Yes, I am staying at home this summer, quite unemployed, and taking care of our 3½ year-old daughter and 4 month old, 18½ lb son. (He’s huge… a virtual planetoid!) Every once in a while, you can see me pushing him in the stroller and her riding on my shoulders as we marvel at the roaring lions, bathing tigers, and bamboo munching pandas.

Our moving schedule is:

1. Close on the sell of our house Tuesday, 29th.
2. Movers show up to load the truck Wednesday, 30th.
3. Close on the purchase of our new house Thursday, 31st.
4. Leave after closing for Lexington.
5. Sometime between the 1st and the 4th of August our stuff (which consist mainly of toys for children under 4, pots and pans, bookshelves, 3 armoires, and 1,200+ books) will show up in Lexington.

For the past two weeks this has been my schedule:

The move is upon us.

We sign the papers on our house this coming Tuesday (the purchaser’s loan has come through and our house has appraised at or greater than the price we agreed upon, which, the buyer is getting this house for considerably less than the listing price). We sign the papers on the house in Lexington this coming Thursday, take possession of that house that same day, and hand our house over the the buyer at 6 pm that day.

We have no idea when the movers are going to show up; they gave us a three day window and have yet to call to give us the exact day.

We have been in “clean out the cupboard” mode for the past week or so and it has gone well.

I just made a Vegetarian, Tomato-Cream sauce, Lasagna that is now sitting in the freezer waiting for next week. And, I’ve two honey-olive oil-flax seed whole wheat loaves cooling next to the Kitchen Aide (that is about be packed up), so we will have plenty of bread.

We just ate the last of the frozen gnocchi that I had made with the last of potatoes: we had it with a portobello mushroom, blue cheese, vodka, cream sauce. This is certainly one of those De gustibus non disputandam est matter, but I much prefer my gnocchi made only of potatoes and flour. Probably because I was born in Milan and the northern Italian style is what I’ve always had. I’ll eat the southern Italian style that includes eggs and sometimes herbs and cheese, but I much prefer the lighter and simpler gnocchi of potatoes, flour and salt.

Two of my happy finds were the following soups:

This Split Pea Soup. The Rapunzel Herb Bouillon she recommends is really my favorite bouillon of all time. And, though split pea soup is very much of a winter soup, if you let it cool off to almost room temp, this particular version (because of its thickness and because of the citrus) makes a great summer soup.

And, I also made a leek and lentil soup that was really, really good, even if I do say so myself.

I had originally made this dish for the family and used up all the lentils we had, which left us with plenty of left over lentils—I should add, the lentils I used weren’t French lentils but whole Masoor Daal. To this, I added some home-made chicken stock and the remaining herb-mustard-butter we had. Also, I use the entire leek. I know that a lot of people (probably following French cuisine) recommend not using the dark green leafy stalks because their tough and what not. I, though, actually like them. I like the color they add and, if you do them right, they aren’t tough and chewy, as other people say. I say, eat the green leafy stalk. It tastes great and is good for you. We had this soup with some homemade french bread.

After years of trying to figure out how to maximize work-related efficiency and minimize procrastination and job related distress, I am hopeful that I have finally hit upon a combination of tools to help in these respects. I am relying increasingly on Google Calendar and Remember the Milk to schedule my time and create realistic to-do lists, respectively. I have started using Remember the Milk for 30 mins or so each Sunday evening to arrange a realistic to-do list for each day of the next week. Obviously these pre-planned lists are subject to revision and to surprise obligations that pop up during the week, but there is something fulfilling in marking a task as “complete.” I also love the feeling of finishing a day’s list and knowing that I have accomplished what I consider a decent day’s work and that I don’t have to take home homework in order to feel caught up. After a few weeks, this system has helped me stay more on-task during the day and content in the knowledge that I can have the night off if I get all the day’s list done. (Obviously, I am generally very neurotic.)

I am interested in how you people negotiate the issues of getting “enough” done, minimizing distress, and staying organized with your time?

As of this post, we can count posts by the kilo.¹

¹ Actually, if you include the archives, we’ve had well more than 1,000 posts for some months now. But those were the days of Blogger, eh, and they take too long to count.

It’s been a bad week for writing. Sigh.

But it’s been a great week for having one’s hopes squashed! So there’s that.

And there’s also the fact that I ain’t gonna be Laundromania’s bitch anymore. And that, my friends, is important.

Unrelated: The past couple of days I have been thinking about John McCain. Is it correct to say that McCain’s Iraq war policy is primarily a policy of presentation? In spite of his recent rhetoric about “winning” and “losing”—concepts which he leaves undefined—his intent is to ensure that the U.S. maintain martial (as opposed to economic or political) strength in the Middle East. One reason for this is that he believes a significant military presence is an insurance policy for Israel. More importantly, McCain wants to maintain the appearance of martial strength there because he believes it is the best way to influence—no, to threaten—Iran. Is it more complicated than that? If not, is McCain’s suspicion of Iran primarily related to his PNAC sympathies, or is there something else?

Oh come on.

Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland. Some Iranians may believe that this is a worthwhile gamble if the prospect is Israel’s demise. But most Iranians probably don’t.

Can anyone really be swayed by the conclusion that a nation should accept that its only options are to allow Israel to murder thousands of its citizens now or to allow Israel to murder millions of is citizens later? I mean, really. “I was skeptical of the Iranian threat at first, but Benny Morris makes a compelling case for attacking Iran now—just in case they really will become a worse threat—that I think we, or Israel as our proxies, should do it!” What nonsense.

I hope Morris’s editorial represents a desperate plea on the part of the capriciously warring class because they sense they are losing their best opportunity.

Irritating is the gender segregation you get when you search for an artist—say “Josh Ritter” or “Emmylou Harris”—on last.fm to listen to a station of “music like” said artist. Only two women turned up on the “Josh Ritter” channel, which I listened to it for nearly two hours, and the men were either Wilco or clones of Ryan Adams. The Emmylou Harris channel may be a bit more diverse, but it’s still a noticeable gender bias.

1. A minute into my ride to work this morning, an erratic cicada flew from the Lutheran church (Missouri Synod) and smacked me in the mouth. It hurt.
2. K told me yesterday that her mother says “a beast” when she means “obese,” as in “That woman is a beast!” Today we’ve been debating whether the phrase is a malapropism or an eggcorn. I say it would be an eggcorn—it shares in the general logic of them—but eggcorns are as much visual as oral puns, and since the only occasion of it we know is her mother’s speech act; therefore, I think it is a malapropism. K says it’s an eggcorn.
3. On a similar note: This week, my allergies have my sinuses backed up to my ears; it’s as though I hear the world through a tunnel. I mentioned it to K tonight. “My ears are stoffed up,” I said. Stoffed! And you know what? I say it all the time! At the same time I think stopped and stuffed, but rather than say one or the other, I say both.
4. Fact: Nothing is more perfect than ice cream.

because I had nothing to do with getting a jackass like Steve King elected.

(Previously.)

Today marks one week since Mark Elrod, token centrist liberal at camp and formerly popular blogger, embraced the Paris Hilton lifestyle and made his blog exclusive, to fanfare. Lucky for you, Elrod and I have been like brothers ever since I saved his ass from obscurity, and he asked me to fill his jilted adoring fans in on all the comings and goings in the VIP room.

Wednesday, July 9, it was like Elrod let us all have some of his cocaine. The comments came fast and furious. When GKB was getting up in his grill, Malibu Librarian was like, “Statistically, universities thrive when they hire PhDs as faculty. Pepperdine did not become respectable until it hired its first tenure-track faculty. Lipscomb is following in Pepperdine’s footsteps, as any wise institution would.” There were so many fly people there, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Alexander Campbell himself didn’t start commenting. Best of all, acting as if “private blog” means anything at all on the Internet, as if they didn’t know I would write them all down, they used their real names. Seriously! I’m not going to spill the beans yet, but let’s just say that a guy whose last name rhymes with “Pope” came in like he owned the place. Elrod’s first post, which was about the Searcy Police Log, is up to 123 comments and counting.

Elrod’s second secret post was a heartwarming tribute to his 83-year-old aunt in Delaware. It seems she was the one who sent him warm-from-the-oven cherry pies—cooked with cherries descended from the very cherry tree George Washington chopped down—while he was in the Navy. She cooked the cherries with their pits because she always said, “The pits are life’s reminders that you have to bite carefully.” It was so touching it made me cry. It whipped up 155 comments from the Elrodgeoisie, each and every one a moving tribute to a mom or an aunt or the old widow sister Thompson, who for thirty years made a quilt for all the new married couples in church in memory of her dear, departed Frank.

The excitement didn’t stop there! On Thursday, Elrod asserted that he, not the Pope, actually owns the place, not only his own posts but also every comment and every blog post anybody writes about him. Being respectful Christians, everyone agreed that Elrod’s imperial aggression against their intellectual property rights was a necessary security precaution. Later that day, he posted about his profound disappointment in Barack Obama for voting for FISA. He said it was as if Senator Obama, after unshackling him from the cold cement floor of the Bush Administration and giving him a few minutes to stretch, had suddenly wrapped the chains around his ankles again and walked away. Elrod’s faith in The Candidate appeared to be shaken, but the Pope said he’d pray, and before the night was over, several rounds of “Yes we can!” loosened up the blog for good!

The weekend started Friday with “Caption This Friday” and “Vox Bloguli,” which was followed up on Saturday with another sign of the impending apocalypse. Nothing much happened on Sunday.

Monday and Tuesday were the most intriguing of all! In successive posts he explained about his ongoing disagreements with his church and with the university. Elrod doesn’t think the church should build a new family life center because he says there are plans afoot to use it for after-school programs. While it would attract faith-based initiative funding from the government, he says it would also make the line between church and state too blurry for his comfort. This caused a minor kerfuffle because several people from his church are members of the VIP room, too, and they argued that the family life center would be a great place to preoccupy the youth group with chaste games of sport. Meanwhile, Elrod’s disagreement with the university had nothing to do with the recent controversy over his blog—other than maintaining that he was never pressured to make his blog exclusive, he has so far kept silent about that—but rather it is the rising cost of tuition. Even with faculty discounts, he said, tuition has hit him hard ever since his son started attending there last year. At the same time, Elrod realizes that rising tuition is a problem at all universities these days, and he is confident that the expense will be worth it and that Alan will make good use of the fine Christian education he is receiving. This led to praise from the Elrodgeoisie, especially from the professors, staff, and other camp counselors who are also part of the VIP room. Others were skeptical. One or two people worried about IRS form 70-549, someone suggested the university might, and JH of course scoffed, but no one wanted to change the university that much, and everyone said, “That’s just JH—he scoffs at everything!” The overwhelming consensus was summed up by one professor: “Who needs a good library for an education,” he said, “when we have a fine collection of new buildings in which to teach!” Finally, Elrod then posted a screed against the President’s “horrible record on the environment.”

Best of all, dear readers, I can already tell you that the second week of the Elrod’s secret blogging life will only be more exciting, complete with play-by-play of the student-faculty softball game at Arkansas Governor’s School, more “Caption This Friday” and yet another sign of the apocalypse! Find out about these and many more happenings in the VIP room next week—right here!