So, we buy a lot of cat litter. Old cats, one who is diabetic and one who has kidney disease = lots of cat pee = lots of cat litter. The pet store where I buy it sells it in 30 lb plastic buckets, and if you bring back the bucket and refill it yourself, it’s a bit cheaper. I’m cheap, and also hate the idea of the plastic waste going into the landfill, so I try to always refill the buckets we already have. but occasionally I’ve been out and needed to buy a bucket right away and didn’t have the old one with me to refill, so gradually we’ve amassed a collection of 6 buckets. But since buying cat litter is kind of a pain, I just take all 6 buckets and then don’t have to go as often.

Apparently this is not normal behavior.

I know this, because nearly every time I check out, the clerk at the store says something to the effect of, “wow, lady, you must have a lot of cats!!”

This is someone who works in a pet store. They see people exhibit crazy, my pet-is-my-child behavior all the time. There is a refrigerator cabinet selling fresh, locally made, grain-free “doggy sausage” right next to the counter for more than I spent on lunch last week. I mean, am I really the weirdest one in the store?

I used to try to give a quick and boring explanation:

me: “Both our cats are elderly and they pee a lot”
me: “One cat has kidney disease and the other has diabetes. They pee a lot.”
me: “I have a young son and it’s really hard to buy cat litter with him in tow and also hard to find a time to run errands without him, so I try to buy a lot at one time so I don’t have to do this very often.”

Boring. So boring I got bored even typing out those explanations. I get bored preparing to answer the question as I approach the counter.

So today I decided that from here forward, I’m going to amuse myself by making up fantastical stories instead.

clerk: “Wow, lady, how many cats do you have?!”

me: “Five.”
me: “Eight cats.”
me: “Eleven white persians with matching blue eyes and diamond collars.”
me: “Twelve siamese cats. You should hear them meow. It’s never quiet in my house.”
me: “I don’t even know they just keep breeding.”
me: “Well, comrade, I live in a commune and we have 17 cats and this month I’m on cat litter duty. Can I interest you in a pamphlet?”

Is this how people become pathological liars? Is it sheer boredom?

I was surprised, when I looked back through the blog to find a roasted cauliflower recipe (me looking for old recipes is basically 99.9% of my blog’s search traffic), to discover that it’s been nearly a year since I’ve completed a post. I mean, surprised but not really surprised. Time, obviously, is an even more precious commodity around here than it used to be. But also social media* has risen up to take the place of blogs as a place to express ourselves. Case in point, I’ve been working on, revising and editing, this post on facebook all day. But it feels like as good an opportunity as any to return to the blog.

This morning, on this day-after-election day, though sick with dread, I am still with her.

I am still with Hillary Clinton, and I look forward to seeing what she’ll do next in her long career of public service. I am with President Obama, as he prepares to throw off the shackles of congress and move into the next chapter of his career.

I am with every her who hammered her fists on that glass ceiling last night, and maybe cried tears of rage or frustration, but also vowed not to give up.

I’m with every woman who has been groped or sexually harassed in the workplace, with the ones who were able to speak up and the ones who were not. I’m with every person of color who woke up this morning feeling a little bit less safe in their own country. I’m with Muslin Americans who fear vigilante passengers on an airplane, I’m with immigrants who fear a raid in the night. I’m with transgender hers/hims/theys who fear going into a public restroom. I will go with you.

I’m with every grassroots organization and non-profit who works to care for the impoverished and the marginalized. I will attend your bake sales, I will promote your causes. I will be an ally and I will bear witness. I will listen when you speak. I will buy Streetwise and I will give spare change and I will not close my heart to the people in this country.

I’m with every mother who didn’t know what to say to her young daughter this morning about the election results. I’m with every mother of a little boy, who, like me, woke this morning vowing to raise him to respect women and to care for the people around him. I can’t teach him to respect the highest office in our country’s government, not right now, but I can teach him to be kind.

#Imstillwithher

*by “social media” i mean facebook, as i’m too old and cranky to keep track of all the other platforms the kids are using these days. and yes that includes twitter. and instagram. and snapchat. and a bunch of stuff i’ve never even heard of probably.

Let’s be honest, there really hasn’t been much time for crafting or projects since our Leiflet arrived. I’ve been knitting a baby blanket for him since sometime in the second trimester, and it’s only just past halfway done now (he’s nearly 5 months old). But this past week I managed to actually start, and finish, a project. And it made me realize that it’s been ages since I’ve actually completed a knitting project. I went through the basket of knitting and realized that I’ve abandoned or frogged the last 4 or 5 projects in a row. There the lace yoga bag. The sweater dress for myself. There was the sweater I was going to repurpose into leg warmers. Oh yes, and the onesie knitted on SIZE ONE needles (what was I thinking?) that was purchased for the first nephew (now 3.5 years old), actually started for the second nephew (now 1.5 years old) and in danger of being too small for my own son before long it’s complete.

So it was nice to actually finish a project. I remembered that the point where knitting finally took off for me was when I developed the patience to knit things right — stop and pull out mistakes, check and recheck the gauge, read the pattern all the way through before diving in — and therefore stopped being discouraged by hastily-knit crappy things and started being pleased with the results of patience and effort (umm, duh, but one has to learn these things for oneself). The last few projects have been too slap-dash: ignoring mistakes, trying to frankenstein a pattern into something it’s not.

These hand warmers are my contribution to a holiday gift exchange. I don’t personally know the person I’m gifting (it’s a facebook moms’ group I’m part of), but I google-stalked her enough to know she lives in Massachusetts, and so I figured that these would be of good use. (Let’s hope she’s not allergic to wool).

I used this pattern, and pulled these together over the course of three evenings.

I’m pretty behind on blog posts. Because, um, three months ago this happened:

Leif Alexander Carlson Wilhelm was born on July 13, 2015, weighing 6lb 3oz and measuring 19.25in long*. He made a surprise arrival exactly one month ahead of his due date (causing us to miss, among other things, our own baby shower!). He spent the first 8 days of his life in the NICU at Comer Children’s Hospital but since coming home with us has been healthy and growing quickly.

* why ARE babies measured in long, instead of tall?

This is the last photo I took with my grandmother. Last week I brought my son home to meet his great-grandmother. The first day we visited she sat up and held him, but the next two days she wasn’t able to get out of bed and so I placed Leif’s carseat on her walker and rolled it up close to her bedside. Without having to sit up, she could reach out and hold on to his foot. She held his foot and he slept, snoring softly, and we talked about how impossibly soft baby skin is. Grandma asked if we’d be home at Christmas, then teared up when she remembered that she probably wouldn’t be with us then. She’d already completed all of her Christmas shopping, gifts wrapped in silver paper and stashed on her closet shelves, every member of her family provided for. My mom, my son and I stood around her bedside and together we were four generations.

Yesterday afternoon she slipped softly away from us, leaving us just three generations again, and we each take up our new place in the chain. Leif was born on my grandparents’ 73rd wedding anniversary, and grandma left us exactly three months later. For three short months, I was part of a family four generations deep. This is the gift that my son gave us, and grandma’s passing is another sort of gift, delivering her out of a body that was failing her and into an afterlife where she won’t have to bear the bone-deep ache of missing my grandfather any longer. My grandparents left behind two children, five grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. Now it’s our turn to carry the family forward, and their turn to rest.

there’s nothing like discovering another one of those little easter eggs left behind by the criminally negligent previous owners. like when ben noticed that our kitchen cupboards had been screwed directly to the drywall (not a stud) and were gradually pulling out of the wall.

the immediate solution was to put the cupboards up on stilts. since the Rat Crisis of 2015 began almost immediately after this, the cupboards quickly moved down the priority list. like most of the visual flaws in this house, we learned not to even see the stilts after a while.

but this past weekend, while i patched and painted moulding in the dining room, ben installed the cupboards properly. it turned out the cupboards came constructed with a mounting rail, so all he had to do was actually anchor through the rail into a stud to shore things up.

this is not as easy as it sounds. nothing is ever as easy as it sounds. remember, russian nesting projects.

our walls, from outside to inside, consist of brick, 2×4″ studs placed at random intervals / open space where we wish there was insulation, then lathe, plaster, and then drywall. the layers of lathe means that a stud finder is a completely useless tool. absent of x-ray vision, the only way to determine the location of a stud is to drill exploratory holes. sometimes lots of them.

but he was successful. we took down the stilts, and after having gotten used to looking at them, it now looks like the cupboards just magically float above the countertops. at least adversity is gradually teaching us to appreciate the little things. like our magically floating cupboards that totally didn’t come crashing down in the middle of the night.

we took the baby along for his first 5k race today. the Ravenswood 5k is a favorite of mine, mainly because it starts and ends about 8 blocks from our house, enabling us to wake up at 7am for an 8am start time. and also because it loops through our neighborhood, is populated with our neighbors, and is generally the sort of friendly casual race that has room for kids, strollers and dogs as well as those stringy dudes who finish in 15 minutes flat. oh, and raises money for the ravenswood food pantry, too.

my “race” results:

Overall place 1876 / 3176
Div (women 35-40) 159 / 323
Finish time: 32:43

it’s not the 20 min times i used to log in high school cross country, but for being 24 weeks pregnant, it feels pretty good to have still finished in the top half of my division.

it was cold but a beautiful sunny morning, and our friends Chris and Carly ran with us. good friends, good community, good running.

i will admit that after spending about 8 hours yesterday, and another 4 today painting the dining room, and running this 5k a bit faster than i normally run these days, i am feeling creaky, sore and wiped out tonight! this kid is starting to slow me down, just a bit. already it’s clear that we are raising an active baby: i rarely hold still during the day, and when i’m up and moving, the baby seems perfectly content to be quiet and still. but as soon as i lay down at night, or even sit still for more than 20 minutes, then he wakes up and begins to kick. i suspect this means we’ll need to invest in some baby-shaking devices and some hand-free baby-wearing devices if we’ll have any hope of surviving the first few months.

the first trimester, and winter, and some pesky play at work meant that there was a bit of a lull over the winter, but our vigilance has returned. need to know what the pantone color of lake michigan is today? i got ya covered:
http://whatcoloristhelaketoday.tumblr.com/

PS – don’t get your hopes up or nothing. this isn’t an April lake. it’s from last August.

today, the happy house update. next up, the not-so-pleasant update. (spoiler, it involves rats).

another step towards getting a new tree!

so, early on, there was the drama with the water valve that caused us to lose the only tree on our property, a beautiful old ginko that our realtor assured us was a sign of good fortune.

the short version of the saga, oh wait, nevermind, there is no short version. the briefest version i can give goes: water was leaking from a water pipe in the basement. the plumbing joint in question couldn’t be tightened until the outside water valve was shut off. the ground was frozen so no one could get to the valve. so we waited for the coldest winter on record to end, while the trickle of water created a sort of sinkhole under one corner of the basement. eventually the ground thawed. our contractor’s guys dug up the entire front yard looking for the valve. finally found it, but the valve was faulty and couldn’t be shut off. so we put in a request to the city water department for a new valve. they came out and decided that in order to access the valve, they’d need to get a backhoe in there to dig. but there was a tree in the way. so they sent the department of forestry out to cut down our beautiful ginko tree. tree comes down, ben calls again to get the water guys back out. water guys asked if the tree had been stumped. nope. well, if the rootball is still in the way, then they can’t use the backhoe. never mind, they’ll just come at it from the other side by removing a chunk of sidewalk (WHICH BEGS THE QUESTION WHY CUT DOWN THE TREE IN THE FIRST PLACE!?). valve was replaced. water shut off. plumbing joint fixed. water turned back on. basement sinkhole filled in with concrete. after a few weeks i began to file requests with the city to replace the sidewalk. sidewalk guys came, put down wooden forms, but didn’t pour the sidewalk. after a few more weeks, i make another call. someone returns, pours the new slab, but dumps all their leftover gravel and concrete into the yard where the tree (now stump) had been. i made more calls and complain about sloppy work. a few weeks later someone came back cleaned up the excess concrete. a few weeks later another department rolled up and put down some nice new fill dirt. a few weeks later, to my total surprise, another department comes through and plants some nice new turf. a few months after that, on a cold winter day, we look outside to discover that a weird little tractor is pulverizing our tree stump back into bark. it is now December.)

sometime last summer, i filled out a dubious-looking online form on a city website requesting a new tree. i read in various forums that the waitlist for a tree can be long, and it’s not always clear how and why the city decides to replant when they do. but lo and behold, exactly as i (sarcastically) predicted, a [nearly-] Easter miracle: we found the following notice hung on our front door a couple of days ago.

so….the next step is to ask the gas company to come out and mark where our gas line is. so that i can request that the city plant the new tree NOT next to the water main, unless the other side of the yard is even less diggable because of a gas line. (one would think that the various city departments could coordinate…one would think wrong. see above.)