I think I have this bad habit of not telling people how much they mean to me until it's too late. Yesterday, when I heard about Ms. Sitler's death, it got me thinking about all the really excellent teachers I've had the privilege and honor to have learned from over the years. They all had something to teach me, and I wouldn't be who I am today without them. I think that they ought to know.
I went to Northern Potter Children's School as a kid. I started out in the Harrison Valley Elementary School, but by the time I started kindergarten, everybody knew we were headed for the Hill the following year. But while I was in the 'Valley, I had a kindergarten teacher named Mrs. Eckenrode. I started out a little ambivalent about kindergarten. I wanted to stay home and watch Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers with Mom, and go up to Aunt Flossie and Uncle Al's. I didn't want to be in kindergarten. Mrs. Eckenrode suggested to my mom that she pack my lunch, and that might help with my homesickness. And it did. It worked like a charm.
Besides teaching me the basics, and introducing me to the characters in The Alphabet (I remember Mr. G strung his g-g-g-gum ALLLLLLL over Mrs. Eckenrode's chair, and the blackboard, and her desk! That stinker, Mr. G! And Mr. X was a Man of Mystery!), Mrs. Eckenrode taught me a valuable lesson: to be neat and to listen to and follow directions. The first marking period of kindergarten, I got two "Ns" on my report card. Our grades then were E, S, and N. E was the best, S was satisfactory, and N was "needs improvement," which was code for "you failed!" I got the only two Ns of my academic career that first 9 weeks in Grade K. One was for neatness and the other was for listening to and following directions, or not being neat or listening to and following directions as the case may be. There were so many things I learned in kindergarten, and Mrs. Eckenrode was The Best kindergarten teacher I could have imagined. But that thing about neatness and listening to and following directions has especially stuck with me my whole life. Every so often, I need to remind myself just where I stand in those departments, because none of that comes naturally to me.
Mrs. Duell was my first grade teacher. She was a very nice, very religious lady. When I was in school, they still didn't haul you away for praying in school, and as first graders, we had Devotions, first thing every morning. I don't think any of us really understood Devotions, but I still don't think it was a bad thing. But that's not what stuck with me from Mrs. Duell. At the end of First Grade, Mrs. Duell had a sleepover for all the girls in our class, at her house. Her house was pretty neat. There was a loft where we were all to sleep, and there was a pond with an island in it! We rowed in the rowboat over to the island and sang songs, and then went back to the house for the sleepover.
Don't you know I was the nerd who came shuffling downstairs well after everybody else had gone to sleep? Mr. and Mrs. Duell were in their jammies, enjoying the quiet, and the Little Wynick Girl was there in tears, begging to go home. *cringing* Mrs. Duell said I could go home if I wanted to, but I ought to have a glass of warm milk and a sit-down first. I sat there at the table with her and Mr. Duell, drinking my warm milk. By the bottom of the glass, I figured I could stick it out until morning. And I did. And to this day, when I'm having a hard time getting to sleep, I go downstairs, pour a glass of milk, heat it up, and have a sit-down while I drink it. It doesn't make everything better, but it does make it a little easier to get through until the morning.
Mr. Wilcox was my second grade teacher, but by this time, we really started switching classes for different subjects, so I saw all the second grade teachers. Mr. Wilcox taught us that Bloomsburg is the only actual town in Pennsylvania. The other places that we call "towns" are really boroughs, villages, or cities, but Bloomsburg is the only incorporated town. I've always remembered that, and if any of my friends get on a quiz show, and that's the answer, I'll be your phone-a-friend lifeline and tell you that. In Mrs. Ransom's language and spelling class that year, we had to do a project where we invented a product to be sold in grocery stores. My product was Zowies, a breakfast cereal featuring a blow-up flying saucer in the package, that you could really get in and fly around in! In Ms. Cowburn's reading class, she sat me at a desk by myself, because I was very social, apparently. But I also got to do a lot of independent reading, from the box of SRAs she kept on the counter. I started with the red ones and finished the year reading the ones with the silver accents. This was a big deal, I'm told.
In third grade, I was once again placed at a desk all by myself, right in front of my teacher, Mrs. Torrey's desk, and right behind David Wetmore's individual desk. I don't know how it was that David Wetmore and I both had to sit by ourselves in the third grade (I was probably overly social and a disruption to others, but I don't remember David being so), but it's okay, because at least I got a window seat. Mrs. Torrey's classroom was a lot of fun. In social studies that year, we studied about a girl named Lisa and her family, who were traveling across the country, I believe. We learned that the basics you need to live are food, clothing, shelter, and water, and my friend Sara would always include "and love!" in her list of essentials. We had a "Career Day," where I dressed up as a fashion designer (I was a fashion designer, even though Nicky Gray said I was a contractor) and Sara dressed up as the President of the United States. I told Mrs. Torrey that when I made a million dollars, designing fashions, I'd give her half. Sara told her that when she was President of the United States of America, she'd have her come stay in the Lincoln Bedroom. Mrs. Torrey had Sara and me each write her a letter saying so, and she still hasn't forgotten, to this day. So I guess Sara and I better get crackalackin' on making good our promises to our third-grade teacher!
Mrs. Reed was another third grade teacher. I was in her class for reading. She taught me how to answer a reading comprehension question. She taught me how to be specific when I wrote. In the third grade! I cannot stress enough how important a skill it is to know how to answer a question. Seriously. Think about it! And finally Mrs. Smith. I'm going to put Mrs. Smith on hold for right now, as she was also my fifth grade teacher, and that's where I knew her better.
Now, in fourth grade, our little lives were shaken up. We went from having three classes of us to having just two. It isn't that a bunch of people suddenly vacated our class, but they just split us down the middle instead of in thirds. And besides moving to The Intermediate Wing of the school, we also changed classrooms and teachers for nearly every class, just like high schoolers did. This probably accounts for why I never liked those long Tuesday-Thursday classes in college. After the first half, I was ready to get up and move to a different room!
But in fourth grade, Mrs. Checkett and Mrs. Wagner were our teachers. Mrs. Checkett had been in the Peace Corps in Barbados, so she always had the best stories to tell. She taught us how to wind our hair up like the girls in Barbados would, in a scarf, and she told us about not appreciating the danger of a hurricane, thinking it was a big party as they taped up their windows and filled water jugs. She had a lottery every Friday, and as long as you stayed in line and didn't tip in your chair or speak out of turn, you got a lottery ticket. If you won, you got to pick out of her prize box. She knew how to motivate a bunch of kids, I'll tell you what! And she traveled a lot, so we fourth graders got to travel vicariously through her. The year I was in fourth grade, she went to Brazil over Christmas and sent us all postcards, and when she got back, she regaled us with stories of the giant plane she rode on to Rio. It's safe to say most of us had never been on a plane at all, let alone a giant one! Wow!
Mrs. Wagner was one of those super-nice teachers who was always dressed very well. Blouse, jacket, and skirt. In her class, I was always winding up staying inside for recess for being overly chatty. Ummm. Aren't I seeing a pattern here! But she ran a club- our school had "Clubs" time on Thursday afternoons and later on Friday afternoons for the intermediate kids. We all had to pick a club to join, and it changed every 9 weeks. For one nine-week period when I was in fifth grade, I was in Mrs. Wagner's "Health and Beauty" club. I learned that I'm an "autumn" (eeeeeeewwwwwwww, look! April has to wear olive green!- now one of my favorite colors!) and I also learned the right way to file my nails and apply nail polish. Mrs. Wagner also taught me how to put makeup on. Excepting that time in junior high when I thought it was cool to put hot pink eyeshadow in my eyebrows, I don't think Mrs. Wagner would be embarrassed to admit that I'm an alumna of her Health and Beauty Club. And I don't think it's a shallow thing, to teach ten-year-old girls how to dress and groom themselves. As much as we'd like to deny it, we're judged by our appearance in this world. I'm not even talking about our looks, but how we present ourselves, and how we work with what we've got. I'm really thankful for Mrs. Wagner and her Health and Beauty Club, because without her, I'm convinced that I would have gone goth years ago and never come back.
Also speaking of clubs, Miss VanDusen's clubs were always my favorite ones to get. I think I joined her clubs more than I was in anyone else's club. She ran Ceramics Club sometimes, and a Paper Jewelry Club, where we made jewelry from this paper-like material that's a lot like what casts are made from, and we'd paint and spray them. Basketweaving was one of my favorite clubs to join, when Miss VanDusen offered it. I always thought it was so cool to start the 9 weeks out with just this wooden base and a bunch of vine, and then finish out the time with a whole entire basket! I was also in Miss VanDusen's math class for a while. Multiplication. Oh, good lord. It was torture. The kind where you'd have to multiply some big number by some other big number. I was sure that these big multiplications would give me an aneurysm. I did. I looked up "aneurysm" in the medical encyclopedia in the library (Mrs. Blanchard's realm!) and was convinced that's what I was going to have. But Miss VanDusen was really patient about spending all the time with me I needed, to learn it. And then in a genius twist, if I got all the multiplications right on the quiz on one Friday, she'd get me a can of pop out of the machine in the teacher's lounge! Holy cow, did I ever work hard on that quiz! Best can of Coke I've ever drank, to this day! And Miss VanDusen was also our Driver's Ed teacher, when we got to high school. Driver's Ed was in the summer. I wish that the Driver's Ed car had been stick, because if anybody could have taught me to drive stick without it ending in tears and swearing, it'd be Miss VanDusen. I always admired her ability to control a roomful of kids or unruly teenagers (is there any other kind?) and then diffuse anything too intense with humor. You need to experience the power of a well-placed "hooty!" to believe it! Magic!
Speaking of Mrs. Blanchard and the library, she always had her library decorated with the best artwork. Computers were starting to be more and more prevalent, and it was Mrs. Blanchard who taught us to navigate the keyboard. We had to color our keyboards, one color for the keys controlled by our right hand, another color for those keys controlled by our left. These were copied keyboards. Not actual keyboards. I don't think any of us really got how to type back then, on our Xeroxed keyboards, because who was going to need to know how to type anyway, and besides, we all just wanted to be able to play Word Munchers and Number Munchers on the library's computers. To this day, though, I still touch something to ground myself before I touch my computer, lest an errant spark destroy the whole thing. And something I thought was really cool of Mrs. Blanchard was that in fifth grade, when the Space Shuttle Atlantis launched, the first one since the Challenger explosion in 1986, Mrs. Blanchard let my friend Sara and I watch the launch on a TV in the library, because Sara and I wanted to be astronauts and fly in a space shuttle together. That was pretty awesome.
In fifth grade, it was kind of a dark time for my class. We were branded "the worst ever to go through Northern Potter!!!" and that reputation kind of stuck with us for the rest of our lives there. I think it was uttered out of frustration by someone. We were frustrating, yes. I'll readily concede that. I also think the universe hated us a little bit. On our fifth grade field trip, one of the buses carrying all sixty of us, plus our teacher-chaperones, broke down on the way, so all of us had to pile onto one bus, three to a seat. And it was hot that day. And there was a incident on the way home that my friend Sara would like to forget, I think. But we also had a lot of fun in the fifth grade, when we weren't being frustrating little terrors making more than one teacher start a countdown clock for their own retirement. In Mrs. Smith's section that year, our door won the first prize in the whole school for the best one. It was a Frosty the Snowman that we made by sticking little pieces of tissue paper on a big piece of paper, kind of a pointillism. It WAS a beautiful door! And we all worked together to make it happen. As a section, we were so proud! Mrs. Peffer, the other fifth grade teacher, I knew better from outside school. We went to the same church. My sister and I were in her daughter's wedding. Outside of school, I thought the world of Mrs. Peffer. In school, she and I clashed. But it taught me that you don't have to like everybody in every situation to still be their friend. I still adore Mrs. Peffer. I had a baby shower with a very small guest list, and she was on it. Plus, another thing I learned from Mrs. Peffer is that I listen a lot better with something in my hands, whether it's a pen or knitting needles and yarn. I think unleashing the two of us on a yarn shop would be good business sense for the yarn shop!
Mrs. Simonetti was the special education teacher when I was in elementary school, and then she came over to the high school. So I'll be talking about Mrs. Simonetti tomorrow, too, but today, I remember being in her math class- we switched classes and different teachers taught different levels at different times- thinking about it now, the schedule-board at school must have looked like the arrival/departure board at JFK- but recalling my distaste for math, you'll understand why this made such a big impression on me. One day in class, Mrs. Simonetti was teaching a lesson on estimation, and she brought in chocolate chip cookies for us. How cool! But before we could eat 'em, we had to guess how many chocolate chips were in our cookies. I can't remember if I were right or way off, but I do remember the deliciousness of that cookie! And on another day, it was the eve of a big Lottery drawing, and Mrs. Simonetti said if she won, she'd buy us all calculators. I went home and prayed hard that Mrs. Simonetti would win the lottery! But I guess it's a good thing we had to learn how to do our math without. And Mrs. Simonetti was a stickler for counting back change. This was something we practiced in math class, counting back change. She said she'd make the checkers at the store count her change back, and I remember thinking at the time "wow! I'm glad I'm not HER checker-outer!" But now, twenty-some years later, I find myself doing the same thing, demanding that the checker-outer count my change back to me the right way. I'm dismayed that I've gotten a couple vacant stares at this request. They don't know how to do it, some of them! Wow! I'm glad Mrs. Simonetti drilled that skill into our heads! I really am! Can you imagine?
Sixth grade. Mr. Hess and Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller will also be making a re-appearance as the high school band director. But right now, he's sixth grade teacher, my favorite of his roles at our school. But first, Mr. Hess. He taught us handwriting and social studies. He was also my math teacher, sometimes, and he let us check our own work in his teacher's book, but then he'd "ok" it. Mixed numerals in there, we learned. He also taught Hunter's Safety, which I took. I got a hundred on the test! I learned never to accept a gun from someone until they proved it was unloaded. I've spent one day hunting in the woods since Hunter's Safety in sixth grade, but I think it's a good skill to have simmering in the back of my memory, at least how to use a gun, in case any dangerous animals try to get in my garbage. Or the Jehovah's Witnesses start coming 'round again...
I'm kidding about the J-dubs!
Mr. Miller was one of those cool sixth grade teachers that really inspired kids. His walls were cluttered with all kind of things, a rattlesnake encased in some kind of plastic or lucite, clippings from tabloids, factoids, on the window hung a real, honest-to-goodness chest x-ray. One day, he brought in his muzzleloader, and we all went out to The Circle on the playground, so he could demonstrate how it fired- these were different times- another day, around this time of year, he brought in a deer-lung from a deer he shot during hunting season. He showed us how it inflated and deflated, with a straw, and then he dissected it for us, while all of us stood in rapt attention, utterly grossed out, but also utterly fascinated. Wow! Mr. Miller knew about a lot of things, and as a sixth grade teacher, he was excellent at sparking students' curiosity. He was our Level A teacher, and Level A was made up of me, and my friends Amy, Sara, and Josh. With such a small Level A class, we got to do a lot of things we wouldn't normally get to do. We got to produce videos and go on special field trips. We had and ant farm and a bonsai tree, both of which met untimely ends, and Amy, Sara, and I always blamed Josh for killing the ant farm and the bonsai tree, but I think I'm at least 75% to blame for the bonsai tree's demise, judging from my success with plants in the years since. Sixth grade was fun. A lot of fun. And that was Mr. Miller.
Our art teacher, Ms. Rutkowski was also our high school art teacher, but I knew her best in elementary school. She taught me not to be afraid to try new things. I think it's her influence, at least in part, that I'm kind of a voracious crafter. Whether it's clay, or painting, or drawing, or tie-dying something, I'm all for trying it at least once. I loved art class!
We had two gym teachers while I was at the School on the Hill. Mrs. Raber taught us gymnastics and had an after-school dance club. I knew I wanted to be in the Dance Club from the first time I saw the "big kids" do a dance for the whole school, when I was in first grade. I loved their costumes. I loved their shoes. I loved their square-dancing. When I was in Dance Club, we did a lot of jump-rope drills, and she changed the theme to space-theme- it was meant to be! She also had a Baton Club that met Fridays at lunchtime. Of course I belonged! And I brought my gold glitter-baton every Friday and would dash off to the gym after eating my lunch and 25-cent ice cream bar, to do some twirlin'!
Mr. Galley was more sports-oriented, less with the gymnastics and dancing. But he still broke out the Big Parachute. We'd play "Deer Tag" with Mr. Galley, which was a combo of tag and dodge ball. One team had to be the hunters, with the playground balls, and the other team had to be the deer. You had to run around with your hands up like antlers. It might sound like torture, especially if you weren't a fan of tag or dodgeball, but put yourself in the mindset of a fifth-grader, and then get simple, and you'll see the hilarity in this game. Mr. Galley was also an excellent Cross-Country coach for the high schoolers. I was not a runner, so I didn't get to know him as Cross-Country coach, but I did know him as my gym teacher in 5th and 6th grade, and I know the upbeat and enthusiastic way he approached that, so I know that's how he ran his Cross-Country team. Plus, during those years, our Cross-Country runners were to be feared if you were on another team!
Finally, in the music room, there was Ms. Sitler. I spoke at-length about her in yesterday's post, and I still don't think I got it all. But here, I'll say that I never knew her at a time when she wasn't approaching whatever was going on with grace and a sense of humor. I remember she went on our Sixth Grade Camping Trip. It was a rainy, drizzly, kind of miserable time. But every night after dinner, there were campfire songs with Ms. Sitler. No autoharp. Just our voices. Clapping hands, stomping feet. During the day, she must have taught us a survival skill along with another teacher- there was archery, rifle-shooting, orienteering, canoe-paddling, foraging for edibles and staying away from the poisonous plants, and lanyard-making. I know she was in on another thing besides just the campfire songs, but that's the lesson I take from her from the 6th grade camping trip: Even if it's wet and raining and you're cold and you sat in a puddle and now your undies are all wet and gross, and you want to go home and sleep in your own bed, sing. Just keep singing. Sing in the rain. Sing on the bus. Don't stop singing.
I was really lucky to grow up in the school I grew up in. My teachers- all of them- are part of a big extended family. All of them are a reason I turned out to be who I am. I learned something from each and every one of them. I hope they all know how much I appreciate them for that.
Tomorrow, we're gonna go to high school!
Monday, December 3, 2012
Sunday, December 2, 2012
One of the Brightest Lights
I just learned some news that took my breath away. My music teacher from elementary school, Darlene J. Sitler, was shot and killed at church. Her ex-husband was the gunman. Everything about this is the stuff of nightmares. It happened in church, with so many other families around. The church is in a small town, a place that is almost idyllic at its very best. Things like this just don't happen here. And Darlene. Why Darlene? She was one of the happiest, most patient, most enthusiastic people I have ever known.
I mean, she'd have to be, teaching elementary school music all these years.
This world makes no sense on days like this, when you hear news like this. It's been over twenty years since I moved on from the Children's School, where Darlene taught, but I still think of her as "my" music teacher. Always have, always will. And just like anybody does, memory freezes the way a person looks, so in your mind's eye, they never change from the last time you were around them lots. The thing of it is, the last time I saw Ms. Sitler, Shane and I were at the elementary school, doing dental exams, and Ms. Sitler peeked her head in the room and said 'hello!' She hadn't changed a bit from the last day I was in sixth grade, in 1990. How about that! I would have liked to have more time to visit with her, to catch up, but we had kids' teeth to document, and she had kids' talents to inspire and encourage.
Just this morning, while Zoe and I were down in the gym, cleaning up from my workout, Zoe got fussy, so I started singing her a song Ms. Sitler had taught my class way back in kindergarten ("I like to eat! I like to eat-eat! I like to eat-eat apples 'n' bananas!"), and Zoe stopped fussing and a big smile broke across her face, and she started dancing. A few hours later, I saw something on my Facebook feed about a shooting in Coudersport, and then after that, I couldn't stop stalking the story to find out who, and what happened, and when, and where.
I really wish I could rewind back to this morning, when I was singing that song to Zoe that made her stop in her tracks, smile, and dance, when I said "when you go to kindergarten, Ms. Sitler will teach YOU this song!" and have it be true. I wish we could all wake up from this mess and have it never have happened.
I can't make this make sense, even in my head. It's not because it's just "too soon." This doesn't make sense. I can't and won't package the breathtaking senselessness into some pithy comment. There are so many things I'd like to say about the ex-husband who shot her, but I didn't know him.
I hate that lives come with a hard-end like this. I hate it. But instead of focusing on this hard-end and letting this define Darlene J. Sitler forever in my mind, I want to remember My Music Teacher.
The only way I would have believed that Ms. Sitler was fifty-three is that I remember that I started kindergarten in 1983, and Ms. Sitler was my very first music teacher. She couldn't have been teaching for very long- '83 could have possibly been her rookie year. You wouldn't have known it, though. She greeted my kindergarten class- eighteen boys and six girls- with enthusiasm on our first day of music class. If I'd have known the word back then, the word I would have used to describe her was "a dynamo!!!" exclamation points intentional. She was this petite woman with big almond-shaped brown eyes, and dark curly hair. I remember that day she wore a plaid A-line skirt and a blouse with a floppy tied bow (it was 1983), and... high heels! I remember what Ms. Sitler wore, because I remember thinking "I want to dress just like Ms. Sitler when I grow up!" After 1983 until I was well into high school, she kept her hair in a pixie cut, which really suited her, and as I was usually a short-hair girl, I remember feeling a lot better about my own pixie-cuts, because Ms. Sitler always looked so stylish with her close-cropped hair.
She made the library/art room/music room at the Harrison Valley Elementary School feel just like home!
Now, music class is neat enough to a kindergartener. I mean, you just get to go into the music room and sing and clap your hands?! Awesome sauce! But then a magical thing happened. A couple weeks into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler broke out the box of rhythm sticks, followed by the sandpaper blocks, little miniature cymbals, castanets, maracas, the guiro, and.... THE TRIANGLES!!!
Just at Zoe's birthday party a couple months ago, Colleen and I got laughing like idiots, because Colleen and Lorentz got Zoe a set of musical instruments much like those Ms. Sitler brought to my kindergarten class. In it was a triangle, and I related the story about the day Ms. Sitler brought twenty-four triangles for my kindergarten class, and before she let any of us grab them up in our grubby little mitts, she said "Now, *this* is how you play this musical instrument," and she demonstrated by rapping the metal triangle smartly with the mallet on one of its metal legs, producing a melodious ring. "You don't just run your mallet around the inside of the triangle like *this*," and she proceeded to ding the mallet around the inside of the triangle the way one would clang a dinnerbell hanging on the ranch porch, which of course was the way all of us kindergarteners had seen triangles used. Did we promise not to clang the triangles like dinner-bells? Of course, Ms. Sitler! We won't clang our triangles like dinner-bells!
She handed out the triangles, all two-dozen of them, and we all waited for her cue to rap our triangles smartly on one of the metal legs to produce a melodious ring.
But almost as though it were on-cue, twenty-four kindergarteners clanged the daylights out of our dinnerbells. I mean triangles. I think one little kid who was on his second run-through of Grade K even called out "Come to the table!" while happily clanging his triangle.
Ms. Sitler let us get it out of our systems, the cacophonous clanging, before ensuring that we could, in fact play our triangles the right way!
Halloween was another opportunity for surprise. The music class day nearest Halloween found us meeting Ms. Sitler in the appointed room, and she had ... an autoharp. She turned out all the lights in the room and sat down to play us a special song while she strummed the autoharp:
There was an old woman, all skin and bones
Ooooooo-oooooo-oooo-ooooo
Who lived beside an old graveyard
Oooooooo-woooooooo-ooooo-oooo
The song ends when she opens a door and "BOO!" with just a loud, dischord on the autoharp. I swear I wet my pants a little at the end of the song, when Ms. Sitler went "Boo!" Maybe I wasn't the only one. We ALLLL jumped a little, eighteen boys and six girls.
When our elementary school closed and we headed up to the school on the hill, we learned more things in music class. Ms. Sitler had hand-drawn and laminated flashcards to teach us how to interpret rhythm (quarter notes and eighth notes) "Ball, Ball, Bas-ket Ball!" "Chain, Chain, Dai-sy Chain!" There were other ones, but I don't remember them as well as "Basket Ball" and "Daisy Chain."
In third grade, we got our first taste of Real Musical Instruments, with music we had to read, when out came the white and red plastic Flutofones. Now, looking back, the Flutofones are what convince me that Ms. Sitler was one of the most patient people to walk on this planet. Do you know what a Flutofone sounds like? At their best, they're kind of reedy and shrill. Novice third-graders can't play Flutofones at their best. The noise of them still haunts me. But Ms. Sitler handled the Flutofone Unit with grace and aplomb, every year, every third grade class. The Intermediate Recorder units exposed about the same level of talent and skill, but with a slightly different tone quality.
For those of us who opted in to elementary band and chorus, elementary band, especially, Ms. Sitler demonstrated an even greater capacity for patience, enthusiasm, and encouragement. Now, I have no doubt that elementary chorus really DID sound as much like a choir of angelic voices, as much as we imagined we did. But elementary band... let's be honest. Elementary band is another matter entirely. No matter how great a musician the music teacher is herself, no matter how well she teaches her students to play their instruments, no matter how well she inspires them to really practice their 15 minutes a day, there's a level of playing ability that is the threshold. There's a place that most elementary school musicians get to that is the best they can do for a little while, and even when they reach it, there's a crop of fourth-grade rookies to be contended with. Elementary school bands have their own sound. The boom-chuck of the percussion, the very pronounced notes, the larger-than-life slurs. Accented notes are ACCENTED!!! Multiple-measure rests are counted out with a tapping foot and not-at-all subtle mouthing "One-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four..." There's almost always a "cha-cha-cha" stinger on the end of every song. It's just the way it is, and that's great!
And no matter how awful we'd sound, Ms. Sitler would smile as we were packing up our instruments at the end of band practice and call out "Excellent rehearsal!" It wasn't disingenuous. It was encouraging. Because in elementary school, everybody's talent is embryonic, and you don't snuff out somebody's light before they're even twelve years old. That's what high school's for!
Another thing about Ms. Sitler that I touched on earlier, was that she was one of the most stylish ladies I knew, especially in elementary school. Even back when I was in elementary school, Potter County was a casual place to live. I don't think our school had "jeans Fridays," but instead we had "jeans any day you want to wear 'em" for the teachers. I don't remember seeing Ms. Sitler in jeans much, if ever. Dresses and skirts, stylish sweaters, leggings, yes. She had a knack of being current and up-to-date with her style, so she wouldn't have looked like a hillbilly in other locales besides our school in the cornfield on a hill, without being so cutting-edge that she'd alienate us hillbillies who lived in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers. I guess when you come right down to it, Ms. Sitler had a very strong sense of style, rather than being swayed by fashion.
And then there were her SHOES!!! Her shoes were one of the first things I noticed about her, when I was a kindergartener. Boy, she must have had some shoe collection! I don't think they were anything like Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos, but it was fun to see which shoes Ms. Sitler wore, any given day. I remember being really irritated with my mom one day in sixth grade, for making me wear my snow boots to school, and bring my regular-shoes to change into (they took up valuable space in my backpack, and I was horsing home every school book as well as a French horn!), and when I went to the music room for band practice, I saw tucked under Ms. Sitler's desk a pair of black snowboots with faux-fur peeking out of the tops! Ms. Sitler wore snowboots to school then changed into her cute shoes! Well, then. If Ms. Sitler could wear snowboots to school, I didn't need to feel like a dork when I did!
When I got to high school, whenever I'd buy new shoes (a lot of my allowance money went to buy cheap shoes back then), I'd always run a prospective pair through a "Ms. Sitler Test." Would Ms. Sitler wear these shoes, if she were a high schooler? Yes? Well, okay! Ring me up a pair in each color! One day when my sister was still in elementary school, and I was in eighth or ninth grade, I'd slogged up to the elementary school from the high school, on a sloppy, wet, nasty day, for Girl Scouts or some such nonsense, and as I trudged through the front doors of the school, Ms. Sitler was on her way out for the night. She stopped in her tracks and said in her characteristic enthusiastic voice, "I LOVE those boots!" and then continued on her way out to the parking lot while I had trouble getting my big head through the school doors, swollen up by a compliment from MY style icon! They were neat boots. They were blue rubber boots, and they were technically my mom's. I hijacked them that morning, and after Ms. Sitler said she LOVED them, my mom had a hard time getting them back from me!
It's going to take a long time to come to terms with losing Ms. Sitler the way we did. Our school and our community is never going to be the same. For such a petite, pixie-like woman, she's leaving a huge, open void behind. She was a dynamo. She was beloved. She was so much bigger than how her life's book of Revelation was written. Thousands of kids who grew up to be adults will teach their kids the songs Ms. Sitler used to sing. Thousands of adults who were kids who'd pee themselves a little bit when Ms. Sitler would get to the end of "There Was an Old Woman All Skin and Bones" will sing that song to THEIR kids, with or without an autoharp. (WITH the autoharp is much better, I'm sure!) Ms. Sitler encouraged THOUSANDS of us to follow our dreams, to practice for fifteen minutes every day, not to get discouraged if, after counting out all the beats in a multi-measure rest, you forgot to make your big re-entrance in the song.
THOUSANDS of us are better for having had Darlene Sitler in our lives during elementary school. She was one of the brightest lights, and now we all have a little of that light in us, too. I think the best way we can honor Our Music Teacher is not to let the awful ending to her story define her, but instead remember all the ways she touched our lives. And if we can, encourage each other to be our best. Teach our kids her songs. ENCOURAGE kids. Tell people just what they mean to you, before they're gone. Fan up the little bit of her light that's in us all until all the darkness is gone, until every corner is lit.
Ms. Sitler, I will NEVER forget you. I wish YOU were here to teach Zoe your songs, but I'll teach them to her the best I can. I'll scare the bejeebers out of her at Halloween with the "Skin and Bones" song, and sing "Turkey trot-trot-trot, across the lot-lot-lot" with her at Thanksgiving. Maybe someday, she'll be like us and play the French horn, although I think she's a percussionist at heart. She loves to play the dinnerbell. I mean triangle. But I'll teach her the right way, someday. Maybe if you get a minute while you're Up There, you could take a listen. We'll be listening for glimpses of you!
Love,
April W.
I mean, she'd have to be, teaching elementary school music all these years.
This world makes no sense on days like this, when you hear news like this. It's been over twenty years since I moved on from the Children's School, where Darlene taught, but I still think of her as "my" music teacher. Always have, always will. And just like anybody does, memory freezes the way a person looks, so in your mind's eye, they never change from the last time you were around them lots. The thing of it is, the last time I saw Ms. Sitler, Shane and I were at the elementary school, doing dental exams, and Ms. Sitler peeked her head in the room and said 'hello!' She hadn't changed a bit from the last day I was in sixth grade, in 1990. How about that! I would have liked to have more time to visit with her, to catch up, but we had kids' teeth to document, and she had kids' talents to inspire and encourage.
Just this morning, while Zoe and I were down in the gym, cleaning up from my workout, Zoe got fussy, so I started singing her a song Ms. Sitler had taught my class way back in kindergarten ("I like to eat! I like to eat-eat! I like to eat-eat apples 'n' bananas!"), and Zoe stopped fussing and a big smile broke across her face, and she started dancing. A few hours later, I saw something on my Facebook feed about a shooting in Coudersport, and then after that, I couldn't stop stalking the story to find out who, and what happened, and when, and where.
I really wish I could rewind back to this morning, when I was singing that song to Zoe that made her stop in her tracks, smile, and dance, when I said "when you go to kindergarten, Ms. Sitler will teach YOU this song!" and have it be true. I wish we could all wake up from this mess and have it never have happened.
I can't make this make sense, even in my head. It's not because it's just "too soon." This doesn't make sense. I can't and won't package the breathtaking senselessness into some pithy comment. There are so many things I'd like to say about the ex-husband who shot her, but I didn't know him.
I hate that lives come with a hard-end like this. I hate it. But instead of focusing on this hard-end and letting this define Darlene J. Sitler forever in my mind, I want to remember My Music Teacher.
The only way I would have believed that Ms. Sitler was fifty-three is that I remember that I started kindergarten in 1983, and Ms. Sitler was my very first music teacher. She couldn't have been teaching for very long- '83 could have possibly been her rookie year. You wouldn't have known it, though. She greeted my kindergarten class- eighteen boys and six girls- with enthusiasm on our first day of music class. If I'd have known the word back then, the word I would have used to describe her was "a dynamo!!!" exclamation points intentional. She was this petite woman with big almond-shaped brown eyes, and dark curly hair. I remember that day she wore a plaid A-line skirt and a blouse with a floppy tied bow (it was 1983), and... high heels! I remember what Ms. Sitler wore, because I remember thinking "I want to dress just like Ms. Sitler when I grow up!" After 1983 until I was well into high school, she kept her hair in a pixie cut, which really suited her, and as I was usually a short-hair girl, I remember feeling a lot better about my own pixie-cuts, because Ms. Sitler always looked so stylish with her close-cropped hair.
She made the library/art room/music room at the Harrison Valley Elementary School feel just like home!
Now, music class is neat enough to a kindergartener. I mean, you just get to go into the music room and sing and clap your hands?! Awesome sauce! But then a magical thing happened. A couple weeks into the schoolyear, Ms. Sitler broke out the box of rhythm sticks, followed by the sandpaper blocks, little miniature cymbals, castanets, maracas, the guiro, and.... THE TRIANGLES!!!
Just at Zoe's birthday party a couple months ago, Colleen and I got laughing like idiots, because Colleen and Lorentz got Zoe a set of musical instruments much like those Ms. Sitler brought to my kindergarten class. In it was a triangle, and I related the story about the day Ms. Sitler brought twenty-four triangles for my kindergarten class, and before she let any of us grab them up in our grubby little mitts, she said "Now, *this* is how you play this musical instrument," and she demonstrated by rapping the metal triangle smartly with the mallet on one of its metal legs, producing a melodious ring. "You don't just run your mallet around the inside of the triangle like *this*," and she proceeded to ding the mallet around the inside of the triangle the way one would clang a dinnerbell hanging on the ranch porch, which of course was the way all of us kindergarteners had seen triangles used. Did we promise not to clang the triangles like dinner-bells? Of course, Ms. Sitler! We won't clang our triangles like dinner-bells!
She handed out the triangles, all two-dozen of them, and we all waited for her cue to rap our triangles smartly on one of the metal legs to produce a melodious ring.
But almost as though it were on-cue, twenty-four kindergarteners clanged the daylights out of our dinnerbells. I mean triangles. I think one little kid who was on his second run-through of Grade K even called out "Come to the table!" while happily clanging his triangle.
Ms. Sitler let us get it out of our systems, the cacophonous clanging, before ensuring that we could, in fact play our triangles the right way!
Halloween was another opportunity for surprise. The music class day nearest Halloween found us meeting Ms. Sitler in the appointed room, and she had ... an autoharp. She turned out all the lights in the room and sat down to play us a special song while she strummed the autoharp:
There was an old woman, all skin and bones
Ooooooo-oooooo-oooo-ooooo
Who lived beside an old graveyard
Oooooooo-woooooooo-ooooo-oooo
The song ends when she opens a door and "BOO!" with just a loud, dischord on the autoharp. I swear I wet my pants a little at the end of the song, when Ms. Sitler went "Boo!" Maybe I wasn't the only one. We ALLLL jumped a little, eighteen boys and six girls.
When our elementary school closed and we headed up to the school on the hill, we learned more things in music class. Ms. Sitler had hand-drawn and laminated flashcards to teach us how to interpret rhythm (quarter notes and eighth notes) "Ball, Ball, Bas-ket Ball!" "Chain, Chain, Dai-sy Chain!" There were other ones, but I don't remember them as well as "Basket Ball" and "Daisy Chain."
In third grade, we got our first taste of Real Musical Instruments, with music we had to read, when out came the white and red plastic Flutofones. Now, looking back, the Flutofones are what convince me that Ms. Sitler was one of the most patient people to walk on this planet. Do you know what a Flutofone sounds like? At their best, they're kind of reedy and shrill. Novice third-graders can't play Flutofones at their best. The noise of them still haunts me. But Ms. Sitler handled the Flutofone Unit with grace and aplomb, every year, every third grade class. The Intermediate Recorder units exposed about the same level of talent and skill, but with a slightly different tone quality.
For those of us who opted in to elementary band and chorus, elementary band, especially, Ms. Sitler demonstrated an even greater capacity for patience, enthusiasm, and encouragement. Now, I have no doubt that elementary chorus really DID sound as much like a choir of angelic voices, as much as we imagined we did. But elementary band... let's be honest. Elementary band is another matter entirely. No matter how great a musician the music teacher is herself, no matter how well she teaches her students to play their instruments, no matter how well she inspires them to really practice their 15 minutes a day, there's a level of playing ability that is the threshold. There's a place that most elementary school musicians get to that is the best they can do for a little while, and even when they reach it, there's a crop of fourth-grade rookies to be contended with. Elementary school bands have their own sound. The boom-chuck of the percussion, the very pronounced notes, the larger-than-life slurs. Accented notes are ACCENTED!!! Multiple-measure rests are counted out with a tapping foot and not-at-all subtle mouthing "One-two-three-four, TWO-two-three-four..." There's almost always a "cha-cha-cha" stinger on the end of every song. It's just the way it is, and that's great!
And no matter how awful we'd sound, Ms. Sitler would smile as we were packing up our instruments at the end of band practice and call out "Excellent rehearsal!" It wasn't disingenuous. It was encouraging. Because in elementary school, everybody's talent is embryonic, and you don't snuff out somebody's light before they're even twelve years old. That's what high school's for!
Another thing about Ms. Sitler that I touched on earlier, was that she was one of the most stylish ladies I knew, especially in elementary school. Even back when I was in elementary school, Potter County was a casual place to live. I don't think our school had "jeans Fridays," but instead we had "jeans any day you want to wear 'em" for the teachers. I don't remember seeing Ms. Sitler in jeans much, if ever. Dresses and skirts, stylish sweaters, leggings, yes. She had a knack of being current and up-to-date with her style, so she wouldn't have looked like a hillbilly in other locales besides our school in the cornfield on a hill, without being so cutting-edge that she'd alienate us hillbillies who lived in jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers. I guess when you come right down to it, Ms. Sitler had a very strong sense of style, rather than being swayed by fashion.
And then there were her SHOES!!! Her shoes were one of the first things I noticed about her, when I was a kindergartener. Boy, she must have had some shoe collection! I don't think they were anything like Carrie Bradshaw's Manolos, but it was fun to see which shoes Ms. Sitler wore, any given day. I remember being really irritated with my mom one day in sixth grade, for making me wear my snow boots to school, and bring my regular-shoes to change into (they took up valuable space in my backpack, and I was horsing home every school book as well as a French horn!), and when I went to the music room for band practice, I saw tucked under Ms. Sitler's desk a pair of black snowboots with faux-fur peeking out of the tops! Ms. Sitler wore snowboots to school then changed into her cute shoes! Well, then. If Ms. Sitler could wear snowboots to school, I didn't need to feel like a dork when I did!
When I got to high school, whenever I'd buy new shoes (a lot of my allowance money went to buy cheap shoes back then), I'd always run a prospective pair through a "Ms. Sitler Test." Would Ms. Sitler wear these shoes, if she were a high schooler? Yes? Well, okay! Ring me up a pair in each color! One day when my sister was still in elementary school, and I was in eighth or ninth grade, I'd slogged up to the elementary school from the high school, on a sloppy, wet, nasty day, for Girl Scouts or some such nonsense, and as I trudged through the front doors of the school, Ms. Sitler was on her way out for the night. She stopped in her tracks and said in her characteristic enthusiastic voice, "I LOVE those boots!" and then continued on her way out to the parking lot while I had trouble getting my big head through the school doors, swollen up by a compliment from MY style icon! They were neat boots. They were blue rubber boots, and they were technically my mom's. I hijacked them that morning, and after Ms. Sitler said she LOVED them, my mom had a hard time getting them back from me!
It's going to take a long time to come to terms with losing Ms. Sitler the way we did. Our school and our community is never going to be the same. For such a petite, pixie-like woman, she's leaving a huge, open void behind. She was a dynamo. She was beloved. She was so much bigger than how her life's book of Revelation was written. Thousands of kids who grew up to be adults will teach their kids the songs Ms. Sitler used to sing. Thousands of adults who were kids who'd pee themselves a little bit when Ms. Sitler would get to the end of "There Was an Old Woman All Skin and Bones" will sing that song to THEIR kids, with or without an autoharp. (WITH the autoharp is much better, I'm sure!) Ms. Sitler encouraged THOUSANDS of us to follow our dreams, to practice for fifteen minutes every day, not to get discouraged if, after counting out all the beats in a multi-measure rest, you forgot to make your big re-entrance in the song.
THOUSANDS of us are better for having had Darlene Sitler in our lives during elementary school. She was one of the brightest lights, and now we all have a little of that light in us, too. I think the best way we can honor Our Music Teacher is not to let the awful ending to her story define her, but instead remember all the ways she touched our lives. And if we can, encourage each other to be our best. Teach our kids her songs. ENCOURAGE kids. Tell people just what they mean to you, before they're gone. Fan up the little bit of her light that's in us all until all the darkness is gone, until every corner is lit.
Ms. Sitler, I will NEVER forget you. I wish YOU were here to teach Zoe your songs, but I'll teach them to her the best I can. I'll scare the bejeebers out of her at Halloween with the "Skin and Bones" song, and sing "Turkey trot-trot-trot, across the lot-lot-lot" with her at Thanksgiving. Maybe someday, she'll be like us and play the French horn, although I think she's a percussionist at heart. She loves to play the dinnerbell. I mean triangle. But I'll teach her the right way, someday. Maybe if you get a minute while you're Up There, you could take a listen. We'll be listening for glimpses of you!
Love,
April W.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
It's a Mystery!
I'm a sucker for a mystery box or grab bag. I just can't help myself. Throw a bunch of leftover stuff in a box, slap a question mark on it, and price it under $50, and you're almost sure to get a bite. It's just terrible.
So this week, especially, Craftsy.com has been pimping their "Premium November Mystery Knitting Box" for just $40. It's regularly $100! And in return for two Jacksons and shipping, you get a box of premium knitting needles, notions, yarns, and other miscellany. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've almost ordered myself one or two of these wonders! Yeah, I said "or two." They're discounted sixty percent off, for Pete's sake! I put 'em in my shopping bag then remove 'em at the last second.
I've had mixed success with grab bags and mystery boxes. When Fire Mountain Gems and Beads clean out their bead bins, they throw the leftovers into one-pound bags of "Boss's Bead Bags," and I've come away with a bunch of really great beads and findings I wouldn't have bought, just looking through their catalog. Also, there's something that feeds my creative fire, sitting there sorting a big bag full of beads (because I'd buy multiple BBBs.) I got a lot of really cool things, to be sure, but I also bought a lot of broken bead bits and some beads that looked like they'd spent too much time hanging out at the bottom of the bead bin.
Then I fell for ModCloth's mystery assortment deal earlier this year. For $20, you'd tell them your size and they'd send you a bunch of clothing and accessories they were trying to get rid of. ModCloth is tricky for me. I'm more zaftig than a skinny-ass model, but I'm not really plus-size. Unless I were trying to be a model, in which case, I'm downright corpulent. Anyway, I should have known better. I'm thirty-four, and I think ModCloth caters to the twenty-five and under hipster set. I like their accessories, but the clothing rarely works out for me. So for my money, I came away with a hooded capelet that I might wear, maybe, a seafoam green strapless short dress that's too big for me up top, but almost just right on the bottom, a maroon blouson dress that maybe I'd wear if I were a little thinner, or if I wore maroon dresses, and a black and white short dress. The black's up top, the white's on the bottom. It's my personal way of living never to wear white on the bottom. Too much can go wrong. So in short, Zoe's dress-up box for when she's a little bigger got three, maybe four pieces richer.
Earlier this month, Thirty-One was having their Consultants'-Only Give One, Get One sale, where they sell off the things they've discontinued for really low prices, and then for every one of something I bought, they'd send a thermal tote to a military family. Cool thing, this GOGO sale. Included in the Consultant-Only sale, they had grab-bags for $25. I figured I couldn't go wrong, getting a Thirty-One grab-bag or two. I like everything Thirty-One, as evidenced by my signing on as a consultant. And I think for my $50, I made out pretty well. The only thing that leaves me scratching my head are the packages of Silly Bandz in Thirty-One-Themed Shapes. I never really got into the Silly Bandz craze, because I was over 8 when they were a hit, so I really don't get why Thirty-One had them in the first place, to necessitate discontinuing them and including them in the grab-bag. (They make decent hair-ties in a pinch. That's the nice thing I'll say.)
So back to Craftsy and this November Premium Knitters' Mystery Box of theirs that has me tweaking. There is the siren's call of the Mystery Box, and I admit it's pretty strong. But then. Just a month ago, I went through my ENTIRE yarn stash. It took me ALL DAMN DAY on the Friday after Frankenstorm. I received my first wasp bite, on the ankle, that day, but by the time that happened, I'd already thrown three tantrums at the mountain of yarn my husband carried down into the middle of the living room so I would sort it. The bullet point of this is that I have more than enough yarn. Yarn that I picked out myself, with my own judgement, with my own two hands, with at least an embryonic idea as to what I'd make out of that yarn I bought. And I know exactly which needles I like to use. Addi Turbo circulars, the interchangeable ones if I can, but the regular Addi Turbo circulars as long as I'm not making something huge like an afghan. As for notions, I have a certain kind of stitch marker I like, and the rest just kind of piss me off.
I don't need the damn Premium Knitter's Mystery Box from Craftsy.
The other thing that's stopped me dead in my tracks from buying Crafty's box of wonders (or two) is that in the last half of this year, I've been burnt twice with them and their "Mystery Knitalongs." The idea was you bought into the knit-along for $30, and they gave you access to the month's pattern and sent you enough yarn to complete the project. Disasters, both. The first one, in July, was this washed-out blue fingering weight yarn, meant to make a cowl with a tendril pattern knitted in. The yarn came in a hank, needing to be wound into a ball before I could knit (using both ends of the ball, no less, at once). I've balled many a hank of yarn, so I'm not beginner at that. But I must have pulled the end funny, because I didn't even make one revolution of my winder's handle when my yarn went from neat hank to WTF?! A tangled mess I've yet to sort out. I ended up making my OWN cowl, from a pattern in my head, with some NORO yarn, which was much prettier and more interesting to work than the yarn from Craftsy would have been, even if it hadn't have spontaneously exploded into a spaghetti monster within seconds of being taken out of the mailing envelope.
Then, because I'm thick-skulled, I gave it another go with the Craftsy Knitalong, this time in October. I sent in my $30, they sent me a skein of super-bulky yarn the color of the insides of a sweet potato. I have a lot of affection for the sweet potato, but not much time for super-bulky yarn. I went into the air when I got access to the pattern. It was meant to be a tight-fitting beanie, knit in the round with a cable running up the side.
Really? A whole entire beanie made from super-thick yarn, meant to fit an adult's head? I cast on and then read the reviews from the other unhappy knitalong participators, who'd finished their projects in one night (it was supposed to last the whole month!), and who ran out of yarn before getting to the end of their beanies, and those that did manage to work it out said the beanie was so stretched when worn that it was unattractive. I don't know what kind of pinhead that beanie (one size fits most) was supposed to fit, but I have a big head as adult heads go, so I knew my yarn had no chance as a beanie, so I knitted up a sweet potato-hued short scarf instead. There wasn't really enough yarn for even that, to be honest, and I didn't like the yarn much, working with it, or fiber-wise.
Remembering those incidents, it's easier to walk away from the promise of this November Premium Knitter's Mystery Box. Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. But then part of me says "but the third time's the charm!" There's a chance that I could wind up with a box of really, really good yarn this time around!
More likely, I'd wind up with fugly, impossible-to-work yarn, and needles I can't stand.
This time, I'm being a grown up and walking away. I'm not biting on the bait Craftsy has dangled in front of me. I'm going to distract myself by knitting up an afghan for the daughter of one of my best friends, hopefully in time to send it for her birthday at the end of the month, and then I have a red throw I promised to knit for another best friend and his partner- way back before I was expecting Zoe. And after that, there's an entire of attic of yarn for me and my Addi Turbos to work through. I don't need a Mystery Box this time around! I don't!
So this week, especially, Craftsy.com has been pimping their "Premium November Mystery Knitting Box" for just $40. It's regularly $100! And in return for two Jacksons and shipping, you get a box of premium knitting needles, notions, yarns, and other miscellany. I can't begin to tell you how many times I've almost ordered myself one or two of these wonders! Yeah, I said "or two." They're discounted sixty percent off, for Pete's sake! I put 'em in my shopping bag then remove 'em at the last second.
I've had mixed success with grab bags and mystery boxes. When Fire Mountain Gems and Beads clean out their bead bins, they throw the leftovers into one-pound bags of "Boss's Bead Bags," and I've come away with a bunch of really great beads and findings I wouldn't have bought, just looking through their catalog. Also, there's something that feeds my creative fire, sitting there sorting a big bag full of beads (because I'd buy multiple BBBs.) I got a lot of really cool things, to be sure, but I also bought a lot of broken bead bits and some beads that looked like they'd spent too much time hanging out at the bottom of the bead bin.
Then I fell for ModCloth's mystery assortment deal earlier this year. For $20, you'd tell them your size and they'd send you a bunch of clothing and accessories they were trying to get rid of. ModCloth is tricky for me. I'm more zaftig than a skinny-ass model, but I'm not really plus-size. Unless I were trying to be a model, in which case, I'm downright corpulent. Anyway, I should have known better. I'm thirty-four, and I think ModCloth caters to the twenty-five and under hipster set. I like their accessories, but the clothing rarely works out for me. So for my money, I came away with a hooded capelet that I might wear, maybe, a seafoam green strapless short dress that's too big for me up top, but almost just right on the bottom, a maroon blouson dress that maybe I'd wear if I were a little thinner, or if I wore maroon dresses, and a black and white short dress. The black's up top, the white's on the bottom. It's my personal way of living never to wear white on the bottom. Too much can go wrong. So in short, Zoe's dress-up box for when she's a little bigger got three, maybe four pieces richer.
Earlier this month, Thirty-One was having their Consultants'-Only Give One, Get One sale, where they sell off the things they've discontinued for really low prices, and then for every one of something I bought, they'd send a thermal tote to a military family. Cool thing, this GOGO sale. Included in the Consultant-Only sale, they had grab-bags for $25. I figured I couldn't go wrong, getting a Thirty-One grab-bag or two. I like everything Thirty-One, as evidenced by my signing on as a consultant. And I think for my $50, I made out pretty well. The only thing that leaves me scratching my head are the packages of Silly Bandz in Thirty-One-Themed Shapes. I never really got into the Silly Bandz craze, because I was over 8 when they were a hit, so I really don't get why Thirty-One had them in the first place, to necessitate discontinuing them and including them in the grab-bag. (They make decent hair-ties in a pinch. That's the nice thing I'll say.)
So back to Craftsy and this November Premium Knitters' Mystery Box of theirs that has me tweaking. There is the siren's call of the Mystery Box, and I admit it's pretty strong. But then. Just a month ago, I went through my ENTIRE yarn stash. It took me ALL DAMN DAY on the Friday after Frankenstorm. I received my first wasp bite, on the ankle, that day, but by the time that happened, I'd already thrown three tantrums at the mountain of yarn my husband carried down into the middle of the living room so I would sort it. The bullet point of this is that I have more than enough yarn. Yarn that I picked out myself, with my own judgement, with my own two hands, with at least an embryonic idea as to what I'd make out of that yarn I bought. And I know exactly which needles I like to use. Addi Turbo circulars, the interchangeable ones if I can, but the regular Addi Turbo circulars as long as I'm not making something huge like an afghan. As for notions, I have a certain kind of stitch marker I like, and the rest just kind of piss me off.
I don't need the damn Premium Knitter's Mystery Box from Craftsy.
The other thing that's stopped me dead in my tracks from buying Crafty's box of wonders (or two) is that in the last half of this year, I've been burnt twice with them and their "Mystery Knitalongs." The idea was you bought into the knit-along for $30, and they gave you access to the month's pattern and sent you enough yarn to complete the project. Disasters, both. The first one, in July, was this washed-out blue fingering weight yarn, meant to make a cowl with a tendril pattern knitted in. The yarn came in a hank, needing to be wound into a ball before I could knit (using both ends of the ball, no less, at once). I've balled many a hank of yarn, so I'm not beginner at that. But I must have pulled the end funny, because I didn't even make one revolution of my winder's handle when my yarn went from neat hank to WTF?! A tangled mess I've yet to sort out. I ended up making my OWN cowl, from a pattern in my head, with some NORO yarn, which was much prettier and more interesting to work than the yarn from Craftsy would have been, even if it hadn't have spontaneously exploded into a spaghetti monster within seconds of being taken out of the mailing envelope.
Then, because I'm thick-skulled, I gave it another go with the Craftsy Knitalong, this time in October. I sent in my $30, they sent me a skein of super-bulky yarn the color of the insides of a sweet potato. I have a lot of affection for the sweet potato, but not much time for super-bulky yarn. I went into the air when I got access to the pattern. It was meant to be a tight-fitting beanie, knit in the round with a cable running up the side.
Really? A whole entire beanie made from super-thick yarn, meant to fit an adult's head? I cast on and then read the reviews from the other unhappy knitalong participators, who'd finished their projects in one night (it was supposed to last the whole month!), and who ran out of yarn before getting to the end of their beanies, and those that did manage to work it out said the beanie was so stretched when worn that it was unattractive. I don't know what kind of pinhead that beanie (one size fits most) was supposed to fit, but I have a big head as adult heads go, so I knew my yarn had no chance as a beanie, so I knitted up a sweet potato-hued short scarf instead. There wasn't really enough yarn for even that, to be honest, and I didn't like the yarn much, working with it, or fiber-wise.
Remembering those incidents, it's easier to walk away from the promise of this November Premium Knitter's Mystery Box. Burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me. But then part of me says "but the third time's the charm!" There's a chance that I could wind up with a box of really, really good yarn this time around!
More likely, I'd wind up with fugly, impossible-to-work yarn, and needles I can't stand.
This time, I'm being a grown up and walking away. I'm not biting on the bait Craftsy has dangled in front of me. I'm going to distract myself by knitting up an afghan for the daughter of one of my best friends, hopefully in time to send it for her birthday at the end of the month, and then I have a red throw I promised to knit for another best friend and his partner- way back before I was expecting Zoe. And after that, there's an entire of attic of yarn for me and my Addi Turbos to work through. I don't need a Mystery Box this time around! I don't!
Friday, November 30, 2012
The Kindergarten Christmas Tree
I really mean it that I'm going to put up our Christmas tree this weekend. I really, really do. We have a 9 or 10-footer (our ceilings are 12 feet), with fiber-optic, color-changing lights already installed on it, and then we put regular LED lights on it in addition, because as cool as the fiber-optics look at night, in nearly pitch-black, if there's any other ambient light around, the LEDs look a little washed-out. In years past, I've always decorated the tree with blue, gold, and silver glass balls, mainly, and then filled in with my ornaments from when I was growing up. A big tree like ours can stand up to a TON of ornaments. But with Zoe now a for-real Toddler with a capital T, into everything and faster than Flash Gordon, I can't be putting glass balls on the tree this year.
I'm looking at the prospect of a Very Nekkid Christmas Tree.
So I got thinking that it'd be kind of cool to have one of those silver tinsel trees. I used to think these flashy trees were the apex of cheesiness, but have come to think they're pretty fabulous (Zoe's not the only one who'd be tickled pink with a disco ball for the family room!) I wouldn't want a short little tinsel tree. I'd want one the size of my regular Christmas tree- a 10-footer! Maybe even with one of those lights that shines up on it and changes the color at a soothing speed. And because the tree would be so flashy, it would hardly need any ornaments! I could probably get away with just using my non-glass childhood ornaments!
Thing of it is, at least right now before Christmas, a ten-foot tinsel Christmas tree will set you back a cool grand, plus tax and shipping. And besides that, even if I could find one for $5, I'm pretty sure Shane would HATE IT.
But all this thinking about Christmas trees got me thinking about our kindergarten Christmas tree. I bring this up, because I really was thinking about replicating the tree my kindergarten class made in 1983 this year.
I think the reason it remains so prominent in my mind is that it started out as this giant cone of chicken wire. Now, as I was maybe three feet tall in Grade K, "giant cone of chicken wire" needs to be taken with a grain of salt. In reality, it could have been anywhere from six feet to fifteen feet tall. It seems to me, to this day, that the giant cone of chicken wire extended from the rubber tile floor to the suspended ceiling in our kindergarten room.
I can't remember if the horde of two dozen kindergarteners in my class completed the entire project in one day, or if we stretched it out for a week or so, but we all were put to work fan-folding sheets of green construction paper. Then, after we had our sheet of fan-folded green construction paper, we'd take it to our teacher, she'd staple it smack in the middle, to make a bow-shaped piece, and then open it up and staple each corner of the bow together, to make a fan-folded circle. Then we repeated, until as a class, we made enough fan-folded circles to cover our giant cone of chicken wire, and then we switched production to red construction paper fan-folded bows. Then in an act of magic, we went home, and the next morning when we came back to school, our giant chicken-wire and construction paper cone-tree was finished. And glorious and unbreakable!
If I were going to adapt this tree for my use here at home, I'd definitely make the chicken wire cone giant enough to reach from floor to ceiling in the living room. Instead of red and green construction paper, though, I think I'd use silver foil wrapping paper, with red foil wrapping paper accents and no small amount of flashy light strings.
Of course, that's a lot of fan-folding. And I'd have to do it all myself. Maybe I WILL use this idea one of these years, but I think I'll wait a year or two, until Zoe has the dexterity to fan-fold. It'll be about time she earns her keep around here, after all!
I'm looking at the prospect of a Very Nekkid Christmas Tree.
So I got thinking that it'd be kind of cool to have one of those silver tinsel trees. I used to think these flashy trees were the apex of cheesiness, but have come to think they're pretty fabulous (Zoe's not the only one who'd be tickled pink with a disco ball for the family room!) I wouldn't want a short little tinsel tree. I'd want one the size of my regular Christmas tree- a 10-footer! Maybe even with one of those lights that shines up on it and changes the color at a soothing speed. And because the tree would be so flashy, it would hardly need any ornaments! I could probably get away with just using my non-glass childhood ornaments!
Thing of it is, at least right now before Christmas, a ten-foot tinsel Christmas tree will set you back a cool grand, plus tax and shipping. And besides that, even if I could find one for $5, I'm pretty sure Shane would HATE IT.
But all this thinking about Christmas trees got me thinking about our kindergarten Christmas tree. I bring this up, because I really was thinking about replicating the tree my kindergarten class made in 1983 this year.
I think the reason it remains so prominent in my mind is that it started out as this giant cone of chicken wire. Now, as I was maybe three feet tall in Grade K, "giant cone of chicken wire" needs to be taken with a grain of salt. In reality, it could have been anywhere from six feet to fifteen feet tall. It seems to me, to this day, that the giant cone of chicken wire extended from the rubber tile floor to the suspended ceiling in our kindergarten room.
I can't remember if the horde of two dozen kindergarteners in my class completed the entire project in one day, or if we stretched it out for a week or so, but we all were put to work fan-folding sheets of green construction paper. Then, after we had our sheet of fan-folded green construction paper, we'd take it to our teacher, she'd staple it smack in the middle, to make a bow-shaped piece, and then open it up and staple each corner of the bow together, to make a fan-folded circle. Then we repeated, until as a class, we made enough fan-folded circles to cover our giant cone of chicken wire, and then we switched production to red construction paper fan-folded bows. Then in an act of magic, we went home, and the next morning when we came back to school, our giant chicken-wire and construction paper cone-tree was finished. And glorious and unbreakable!
If I were going to adapt this tree for my use here at home, I'd definitely make the chicken wire cone giant enough to reach from floor to ceiling in the living room. Instead of red and green construction paper, though, I think I'd use silver foil wrapping paper, with red foil wrapping paper accents and no small amount of flashy light strings.
Of course, that's a lot of fan-folding. And I'd have to do it all myself. Maybe I WILL use this idea one of these years, but I think I'll wait a year or two, until Zoe has the dexterity to fan-fold. It'll be about time she earns her keep around here, after all!
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Pedal, Pedal, Pedal
Over the summer, I bought a FitDesk. It's an ultra-portable exercise bike with a big foam desk on the handlebars for setting a laptop, so you can pedal while you surf or do work on the computer. When it arrived, it was in that hot part of the summer, where even raising one's arms overhead brought on an excessive amount of perspiration, so even though I was intrigued by my FitDesk and liked the idea of it, it didn't get much use.
I was in the habit of NOT using my FitDesk for much of the fall, too. Now, I do really well with workout videos and dumbbells. Other fitness equipment I buy, not so much. In my basement, there's a cheap but perfectly fine rowing machine I never use (no video I've found to row along with!), a bigass, not portable upright bike that I bought back at the old house with the best of intentions of riding it while watching TV or reading a book- except the display on it is so big that I can't see above it or around it to watch TV, and reading a book or magazine while riding it didn't work out, either. There's also a giant treadmill down there that very rarely gets used. That one, along with a bigass Bowflex over at the office, can be attributed to Shane's failed forays into fitness ("I'd work out after work on a Bowflex if it was right at the office!" "I could see myself running on a treadmill, if we had one in the house!" Freakin' HAAAAA!)
So I've been a little concerned that my FitDesk was going to join the list of Failed Fitness Equipment we have in the house, until I've managed to pack back on a buncha weight. I DO work out most days, but I think the workout makes me self-righteous about not needing to move much the rest of the day, and it also makes me feel entitled to eating half a jar of Nutella, either with or without toast. Further investigation shows I have no right to wonder how I got porky again.
So, to the FitDesk I went last Thursday, while we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was trying to preemptively burn off the calories I'd eat at dinner. I did my Lumosity Brain Training while riding my FitDesk bike, even banged out a couple blog entries. Actually, I earned a bunch of "Top Five [Personal] Scores" on Lumosity, which I haven't done in a while, doing my brain training, sitting on the couch. Hmmm. Maybe my brain gets fat too, along with my butt, while I just sit on the couch?
There was a side-effect, though, that almost made me stop riding my FitDesk. When I went to pedal on Friday, my butt felt like my sitz bones were going to come right through the glute and fat that covers them up. I looked on Amazon for more comfortable bike seats and didn't see anything I liked. I figured I'd just pedal through the pain, and figure out some way to rig up a pillow or something to the bike seat, or maybe break down and order some padded-butt shorts or something to wear around the house.
I didn't need to, though. I've been riding the bike at different tensions, with the original seat that came with it, for almost a week now. I ride and surf and write when Zoe's down for her naps and I don't have housework that needs immediate attention. I ride the bike while we catch up on our TV shows, time I'd otherwise be lounging on the couch. I think I'm going to give it a go, knitting while riding my bike. I'll call it Xtreme Knitting or something.
It's still a little early to tell how many calories I'm burning, pedaling during time I'd otherwise be expanding on the couch. I know that with losing weight, slow and steady is better (but less exciting) than dramatic weight-loss. I can be patient. One thing I can't do without spilling is eat on the bike. That's another bonus. It's easy to eat while sitting on a sofa!
We'll all just have to stay tuned to see how this turns out. I'm going to keep up with riding my FitDesk, though. And I just got a shiny new book from Oxygen Magazine, loaded with a meal plan. I have high hopes, and while I won't dwell on it, I'll keep anybody posted, when there's something about it to post!
I was in the habit of NOT using my FitDesk for much of the fall, too. Now, I do really well with workout videos and dumbbells. Other fitness equipment I buy, not so much. In my basement, there's a cheap but perfectly fine rowing machine I never use (no video I've found to row along with!), a bigass, not portable upright bike that I bought back at the old house with the best of intentions of riding it while watching TV or reading a book- except the display on it is so big that I can't see above it or around it to watch TV, and reading a book or magazine while riding it didn't work out, either. There's also a giant treadmill down there that very rarely gets used. That one, along with a bigass Bowflex over at the office, can be attributed to Shane's failed forays into fitness ("I'd work out after work on a Bowflex if it was right at the office!" "I could see myself running on a treadmill, if we had one in the house!" Freakin' HAAAAA!)
So I've been a little concerned that my FitDesk was going to join the list of Failed Fitness Equipment we have in the house, until I've managed to pack back on a buncha weight. I DO work out most days, but I think the workout makes me self-righteous about not needing to move much the rest of the day, and it also makes me feel entitled to eating half a jar of Nutella, either with or without toast. Further investigation shows I have no right to wonder how I got porky again.
So, to the FitDesk I went last Thursday, while we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I was trying to preemptively burn off the calories I'd eat at dinner. I did my Lumosity Brain Training while riding my FitDesk bike, even banged out a couple blog entries. Actually, I earned a bunch of "Top Five [Personal] Scores" on Lumosity, which I haven't done in a while, doing my brain training, sitting on the couch. Hmmm. Maybe my brain gets fat too, along with my butt, while I just sit on the couch?
There was a side-effect, though, that almost made me stop riding my FitDesk. When I went to pedal on Friday, my butt felt like my sitz bones were going to come right through the glute and fat that covers them up. I looked on Amazon for more comfortable bike seats and didn't see anything I liked. I figured I'd just pedal through the pain, and figure out some way to rig up a pillow or something to the bike seat, or maybe break down and order some padded-butt shorts or something to wear around the house.
I didn't need to, though. I've been riding the bike at different tensions, with the original seat that came with it, for almost a week now. I ride and surf and write when Zoe's down for her naps and I don't have housework that needs immediate attention. I ride the bike while we catch up on our TV shows, time I'd otherwise be lounging on the couch. I think I'm going to give it a go, knitting while riding my bike. I'll call it Xtreme Knitting or something.
It's still a little early to tell how many calories I'm burning, pedaling during time I'd otherwise be expanding on the couch. I know that with losing weight, slow and steady is better (but less exciting) than dramatic weight-loss. I can be patient. One thing I can't do without spilling is eat on the bike. That's another bonus. It's easy to eat while sitting on a sofa!
We'll all just have to stay tuned to see how this turns out. I'm going to keep up with riding my FitDesk, though. And I just got a shiny new book from Oxygen Magazine, loaded with a meal plan. I have high hopes, and while I won't dwell on it, I'll keep anybody posted, when there's something about it to post!
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Huntin' Season Trophy Pics
I'm not a city girl. I was born and brought up in deer-hunting heaven. The couple years I did live in a city were both exhilarating and alienating. I was glad to get home. I feel more at home in a place where the streets don't wear signs and there aren't streetlights on every corner. I'd rather encounter some redneck with a truck full of hunting rifles than some crackhead with a Glock in the subway. So this isn't coming from some uppity city girl who moved to the country with dreams of opening a home-based jelly factory or anything like that. These are my people. Also, I am not a vegetarian. I eat meat. I know meat doesn't come from a refrigerated, fluorescent-lit case at the store. I know that something has to give up its life in order for me to have meat. I tried being a vegan for a while, and it didn't work out, so to assuage the guilt I feel sometimes, when I get thinking about meat and where it comes from, I've adopted a personal policy where I try not to waste any. I think of the way the Native Americans would use all of the buffalo.
Native Americans didn't try to make themselves feel better about killing and eating the buffalo by saying that animals don't have souls. They'd acknowledge the animal's soul and acknowledge the sacrifice, and that's kind of how I try to see things. I've been around enough animals, from a pet chicken I had in sixth grade, to my pet rabbit I had as a young adult, to my dog Rozzie, to know those animals have souls, so why wouldn't ALL animals, even the ones we eat, have souls. The Amish keep their cows in the pasture across the way, and sometimes, they're out when I walk over to get my mail, and some of those cows come right over to the fence when I walk up. If you could hear me, you'd think I was crazy, but I talk to them about the weather or if there's any juicy gossip going around the pasture that day. I look right in their eyes, and they aren't the cold, dead eyes of a shark. They're warm and sort of intelligent.
Deer, too. Now, being from The Mountains in Pennsylvania, I've cursed my share of deer that have leapt out in front of my car. I've never hit a deer with my car- a bear hit me once- a minor epic tale that culminates in there being not a dent in my Topaz (!) and the bear obviously lumbering off into the night whence it came- but my husband has hit a few deer, and it makes me kind of fear having one or a herd jump out in front of me, and when one does and I escape hitting it, I do let loose a blue cloud of language. But the thing is, I like the deer.
And I know I'm going to irk a lot of people, a lot of my friends when I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. These pictures of the Mighty Hunters, with their dead deer, necks all noodly and tongues lolling all about, eyes open: I fecking hate them. I understand it's a Big Fecking Deal that you killed a deer! I get it! Even if you're hunting from four-wheeler or up a tree stand or for all the feck I know, the passenger seat of your F-150, it does take a little skill to hit a moving deer with a bullet. Guns are beasties to master in their own rite- back in my day, I took Hunter's Safety. I was pretty good with a .22- in target practice. In practice-practice, I couldn't bring myself to shoot even a woodchuck. So I get it. Having the balls to pull that trigger period, let alone hit another living thing, is a Big Fecking Deal, and part of me tips my blaze orange hat to you.
But the pictures of you and your "trophies?" Sorry, but I just don't get why that's the thing to do. It reminds me of those chodes in college who would display the beer can of every beer they drank, in their rooms. I concede that maybe the first deer you get on your first hunting season warrants a picture for the family album, if you have to, just like maybe if it was a special beer, it's okay to save and display the can. But after you're not a rookie anymore? Let's not.
I once read an article in one of my aviator magazines, about the bush pilots in Alaska, and the hunters there. Someone in the article was talking about how the old timers never had their pictures taken with their "trophies" the way modern hunters do, because in their day, hunting was for food and for survival, not for sport, and they felt it was in poor taste to have their pictures taken with dead animals. It all really resonated with me.
So how do I feel about making stuff out of the deer hides? Great! Use every part of the buffalo! What about mounting deer heads in our house to commemorate your big kill? Creepy as all get-out, but hey, again, you're using all the parts, and the antlers make great scarf hooks/necklace hooks/ a place to hang one's hat. It's the pictures I specifically have issues with. If you're going out hunting for the venison, to eat (I grew up eating venison and I think it's great!) then having your picture taken with your kill and plastering it up everywhere makes about as much sense as the guy at the slaughterhouse pausing to pose with the beefers just knocked in the head or shot or however it had its curtains lowered. If you hunt for sport, I hope to God somebody's getting that venison to eat and the hide to make stuff out of, but it makes light of the animal you've taken the life of, holding it up by its antlers and leering into the camera, showing its blood and viscera spilling over the ground, letting its tongue loll out and its lifeless eyes stare straight ahead. Sport, really. What can the deer really do to you? Maybe if it caught you taking a dump in the woods, it could gore you in the ass with its antlers, or kick you, or it could jump out in front of you while you're driving and total your truck, but otherwise, deer are pretty peaceful. Put a deer up against a human with a rifle or a bow, and the human's going to win if the human has any aim at all. How is that sport, really? Survival, sure.
I don't mind hunters. I have a lot of respect for hunters. I like to eat venison. I don't mind other people having the heads mounted in their houses. I own a deerskin coat. I'd rather see deer hunted and used for meat and hide and I guess decoration than see them overpopulate and lie bloating and wasted by the side of the road. Any roadkill breaks my heart, really, but deer especially. But I can't even pretend to be impressed with the huntin' season trophy pics any more than I used to be impressed by the beer cans the chodes thought they needed to display, just to prove that they were old enough or awesome enough or badass enough (if they weren't old enough) to drink beer. Show your kill and yourself a little respect.
And stay safe out there in the woods. A lot of those beer-can-displaying chodes are out there, this time with guns and their coolers full of more beer cans they'll eventually display, so....
Native Americans didn't try to make themselves feel better about killing and eating the buffalo by saying that animals don't have souls. They'd acknowledge the animal's soul and acknowledge the sacrifice, and that's kind of how I try to see things. I've been around enough animals, from a pet chicken I had in sixth grade, to my pet rabbit I had as a young adult, to my dog Rozzie, to know those animals have souls, so why wouldn't ALL animals, even the ones we eat, have souls. The Amish keep their cows in the pasture across the way, and sometimes, they're out when I walk over to get my mail, and some of those cows come right over to the fence when I walk up. If you could hear me, you'd think I was crazy, but I talk to them about the weather or if there's any juicy gossip going around the pasture that day. I look right in their eyes, and they aren't the cold, dead eyes of a shark. They're warm and sort of intelligent.
Deer, too. Now, being from The Mountains in Pennsylvania, I've cursed my share of deer that have leapt out in front of my car. I've never hit a deer with my car- a bear hit me once- a minor epic tale that culminates in there being not a dent in my Topaz (!) and the bear obviously lumbering off into the night whence it came- but my husband has hit a few deer, and it makes me kind of fear having one or a herd jump out in front of me, and when one does and I escape hitting it, I do let loose a blue cloud of language. But the thing is, I like the deer.
And I know I'm going to irk a lot of people, a lot of my friends when I say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. These pictures of the Mighty Hunters, with their dead deer, necks all noodly and tongues lolling all about, eyes open: I fecking hate them. I understand it's a Big Fecking Deal that you killed a deer! I get it! Even if you're hunting from four-wheeler or up a tree stand or for all the feck I know, the passenger seat of your F-150, it does take a little skill to hit a moving deer with a bullet. Guns are beasties to master in their own rite- back in my day, I took Hunter's Safety. I was pretty good with a .22- in target practice. In practice-practice, I couldn't bring myself to shoot even a woodchuck. So I get it. Having the balls to pull that trigger period, let alone hit another living thing, is a Big Fecking Deal, and part of me tips my blaze orange hat to you.
But the pictures of you and your "trophies?" Sorry, but I just don't get why that's the thing to do. It reminds me of those chodes in college who would display the beer can of every beer they drank, in their rooms. I concede that maybe the first deer you get on your first hunting season warrants a picture for the family album, if you have to, just like maybe if it was a special beer, it's okay to save and display the can. But after you're not a rookie anymore? Let's not.
I once read an article in one of my aviator magazines, about the bush pilots in Alaska, and the hunters there. Someone in the article was talking about how the old timers never had their pictures taken with their "trophies" the way modern hunters do, because in their day, hunting was for food and for survival, not for sport, and they felt it was in poor taste to have their pictures taken with dead animals. It all really resonated with me.
So how do I feel about making stuff out of the deer hides? Great! Use every part of the buffalo! What about mounting deer heads in our house to commemorate your big kill? Creepy as all get-out, but hey, again, you're using all the parts, and the antlers make great scarf hooks/necklace hooks/ a place to hang one's hat. It's the pictures I specifically have issues with. If you're going out hunting for the venison, to eat (I grew up eating venison and I think it's great!) then having your picture taken with your kill and plastering it up everywhere makes about as much sense as the guy at the slaughterhouse pausing to pose with the beefers just knocked in the head or shot or however it had its curtains lowered. If you hunt for sport, I hope to God somebody's getting that venison to eat and the hide to make stuff out of, but it makes light of the animal you've taken the life of, holding it up by its antlers and leering into the camera, showing its blood and viscera spilling over the ground, letting its tongue loll out and its lifeless eyes stare straight ahead. Sport, really. What can the deer really do to you? Maybe if it caught you taking a dump in the woods, it could gore you in the ass with its antlers, or kick you, or it could jump out in front of you while you're driving and total your truck, but otherwise, deer are pretty peaceful. Put a deer up against a human with a rifle or a bow, and the human's going to win if the human has any aim at all. How is that sport, really? Survival, sure.
I don't mind hunters. I have a lot of respect for hunters. I like to eat venison. I don't mind other people having the heads mounted in their houses. I own a deerskin coat. I'd rather see deer hunted and used for meat and hide and I guess decoration than see them overpopulate and lie bloating and wasted by the side of the road. Any roadkill breaks my heart, really, but deer especially. But I can't even pretend to be impressed with the huntin' season trophy pics any more than I used to be impressed by the beer cans the chodes thought they needed to display, just to prove that they were old enough or awesome enough or badass enough (if they weren't old enough) to drink beer. Show your kill and yourself a little respect.
And stay safe out there in the woods. A lot of those beer-can-displaying chodes are out there, this time with guns and their coolers full of more beer cans they'll eventually display, so....
Friday, November 23, 2012
Pie Crusts Are Nothing to be Afraid Of!
Ahhhhhhhhhhh! This year's Thanksgiving was a good one! There wasn't one shred of stress, at least not at my house. We didn't host, but still, most years, there's always something. This year was pretty much perfect.
I was in charge of making the pies. This task has fallen to me in recent years, when I haven't hosted the feast (or fiasco, depending on the year), because I have two ovens, and my mom just has the one, and it gets really filled up with the turkey. Usually I cheat and buy the store-bought pie-crusts. I was always Scared to Death of making pastry. It never turned out right for me, and it was just easier to buy a crust, let it warm to room temperature, and gently roll it into the pie plate. But a couple months ago, my friend David held a long-awaited Piecrust Tutorial when we were all visiting our friend Dawn at her new house, and he was so cool and nonchalant about making that piecrust, right out of his head- no recipe cards needed! It revolutionized the way I think about piecrusts. He measured out the flour, and cubed up the butter, then just eyeballed the salt and sugar in the crust. Then he used his HANDS to incorporate the butter into the salt and flour and sugar. His HANDS! Woah! I've always hated using a pastry blender, but I always thought using my hands to make a piecrust would make the piecrust too muxy, like Play-Doh, and also tough. But it's actually easier than using the pastry blender! And then, where I'd always meticulously add in the ice water one tablespoon at a time and still somehow wind up with too much (and then add in more flour and make the dough too dry, so more water, and so-on until things were a Big Mess) David got a measuring cup of ice water and just poured some in. Dawn and I stood there watching him, and as he poured in the ice water, all at once like that, we both audibly gasped. Apparently Dawn's had as much luck with the ice water stage of piecrusts as I have!
But David's pie dough turned out perfect. It went into the fridge to chill for a little bit before he rolled it out. Rolling has always been dicey for me, too. I always end up with torn crusts and sloppy patch jobs. And tough piecrust. I asked David what to do if the piecrust tears, and as he put his crust in the pie plate, it tore. "You don't worry about it," he said, and gently patted it back together as best as he could, then went about filling the pie. He explained that he was all about the "rustic" crust, with the excess dough allowed to fold up and over the filling a bit in an open-face pie, instead of trimming around the edge of the plate and fluting the crust. Revolutionary! I always have trouble with getting things fluted just right, and was never good at the whole fork-fluting bit.
So since that bright September day that David shared his Piecrust Tutorial, I've been practicing, making potpies with different crusts. I made all-butter, as David had, and although mine were good, I thought they were a little too buttery. I'd always been told that lard crusts were the best, but the thought of lard grossed me out. My husband, who took all the biologies our undergrad college offered, set me straight on that when he said lard would be better than Crisco, because Crisco is made of oil, which is meant to be liquid at room temperature, and it's been altered to be solid at room temperature, whereas lard's meant to be solid at room temperature. So I bought a brick of lard (the ice blue boxes in the butter display at Wegmans!) and was surprised to find that it's white. I also figured what the heck? and took a taste. Huh. Pretty much no taste I could discern.
An all-lard crust is different from an all-butter crust. The dough's stickier, and you don't need as much water (errrrrrrrrrrmahgerrrrrrrrrrd- found that tidbit out the hard way as I slipped back into my hyperventilating pie-maker tendencies). The finished product is also verrrrrrrrrrrrrry flaky, but quite fragile. And it doesn't have much taste.
The crusts I made for the Thanksgiving pies, I tried out half lard, half butter, because it's always a really good idea to try out new recipes the day before an important meal! I wanted the flakiness of the lardy crust, but with buttery flavor. Once again, there were some dueling characteristics, a kind of split-personality during the incorporating phase. The buttery bits wanted to be dry, the lardy bits were sticky, they didn't want to be friends much, I added too much water to one batch, just enough to my second, and all the dough spent a little time in the fridge. What came out of the fridge were the easiest-working pie crusts I've ever made myself. I did have one tear some while I was putting it in the plate, but the filling covered up my sloppy patch-job.
They looked so nice in their pie plates that I brushed egg white over the crusts before I put on the foil to keep the edges from blackening in the oven, and weren't they ever going to be picturesque! Except when I peeled off the foil for the last 10 minutes in the oven to tan them up, some parts stuck to the foil (next time, don't let the foil actually touch the piecrust!), and the glossy crusts ripped right off the pie. I might have bawled in other years. This time around, I looked at it as an opportunity to have a sample of the crusts. And they were the perfect balance between flaky and buttery and I know this is going to be the way I make pie crusts from now on, as long as I can get my hands on lard, to mix in with the butter.
As for the ripped crust edges, only two of the pies got it really bad. They might have been hideous, but they tasted great- maybe I could use just a quarter-cup less sugar next time around, for the filling, but other than that, I can't complain.
I'm really glad my friend took the time to demystify pie crusts! I won't be making them all the time- not if I want to be able to wear my own blue jeans in the long term- but I think this is a skill that's worth having. Yeah, I can go to the store and buy up their pie crusts, but to me, buying a pie crust is like driving an automatic car and making pie crusts is like driving stick. It's cool to know how to do, and also really useful, because if you can make your own pie crust or drive stick, you'll never be stranded.
That's how I see it, anyway!
I was in charge of making the pies. This task has fallen to me in recent years, when I haven't hosted the feast (or fiasco, depending on the year), because I have two ovens, and my mom just has the one, and it gets really filled up with the turkey. Usually I cheat and buy the store-bought pie-crusts. I was always Scared to Death of making pastry. It never turned out right for me, and it was just easier to buy a crust, let it warm to room temperature, and gently roll it into the pie plate. But a couple months ago, my friend David held a long-awaited Piecrust Tutorial when we were all visiting our friend Dawn at her new house, and he was so cool and nonchalant about making that piecrust, right out of his head- no recipe cards needed! It revolutionized the way I think about piecrusts. He measured out the flour, and cubed up the butter, then just eyeballed the salt and sugar in the crust. Then he used his HANDS to incorporate the butter into the salt and flour and sugar. His HANDS! Woah! I've always hated using a pastry blender, but I always thought using my hands to make a piecrust would make the piecrust too muxy, like Play-Doh, and also tough. But it's actually easier than using the pastry blender! And then, where I'd always meticulously add in the ice water one tablespoon at a time and still somehow wind up with too much (and then add in more flour and make the dough too dry, so more water, and so-on until things were a Big Mess) David got a measuring cup of ice water and just poured some in. Dawn and I stood there watching him, and as he poured in the ice water, all at once like that, we both audibly gasped. Apparently Dawn's had as much luck with the ice water stage of piecrusts as I have!
But David's pie dough turned out perfect. It went into the fridge to chill for a little bit before he rolled it out. Rolling has always been dicey for me, too. I always end up with torn crusts and sloppy patch jobs. And tough piecrust. I asked David what to do if the piecrust tears, and as he put his crust in the pie plate, it tore. "You don't worry about it," he said, and gently patted it back together as best as he could, then went about filling the pie. He explained that he was all about the "rustic" crust, with the excess dough allowed to fold up and over the filling a bit in an open-face pie, instead of trimming around the edge of the plate and fluting the crust. Revolutionary! I always have trouble with getting things fluted just right, and was never good at the whole fork-fluting bit.
So since that bright September day that David shared his Piecrust Tutorial, I've been practicing, making potpies with different crusts. I made all-butter, as David had, and although mine were good, I thought they were a little too buttery. I'd always been told that lard crusts were the best, but the thought of lard grossed me out. My husband, who took all the biologies our undergrad college offered, set me straight on that when he said lard would be better than Crisco, because Crisco is made of oil, which is meant to be liquid at room temperature, and it's been altered to be solid at room temperature, whereas lard's meant to be solid at room temperature. So I bought a brick of lard (the ice blue boxes in the butter display at Wegmans!) and was surprised to find that it's white. I also figured what the heck? and took a taste. Huh. Pretty much no taste I could discern.
An all-lard crust is different from an all-butter crust. The dough's stickier, and you don't need as much water (errrrrrrrrrrmahgerrrrrrrrrrd- found that tidbit out the hard way as I slipped back into my hyperventilating pie-maker tendencies). The finished product is also verrrrrrrrrrrrrry flaky, but quite fragile. And it doesn't have much taste.
The crusts I made for the Thanksgiving pies, I tried out half lard, half butter, because it's always a really good idea to try out new recipes the day before an important meal! I wanted the flakiness of the lardy crust, but with buttery flavor. Once again, there were some dueling characteristics, a kind of split-personality during the incorporating phase. The buttery bits wanted to be dry, the lardy bits were sticky, they didn't want to be friends much, I added too much water to one batch, just enough to my second, and all the dough spent a little time in the fridge. What came out of the fridge were the easiest-working pie crusts I've ever made myself. I did have one tear some while I was putting it in the plate, but the filling covered up my sloppy patch-job.
They looked so nice in their pie plates that I brushed egg white over the crusts before I put on the foil to keep the edges from blackening in the oven, and weren't they ever going to be picturesque! Except when I peeled off the foil for the last 10 minutes in the oven to tan them up, some parts stuck to the foil (next time, don't let the foil actually touch the piecrust!), and the glossy crusts ripped right off the pie. I might have bawled in other years. This time around, I looked at it as an opportunity to have a sample of the crusts. And they were the perfect balance between flaky and buttery and I know this is going to be the way I make pie crusts from now on, as long as I can get my hands on lard, to mix in with the butter.
As for the ripped crust edges, only two of the pies got it really bad. They might have been hideous, but they tasted great- maybe I could use just a quarter-cup less sugar next time around, for the filling, but other than that, I can't complain.
I'm really glad my friend took the time to demystify pie crusts! I won't be making them all the time- not if I want to be able to wear my own blue jeans in the long term- but I think this is a skill that's worth having. Yeah, I can go to the store and buy up their pie crusts, but to me, buying a pie crust is like driving an automatic car and making pie crusts is like driving stick. It's cool to know how to do, and also really useful, because if you can make your own pie crust or drive stick, you'll never be stranded.
That's how I see it, anyway!
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