went responsibly to my Annual Exam, thinking the whole way there, “At least it’s not the dentist”—which reminded me I have a dentist appointment in a couple of weeks, so I effectively doubled my feelings of dread. Nice going.

It had actually been more like a year and a half since my last annual, because when I called last March, feeling extremely righteous to be calling the VERY DAY the reminder card arrived in the mail rather than after six months a month several weeks several days of phone-related procrastination, they said they had no appointments at all with ANY of the six doctors, and that I should call back in MAY (TWO MONTHS LATER) and they’d “see.” They’d SEE.

I felt so miffed by this (THEY sent ME the reminder card!! THEY are the ones who harp on how important this is!! HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY HAVE ZERO APPOINTMENTS WHEN THEY HAVE SIX DOCTORS???), I didn’t call back until August, when they again told me they had nothing at all. Just as I was about to hang up in a huff (THEY’LL BE SORRY when I get CANCER and I write them a polite business letter to complain about it!!), they allowed as how they might have an appointment with the nurse-practitioner the next month. So anyway I took it, and then stewed about it for a month wondering if I should have gone to my primary instead (even though last time she did something wrong and I had to GO BACK AND HAVE IT DONE A SECOND TIME), and I’m still stewing now. Goodness, I am SO SORRY for DISTURBING them with my APPOINTMENT REQUEST for an APPOINTMENT THAT IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF APPOINTMENT THEY DO THERE and TIMED TO FIT THEIR OWN GUIDELINES OF WHAT IS APPROPRIATE. I can see how it would be EXACTLY as hard to get an appointment for a PAP as it would be to get a LUNCH DATE WITH ANGELINA JOLIE.

Anyway. It turned out I liked the nurse-practitioner about ten times as much as any of the doctors, so that leaves me in the difficult situation of still feeling like stewing, but about something that turned out better this way. My experience with nurse-practitioners has not been universally successful (the one at our pediatrician’s office is so awful I will not even get into it, because I can feel my brain kicking up the Let’s Stew Fruitlessly Over Long-Past Resentments All Day and Perhaps All Night! gears, and I am already very busy stewing over the six months’ worth of “can’t get an appointment” resentment), but sometimes they are MUCH BETTER THAN DOCTORS. This one was so kind and understanding she made me all teary and happy, and also she gave me a prescription to help prevent UTIs (the “one antibiotic pill Each Time” prescription) that my primary doctor has been extremely reluctant to give me (I’m sure it is unconnected to the $700 it costs each time I have a UTI), treating it as if I’m asking for a monthly supply of narcotics.

Also, did you read Caitlin Moran’s book How to Be a Woman? And if so, were you mesmerized and intrigued by her mentions of using potassium citrate to treat cystitis—cystitis being another word for UTI or urinary tract infection? I immediately looked for potassium citrate at the store, wondering if THIS WAS THE ANSWER, but the store didn’t have it so I ordered some online. And the next time I felt the beginnings of a UTI, I took some, and IT WENT AWAY. Except it didn’t: when the potassium citrate dose wore off, it was back. Also, I noticed that UK sites tended to recommend potassium citrate for UTIs, and US sites said specifically NOT to take it if you had a UTI. It was a bit of a mystery.

After some further research and some consultation with the nurse-practitioner, I think I have the answer: potassium citrate treats the symptoms but not the condition. So if you have UTI, and your UTIs tend to clear up on their own rather than turning into massive raging bladder or kidney infections that leave you wishing you had died instead, then at least for me, potassium citrate worked better than Azo for pain relief (additional bonus: no orangey-yellow stains). But unlike with Azo, if you’re taking an antibiotic (or at least a certain antibiotic, the one I was researching), you can’t take potassium citrate—something about the potential for forming stones. I don’t feel like I have the full story yet, but at least I know it’s not some UK secret for over-the-counter UTI treatment I could have been taking all along. The nurse practitioner said it sounded to her like a product called Prelief, which is for people who get pee-related discomfort from the acids in food.

Also, I told the nurse-practitioner the gist of scattered, irritable, and sentimental, and she asked a few questions about cycle and so forth, and then the word “peri-menopausal” came up. So. Let’s just let that hang in the air for a moment.

She recommends vitamin B-6 supplements, 100 mg a day. She says they can help somewhat with mood fluctuations. She mentioned that she had the unfortunately-not-at-all-rare privilege of going through menopause at the same time her daughter was going through adolescence (nice planning, SPECIES), and one day she was like, “That’s it: we are BOTH going on B-6!” She said they still had their moods, but there were fewer “Crud, did I say that out loud?” moments for both of them. She also recommends the early books (“the earlier the better, before they got so…celestial”) of Christiane Northrup, for information and comfort.

William accidentally broke my favorite of my two West Elm owl plates, which is the sort of thing that makes me wonder why we even HAVE children. Furthermore, though it WAS accidental and he DID feel bad about it, at the time he broke it he was unloading the dishwasher huffily.

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Speaking of breaking, I have a category of Things That Break that makes me feel crazy. Here are three examples from the category I have in mind:

• The “check engine” light comes on in the car, and it turns out the engine is perfectly fine and the check engine light itself is the problem, and it will cost $220 to fix it.

• The button that changes the temperature on the oven won’t press.

• The dishwasher’s handle latch stops latching, so the dishwasher can’t be closed.

It’s not like the dishwasher stopped working: the dishwasher is fine, but because the door won’t latch, the dishwasher won’t run. The oven would still heat perfectly well if I could tell it what temperature I wanted. The check engine light should be notifying me of a PROBLEM WITH THE ENGINE.

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The comments on posts aren’t getting forwarded to me from my Gmail account. Nor are Twitter DMs. It is frustrating. At first I chalked it up to a temporary glitch, but it’s been days now. PR requests for free publicity are still getting through just fine.

I just heard a little girl in our neighborhood shrieking in a voice that sounded like it was paused at just the right intervals to be punctuated by sharp, devastating kicks to the neck of a vile archvillain: “I !!! [*imagined kick*] Am a beautiful!!! [*imagined kick*] UNICORN!!!! [*kick kick kick*]” I’m thinking that would be good written on a t-shirt (without the kicks).

I just realized that the word “villian” is probably why it took me so long to learn that the word “village” doesn’t have an I before the A. But since it’s actually spelled villain, not villian, perhaps we need to dig a bit deeper for the larger solution to this puzzle.

[Edited to add: My brother just emailed to say he has this SAME ISSUE.]

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Rob, kindly, looking over my shoulder as I played a Webkinz game he’s much better at than I am: “How about this: I’ll just make a whistling noise every time I see you about to make a wrong move. *steady, extended whistling sound*”

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Me: “WHAT WAS THAT. Paul! I heard a noise, right outside the window!! Now I hear thumps, like someone is dropping rocks!! OMG NOW I HEAR SOMEONE ON THE ROOF!!!”

Paul: “It’s the walnuts dropping off the tree.”

Repeat once for each of the thirteen Septembers we’ve lived here.

[Edited to add: It was only when proof-reading this post that I realized we have a child with tree-nut allergies and a yard full of nut trees. Hm.]

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An update on the school volunteering situation (the comments on that post were SO EXTREMELY HELPFUL) is that I asked a couple of questions and then decided I would try it, and then I had VERY MIXED FEELINGS the minute I sent the email and hoped I hadn’t made a DREADFUL MISTAKE. But then I never heard anything back, even though they’d said they urgently needed help right away.

This is fairly typical. There are also urgent letters every year about desperately needing baked goods for the annual holiday fair, and every year I answer right away saying I can help, and every year I hear nothing back. And last year I got guilted into signing up to chaperon a field trip during my two hours of child-free time per day, and never heard anything (to my great relief). It would be tempting to take it a little personally, if I could think of a way to do so. As things are, I live in an area where people say, “Are you CRAZY?” when someone is expecting a third child, so it’s just as likely they’re looking at the list of volunteers and thinking, “Oh, god, five kids??? Let’s let her off the hook.”

Look what I found at Goodwill today for 99 cents each (89 cents after my discount card):

I don’t Photoshop the crumbs off my counter for just anyone

I said to William, “Are these mugs the same color as my blog?” and he mocked me relentlessly for, like, ten solid minutes. “Oh!,” he said in an affected female voice, with affected little raised hands, “Do these MUGS match my BLOG? Do they COORDINATE with my WEB SITE?” And: “Oh, look over there, it’s my blog! …Oh, no, wait, I was mistaken—it’s a mug!” And: “I could have SWORN that bowl was Wikipedia!”

Well. Anyway, I bought three. I also bought Elizabeth two dresses, one Lands’ End and one L. L. Bean, for $1.79 each.

By the way, one of the two Targets I go to has this quilt marked down 70% off ($21 down from $70):

(photo from Target.com)

The other Target has it on clearance, too, but 50% off. I considered it (at 70%, derpiously), but we don’t 100% need another quilt, and it’s kind of young for any of the boys except Henry now, and Henry didn’t like it.

There was a weird situation in the candy section. A variety of bags of candy were on a typical sale—$2.66 down from $3.19 or whatever—about 50 cents off per bag. But the “family size” bag of Rolos was ALSO down to $2.66, down from $4.84. I double-checked at a price scanner, because it seemed like it would be a mistake, but it was not. Score. I mean Rolo.

The turquoise student desk chairs were $12.48 down from $24.99, so I bought one. We have a pink one we bought several years ago, and it’s looking pretty grubby but has held up well.

I was looking for a cafe curtain for the bathroom, and there was pretty much nothing. I remember back about a dozen years ago Target had, like, twenty choices for that style, each in multiple color choices. I chose white lace ones for our apartment kitchen, and there were something like four other lace choices. Plus there were gingham ones, and some with little pictures (apples? chickens? teapots? that sort of thing), and then plain solid colors, and some sheers or whatever.

Now, though, they had one style option, which comes only in brown, tan, red, black, and white:

(photo from Target.com)

I would have settled for white (though sullenly), but they were out of stock. SIGH, SO LIMITED AND INCONVENIENCED.

Twice today I’ve had the kind of scatterbrained moment that makes me do a little self-check for error codes. When I was getting dressed, I thought irritably, “Now, WHERE is my other SOCK?”—and then, “Oh. Already on my foot. I see.” While waiting for my lunch to heat, I thought irritably, “WHAT is that annoying BEEPING sound in the background of this video?”—and then, “Oh. The timer. My lunch.”

I think one reason I’ve been dwelling recently on thoughts of menopause and so forth is that I haven’t been such a mix of scatterbrained, irritable, and sentimental since my last pregnancy. I snap at the children and dismally count how many hours until bedtime and how many years until the youngest leaves home—and two minutes later I’m squeezing that same youngest child too hard and getting damp-eyed about what a big kid he is now and how I hardly see him now that he’s in school. I look at Paul and think mistily that he really is SUCH a good guy and I should REALLY make a point to be nice and kind to him—and then I open the dishwasher he’s loaded and say, “My god, Paul, what fresh hell is this?”

I choked up THREE SEPARATE TIMES while talking to my mom about the kids’ first day back to school, which was NOT SAD. Two days ago I ended up WEEPING in the car about how human beings SING, and how tender that made me feel toward the entire species. Then yesterday I just about conceived and gave birth to a cow over a condescending, pompous, self-righteous, mocking, MEAN open letter some grown-up wrote to humiliate teenaged girls, and about what an AWFUL and HARSH and CRITICAL and MEAN species we are. Then this morning I wept with tender affection over the way human beings build playgrounds for children. Whole playgrounds, just to play in! With specialized, serious-faced, clipboard-carrying adult experts designing the equipment for safety, just so the young of the species can have a fun place to play! Isn’t that INCREDIBLY TOUCHING??

Well. Nothing a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar and a bag of Cheetos can’t figure out between them.

Today’s source of unwarranted agitation: Should I, or should I NOT, volunteer a few hours a week to photocopy in the school office?

I have the available time: for the first time in years, I don’t have a child at home keeping me from “no siblings, please” volunteer work. But as I understand it, volunteering is a GIANT SUCKHOLE that pulls you in and makes you feel guilty for doing so little. It also puts me on the PTA’s radar, and past experience has shown me I’d like to avoid that. Also, photocopying for hours at a time sounds like it could be…dull.

On the other hand, it gets me into a system I would enjoy exploring (I love knowing Insider Stuff), and possibly gets my foot in the door for a job later on: it occurred to me after I fretted in another post that at this point in my life if I get a job it has to include SUMMERS OFF, and basically that’s School System.

I blame that book for the dream I had last night: the dream started when I was already having an affair, and it was miserable. I was thinking, “I don’t even really WANT to be in this cheat-relationship, and I can never undo this awful thing I’ve done, and I hadn’t realized when I started this that either way I’d have to have a Bad Break-up with SOMEbody!” Yuck.

I had to go drop off a check at someone’s house this morning, and I managed to get all worked up about it. What if they’re HOME?, etc. And they WERE home, against expectations, but I was still able to just quietly put the check in the envelope taped to the door and everything was fine. (And if they’d come to the door to say hi, that ALSO would have been fine, FREAK.)

On the way home I stopped and bought tulip bulbs. Tulips are my favorite thing to look forward to in spring. This past spring there was a blank spot in the tulip patch, so I was hoping I’d remember to buy more bulbs and fill it in: that’s the kind of task that generally occurs to me riiiiight after the first snow. The only assortment the store had was more bulbs than I needed (a 25-pack, and I only needed maybe 6-8), so it’ll be fun to decide where to put the extras. I wonder if they’d get enough sun if I planted them in a ring around a small deciduous tree we have? Or maybe I’ll put some around the mailbox. Or next to the door. Or maybe somewhere out of sight so I can cut them for indoor vases, instead of feeling like I shouldn’t cut them because it’ll ruin the patch. Or maybe I’ll pot them and refrigerate them and have them bloom in December! Anyway! Fun decision!

I also impulsively bought a 10-pack of a dark-purple kind called Queen of Night. The mixed bag has yellow, orange, red, white, and pink, so I’ll have to carefully space the dark ones—but I think/hope the effect will be gorgeous.

In general, I mention books I like but I don’t mention the ones I dislike. I don’t mind making the mistake of steering you to try a book you might not like: all of us have different tastes and identify with different characters, so maybe you’ll love the book I loved, or maybe you won’t. For those same reasons, I don’t want to steer you AWAY from a book I hated but that you might otherwise have loved. But today I’m too mad to follow my own policy.

(photo from Amazon.com)

Five Days, by Douglas Kennedy. It will sound like I’m giving spoilers, but this is all in the description of the book. We begin with a woman in her early forties, children in high school and college, full-time job as a radiography technician. Her husband is drawn completely flat: he’s just an irrational jerk, all the time, no redeeming features. Meanwhile she is a saint, endlessly patient and kind in the face of his incessant irrational unkindnesses.

And goodness, she just never takes time for herself or pursues her dreams. On the worldwide spectrum, she is BEYOND rich and privileged: living children, a house to live in that is not a one-room hut with three generations in it, a nice/safe neighborhood in a nice/safe city, good health, plenty to eat, a satisfying job with an appreciative boss. But evidently she is insufficiently OVER-privileged and doesn’t have an EVEN BIGGER house in an EVEN BETTER location, has not traveled extensively, has not had a dream career. The author hammers home the point that we need to DO these things, we need to REALLY LIVE, before it’s TOO LATE—as if it makes ANY DIFFERENCE AT ALL, after we’re dead, whether we ever personally saw Paris with our own eyes. Goodness, what a waste of life 99% of humanity leads by not being rich Parisian ballerina-doctor-authors!

She goes to a work conference, where she meets a man. And you will never believe this, but HIS spouse doesn’t understand or appreciate HIM, EITHER!! And HIS spouse is ALSO drawn completely flat in a bad way, while he is drawn completely flat in a good way, JUST LIKE our protagonist! And this is the final thing to amaze us: HE NEVER TAKES TIME FOR HIMSELF OR PURSUES HIS DREAMS. He has a passport, but it sits unused. He never bought the leather jacket he wanted. It’s extremely, extremely sad.

When they start talking, it turns out that each of them feels absolutely patient with the flaws the other person’s spouse can’t seem to tolerate after a couple of decades of dealing with them. They bond over this: “Your wife has never really given you the kindness you need, has she?” and “Your husband has never really understood how wonderful you are, has he?” It’s an amazing connection they share. Also, it turns out, they both love words! This makes their conversations insufferable. And a huge chunk of the book is their conversations, none of which sounded natural to me at all. It’s the kind of “conversation” where each person takes a turn relating the many-pages-long polished trauma monologues designed to impress a new acquaintance: the loss of a first love, the imperfectness of a childhood, the failure to take an opportunity for greatness. Their spouses have already HEARD these gems, whereas now they have a fresh audience. It’s delightful!

Soon they have decided that even though they have known each other only a few days, this is a once-in-a-lifetime love: they shouldn’t let their unselfishness and their fear of change keep them from having a happy life together. I kept waiting for the author to reveal this for what it was, but NO! He AGREED with them! This was not a brief fling at a conference, this was TRUE LOVE!! It’s MEANT TO BE!!

I finished the book only with extensive skimming; I would have given it up, but I kept hoping it was going to take a turn for the better. Good characters need some flaws, or else they are boring. Bad characters need redeeming qualities, or else they are boring. A relationship may indeed turn out to be a once-in-a-lifetime love, but the “My spouse doesn’t understand me”/hotel-room stage is too soon to call it. “Finally going to Paris” / “Finally writing that bestselling novel” / “Dropping your whole life because people aren’t constantly mooning over you” is not the difference between a worthwhile life and a wasted one.