ever-fixed mark

Every year at Christmas, the Catholic school in town rents out the commuter train to put on a fund-raiser based on the book Polar Express. On a short ride between Port City and the next town, volunteers dressed as Christmas characters read the book, distribute hot chocolate, and lead the riders in Christmas carols. The kids wear their pajamas, and a good time is had by all, even I. I am surely in the minority in my hatred of Polar Express (see: my aversion to the Santa Claus myth, and also general curmudgeonliness and hatred of sentimental crap), but I can’t resist the thrill the kids get out of riding the choo-choo! choo-choo! CHOO-CHOOOOOO! as Minor says.

A few years ago, the event was run on multiple weekends, and I was easily able to get tickets from someone in the mother’s club who could not go. Last year, though, they were forced to cut it down to one day, and I could not get tickets for love nor money. This year I vowed to buy on-line tickets the moment they became available, which was, according to the web site, “early November.” I checked on November 1st, and they were not yet on sale; a few days later, they were sold out. There was a link on the web site that said, “Click here to be notified for ‘priority seating’ when next year’s tickets go on sale.” Figuring it couldn’t hurt, I filled out the on-line form.

A few days later, I got an e-mail from “Santa” saying that some additional tickets were going to be released at 7:00 a.m. the following Thursday morning. I had the forethought to set an alarm, and at 6:55 a.m. I was sitting in front of my computer, credit card at the ready, refreshing the screen.

At 7:01, about 70 extra tickets were put on sale. I quickly bought four. About an hour later I checked back, and they were all gone. I could just picture fifty or so middle-aged pajama-clad women out there in Greater Port Cityland — women who used to stand in line overnight to buy Rolling Stones tickets or repeat-dial Ticketron to get Bruce Springsteen seats before they sold out — frantically tapping on their keyboards and wondering where their youth had gone.

At this stage in the game it’s hard to tell if this is genuine weight loss or just a normal clothing/water weight/time of day fluctuation (did you know that my Uggs weigh 2 pounds?), but the numbers are trending in the right direction, so I’ll take it. I’m shooting for a “safe” (read: lazy) loss of 2 pounds a week, so I hope to be in the lower 160s by Christmas.

We’ll see.

The all-too-brief periods of sleep that bracketed my Sunday were both interrupted for trips to urgent care. On Sunday morning, Husband woke me to tell me that Minor had a rash on his face, and I had the choice of hustling to take him to the 9:00 a.m. sick call at the pediatrician, or walking the dog with Aitch in tow. I chose the doctor. When we got there I was pleased to learn that “our” nurse practitioner was working. What with her vacations, our work schedules, and the fact that we avail ourselves of pediatric services on a quasi-emergency basis, she’s only seen Minor on perhaps three occasions since he arrived, and I thought it would be nice to have some continuity. Unfortunately, it was Nurse Practitioner WhoAreYouAgain? who walked through the door, someone I had never seen before. She was very nice and speedily diagnosed impetigo and prescribed antibiotics, but I didn’t bother asking her any questions about Minor’s development or tubes because she’d never even met him before. I made a mental note to schedule his two-year exam well in advance with “our” nurse practitioner.

On Sunday night (technically, Monday morning) I was awakened by Dog running around the house. He had broken out in hives earlier but had responded to Benadryl, and his hives didn’t look any worse than before, but he couldn’t sleep. By this time I couldn’t, either, so I went up to the office to do some work. Around five, Dog bounded up the stairs; this time, he was covered in hives from the neck down. He wouldn’t take any more Benadryl, and although he didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of an anaphylactic reaction, he seemed so uncomfortable that I thought that driving him to Portsmouth to the emergency clinic would be the right thing to do, rather than waiting for our local vet to open.

So we drove north in swirling snow. The back was loaded up with the kids’ bikes, so I let him sit in the front seat with me, a dangerous practice I don’t at all condone, but I felt better being able to turn on the light periodically to gauge his condition. The clinic admitted us, evaluated him, and gave him shots of Benadryl and steroids, which seemed to make him more comfortable. We were back home by eight.

Later that evening I noticed a phone message from Dog’s regular veterinarian, left about mid-morning. “The emergency clinic faxed over Dog’s records,” the vet said, “and we wanted to see how he was feeling.”

I was floored. In all the times the kids or I have gone to the ER or emergent care, OUR regular doctors have never called to see how we’re doing afterwards.

I suppose I should be grateful that the humans in this family have health insurance, but mostly I just feel envious that, while we get adequate medical treatment, only Dog really gets medical care.

The first three words of this post are now officially my new favorite epithet. Expect it to be all the rage at a preschool near you. Or a preschool near me, anyway.

You must watch this.

This reminds me that the last time I took Minor to the otolaryngologist, I got a $100 bill for “impacted cerumen removal.”

I flew JetBlue to and from Florida. JetBlue has in-flight TV at each seat, and although I had David Copperfield to keep me company (the book, not the magician) I could not resist the siren song of Mindless Entertainment. So I availed myself of cable channels that we do not have at home. This is how I got hooked on “Project Runway.” Bravo was showing back-to-back episodes during both flights.

I’m not all that interested in fashion, but I was on the edge of Seats 2C and 5D waiting to see what the designers would come up with at the end of each episode, and whether my judgment would jibe with that of the judges. As someone who would have failed junior-high Home Ec had my mother not sewn my very hip Diane Keaton-inspired checked vest for me, I am fascinated that someone could choose fabrics, cut, and sew a garment in 24 hours, let alone design one.

And Tim Gunn is totally my new gay celebrity boyfriend. (Sorry, Anderson.) I loved how he gave honest and constructive feedback, yet still managed to be kind. And I adored his matter-of-fact yet encouraging “Make it work!” as he left the designers. I think I learned more about management from six hours of “Project Runway” than from two days of the conference I attended.

Spring break! Whoooo-hooooooo!

What’s that?

It’s not Spring Break?

Then what the HELL am I doing in Fort Lauderdale?

It’s coming back to me now. I may be expected to give a speech or something. I sure hope I wrote one.

At any rate, it will be two nights of uninterrupted sleep, which will be welcome. The resort is nice…ish. The guest rooms are arranged in a bunch of outbuildings that look like cheap condos in a housing development, but the interior is pretty nice. It’s big, with a large marble bathroom that’s divided into three sub-rooms: Toilet, shower, and sink. The shower room features a voyeuristic glass wall between it and the toilet room, a Schrager-ish touch I’ve never quite understood. Believe me, when you’re the mother of small children the last thing you want is (more) people watching you shower. And, there is a bidet!

I would bet a hundred dollars right now that 70% of Americans don’t know what a bidet is for. Let’s say 75%. Go ahead, bet me. Stop what you’re doing right this minute and go out and ask four people the purpose of a bidet. If two or more people know the right answer, I’ll send you one hundred Georges.*

There is also a fancy electronic scale. So I was able to do something I’ve been contemplating for a long time.

I weighed myself.

I have been trying to lose weight for a long time, but frankly I haven’t been trying that hard. I really want to lose weight, but I really haven’t wanted to stop eating.

The issue isn’t fat, per se. Decades after puberty, I’m finally over the fact that I don’t conform to the emaciated patriarchal norm for weight and shape. And I ran ten miles at this weight; I’m not that out-of-shape. But I am concerned about how I feel. Lately, I have felt like utter crap: nauseated, over-full, lethargic, headachey. I am pretty sure that it is due to the vast amounts of bread, pasta, and ice cream I have been consuming.

I have blogged this once before, without results. I thought maybe by putting my number out there it would motivate me to do better this time.

We’ll see.

*Not really.

I can’t even remember my first cup of coffee. I must have started drinking it in college, to be like the big kids, but it did not make much of an impression on me. My love affair with coffee didn’t really start until I did my junior year abroad in Germany. Of all the countries in Europe I’ve visited, Germany, in my opinion, has the best coffee, a brand called Jakob’s. It actually tastes the way that coffee smells, if that makes any sense. I’ll never forget sitting in a little coffeehouse with marble floors in the Schnoor in Bremen, eating an apple tart topped with real whipped cream, drinking a coffee, and reading the Herald-Tribune and thinking that it was absolute bliss. When I got back to the States, in those pre-Starbucks days, I was very disappointed by the lack of coffeehouse culture and by the dearth of good coffee. It was back to Maxwell House for me for many years, until I moved to Tunisia.

There were fancy coffeehouses in Tunisia, where you could get a very good European-style cappuccino for a 700 millimes, a significant percentage of my daily budget. There were also more workaday places that served espresso shots, “caffé Americano” (black coffee), and my favorite, direkt. The inexplicably-named direkt is a bit like a latte, but with a thicker consistency, served in a small clear water glass. The price was cheap, 200 millimes, so you could drink direkt and smoke shisha all afternoon without breaking the bank. These kinds of cafés were men-only places (by tradition, not by law), but I was never asked to leave or even unduly harassed. My favorite shisha café by far was the Café des Nattes at the top of the hill in Sidi Bou Said, a coastal village outside of Tunis. Some established volunteers took me here my third night in-country, and I thought I had fallen into Arabian Nights.

At home in Tunisia, I experimented with a caffetiere, but usually I just made Turkish coffee in a big metal pan, kind of like a dog dish, on the top of my gas ring. Turkish coffee is very powdery, and I would just mix it with the water, boil it up, pour it into a cup, and wait for the sediment to settle. The pan did not have a handle, and I sustained a very bad burn on my foot once due to sloshing during transfer. In those days I drank my coffee out of a cheap footed pottery cup that I had bought from a roadside stand. It was the perfect size and was painted half yellow, half green. The paint was probably lead-based. My spoon was aluminum. I know it was aluminum because it looked like it was made with aluminum foil crunched together into spoon shape. Lead paint…aluminum utensils…every day for three years…there are five IQ points I’ll never get back.

When I got back to the US, I was pleased to find that my compatriots had discovered coffee. Starbuckses were everywhere, and you could actually buy something other than Maxwell House in the grocery store. I discovered a great brand of coffee almost the minute I moved to Chicago: Stewarts, in a tartan can, which was sold at the little convenience store in my high-rise. I drank that happily until I moved to Boston, where they don’t have it. After some trial and error I found another brand, Martinson’s, that I liked almost as much. I was a satisfied customer each and every morning until a few months ago, when the local stores began experiencing shortages. First it disappeared from Peapod. Then it vanished, intermittently, from the shelves at the bricks-and-mortar store. As I sit here, I haven’t been able to find it for weeks.

So here I am, Desperately Seeking Coffee. I have no fewer than five brands in my fridge right now, but none of them is cutting it. Husband likes the Dunkin Donuts coffee. For me, it’s okay, but it’s not really coffee. It’s sort of enjoyable in a Miller Lite, Cheez-Whiz kind of way, but at some point in the day I’m going to need a real coffee.

Any brand suggestions from fellow North Shorers?

WTF?

My kids are getting nothing but dryer lint for Xmas.

It is 7:40 EST and both of my boys are in bed and asleep.

How, you ask?

Husband is on a business trip, and I had the brainwave of putting the two kids to bed at the same time. Radical parenting, yes, but it was just crazy enough to work.

You see, when Minor first arrived his and Aitch’s go-to-bed styles were so different (to wit, Aitch: read a few books, have a cuddle, and go to sleep. Minor: scream for two hours) that we naturally put them to bed separately. Minor eventually became a champion sleeper, but he crashed much sooner than Aitch, so we had to put him to bed first. Because their rooms adjoin, we were always afraid that Aitch’s going-to-bed antics would wake Minor, so we allowed an hour in between. After Aitch dropped his afternoon nap, though, it became clear to me that we were getting him to bed too late.

So by delaying Minor’s bedtime half an hour and moving Aitch’s back half an hour, we achieved Nighttime Nirvana. I do feel a wee bit guilty that each boy didn’t get his special alone time with Mommy, but then again I didn’t have to worry the whole time I was putting Minor to bed that Aitch had stolen down to the basement to disassemble the weed whacker.

Overheard while Aitch and his father are playing with Transformer figurines:

AITCH: The Decepticons are coming! The Decepticons are coming!

HUSBAND: Run away! Run away!