No foolin'

We moved into our house four years ago today, and a happy four years it has been.

Four years ago, I went to bed in this house for the first time and I already knew I loved it -- I just wasn't sure if it would love me back. I had, after all, spoken disparagingly about its basement. And I looked askance at the practicality of having big, huge rooms with a meagre one or two electrical outlets each, but those things paled in comparison to the fact that the house was full of light with its big windows and tall ceilings and that it had a subtle air of quiet happiness about it, contentment and well-being. We could hear church bells ringing the hours when the windows were open, and children playing outdoors. It felt so full of peace. That was something we all really needed at the time, having just gone through the screaming, churning hell of bankruptcy and foreclosure; we needed a place to rest and regroup and sort ourselves out.

This house has been a wonderful place to do the sorting. This has been, so far, the best place I've ever lived.

How To: Infuriate Me by Holding My Check

Six weeks ago, we had the piano tuned for Aisling's benefit. Oh, why be such a liar? Okay, I also had the piano tuned for my benefit because it hadn't been tuned for seven years and some of the songs she was playing were so discordant by ears began to bleed and then just fell right off onto the floor, kind of like that scene from Blue Velvet.

Anyway, it cost $80 and I paid the piano tuner with a check and then promptly forgot all about it because I was kind of busy getting my ears re-attached.

That $80 was IN THE BANK on the day I wrote the check. It stayed there for days and days thereafter. But time marched on and the check wasn't cashed and then it marched a little further and still no check and by the time that particular rousing John Phillips Sousa was finished, so was my bank balance.

I spoke to the piano tuner's mother on the phone -- she happens to be Aisling's lovely piano teacher -- who said to me in a deprecating manner, "I don't know if you know this, but Brad's check bounced and that cost him $37.50 in fees from his bank and you know, that also puts his account in jeopardy because of checks he's written and...."

I had to stop listening then, I really did. Because I truly admire and respect Aisling's piano teacher, I really do. But FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE!!! Why -- WHY WHY WHY? -- would anyone who has been paid for a service like piano tuning or leaf raking or transmission repairing or whatever HOLD ONTO A CHECK FOR SIX WEEKS BEFORE CASHING IT?

Don't people need the money? I'm trying to imagine living the kind of life where I wouldn't be out the back door in one hot second, leaping into the car and slinging gravel out of the driveway to cash a check for ten frikkin' dollars and....nope. No, I can't do it. I can do a lot of other things with my imagination, like wondering what that thing was I just saw out of the corner of my eye or if that bump on my arm is a mosquito bite or skin cancer or if the pains from food poisoning will be as horrible as I suspect they will if I eat the rest of that taco meat that's been in the fridge for over a week, but I just can't imagine not cashing an $80 check as soon as it touched my hot little hands.

I know good and well that the bank isn't going to see it my way. I am a nonentity to them. But if they cared, I would tell them (and maybe Brad, too) that a person who holds onto a paper check for SIX WEEKS in this age of instant banking with online bill pay and debit cards and PayPal is just begging to find some insufficient funds a-waiting when he finally works up the energy to go to the bank and endorse that personal check.

So now I still owe him $80, plus the $37.50 in ISF fees his bank charged him. And I know quite, quite well that our bank is going to demand its own pound of flesh and that I'm going to be paying them $37.50 as well. Which makes that original $80 payment, which I thought was so very reasonable, all of a sudden a little more dear than I'd intended it to be.

When I was collecting money for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival trip last year, I recall a few times when I held people's checks for a few weeks because I was waiting for everyone to get paid up and, because I am not a numbers kind of girl, I knew I'd be confused if I took one person's check and deposited it at one branch and then got another check a few days later and deposited it at another branch....you see my difficulty. It is very, very hard for me to count higher than ten because I run out of fingers: I can only count to eleven because I have a nose and I'm too stout to be always with the bending over and taking off my shoes and socks, although my most arithmatick time of year is the summer because I'm always wearing sandals...ANYWAY, I wanted to make it as easy on myself as possible.

But now I see that that might not have been all that easy on my traveling companions. So Virginia, Jerri, Michelle and Katie, if I held your checks for too long, I am very sorry.

We'll see how this goes

Edited to Add: I forgot to mention that this meatload -- and yes, I spelled that correctly and ON PURPOSE -- was made of turkey because it is cheaper than the ground beef and pork sausage I usually use. Oh, yeah....and it was the worst meatload I have ever eaten. Very dry, very bland. I felt like Oliver Twist or maybe Sara Crewe with every bite I ate.

We're a little bit poor-ish this week, due to several bills that have come in all at once, in that dismaying way they tend to do, usually coinciding with the weeks that my husband's commission checks are not all that robust.

So tonight, I am making a meatloaf for dinner that contains more "loaf" than "meat." Should I call it Loafmeat, then? Hmmm... I am all for truth in advertising, but that might be pushing it a bit.

I think it's telling that I just accidentally typed the word "meatload" in the first sentence of the above paragraph. Huh.

Extra whole wheat bread was employed as filler, plus a half a cup of ground flaxseed. Instead of the usual two eggs, I cracked a third 'un into the mix, hoping that would help things stay stuck together so that this would look like dinner instead of breakfast.

I considered throwing in some oatmeal and even thought about tossing in some Frito crumbs left in the bottom of the bag that my husband was snacking on yesterday. I also have recourse to some bran cereal and a box of Cheerios, but the thought of eating anything too cerealy with ketchup sauce on it made me feel a bit throwy-uppy, so we'll just see.

Sending the kids back to college

We have hugged and kissed and waved goodbye to Poppy and Nanny, who left Indiana today and made it as far as Missouri before running into crummy weather. This necessitated an overnight stop and Cracker Barrel figured in there somewhere, because when we called to find out where they were, that's where they were: At a Cracker Barrel in Missouri getting served something fattening and delicious.

We here back in the Hoosier state are looking at getting life back to normal for the next three weeks, when Poppy and Nanny will be making a weekend appearance for Meelyn's sixteenth birthday party -- they're flying in on a strange route that goes from Colorado Springs to Minnesota to Indianapolis, poor things, but Meelyn is over the moon that they're coming home.

Until then, we have tomorrow. It is supposed to be cold and cloudy, with snow flurries, in spite of all the daffodils, crocuses and pansies that are dotted about. Which just goes to show you that Mother Nature is a bitter old hag with a mean streak wider than the infield at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

So to keep our spirits up, I'm going to bake a French Yogurt Cake with Marmalade Glaze from Dorie Greenspan's cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours. Its primary flavor is lemon, which is my favorite flavor for cakes, pies, cookies and whatever else. I thought it sounded spring-like. Kayte told me that it was both easy and delicious, so I think I'll try it, although I'm hedging a little on the marmalade glaze: I'm thinking about making either the lemon cream or lemon curd recipes that Dorie offers in the book because they sound so awesome.

I have a real urge to do another Julia Chicken, maybe with some newpotatoes and a pretty little butter lettuce salad with some homemade croutons, all full of garlicky goodness. But my husband said the word "chili" in a longing sort of voice, so I don't know. I may make it for him because this could be the last time we have chili until next fall.

Here's something I found out this week: I make better noodles than the Amish ladies who make and package them up in Nappanee. Who knew? The Indiana Amish homemakers are the gold standard to which all other Indiana cooks compare themselves. When I made beef and noodles the other night (combining a nice beef roast simmered for hours with seasonings and some red wine) and a package of Amish noodles, my entire family agreed that mine are better. So see! All that time I spent in my youth breathing heavily through my nose and watching Grandma Houser roll out her homemade noodles to the thinnest thin sort of thinniness paid off, especially when I found out entirely by accident that they're a lot easier to cut if you use a pizza wheel.

Here's another thing: St. Anne's groundbreaking ceremony for the new church is at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon in New Castle. I wish they were going to have better weather, but at least they have this bit of progress to look forward to. Three years is a long time to have Mass in the basement of the parish hall with the Blessed Sacrament locked up in a safe. The new church has a price tag of 4.4 mil and I'm sure it will be a lovely place.

I have taken a verbal beating from my brother

I have just been run through the mill by Pat for not knowing how to turn on my dad's laptop computer, despite the fact that he knows that I do not have a laptop computer of my own, since the computer that I do use is a desktop model that belongs to him, being the same one he lent me last May.

Kids are okay; jams and jellies around the world clamor for vintage dates

I am happy to report that eating last century's apple jelly has not harmed my darling nephews, Kieren and Dayden, nor has it inflicted my adorable niece, Kiersi, with some kind of unpleasant gastrointestinal distress.

So now I'm thinking that wine collectors around the world should start rethinking that expensive hobby and converting their cellars and caves into jelly-storage facilities. I can just imagine what the tastings would be like, with the cool air below ground redolent with the smell of toasting English muffins and bagels. Ahhhhhh! A rotund man picks up a piece of toast, enjoying the sensation of melted butter dripping down his fingers, and inhales the sweet scent of a nice 1999 cherry preserve. "Notes of almond!" he says rapturously. "Fruity, with a hint of oak! Made from cherries picked at the height of the season, just after the morning dew evaporated from the tree's leaves!"

He would then bite into the toast and roll it around in his mouth, which could possibly lead to unfortunate choking incidents, so we'll have to be careful with that.

I also like the idea of jelly sommeliers presenting diners with those dinky little jars of jam and sophisticated confiturophiles tasting and then elegantly drawling, "Myself, I prefer a nice, sharp 2002 Robertson's lemon curd, although I did have an extremely piquant currant once that was quite tempting, and I believe it was just a 2005 Knott's Berry Farm. But on the other side of the coin, I had the most delicate fig preserves last year. It was at my mother's house on Christmas morning and I asked her where on earth she'd found it. Turns out, she'd snapped it up in the international foods aisle of SuperTarget a couple of years back. Bonne Maman! Product of France!"

Hacked by Catholic haters

I'm very sorry to say that my blog has apparently been hacked by some for realz Christians from BibleCollegeOnline.com. Some readers -- including me -- have found that in typing in my web address, they're being taken there instead of here. On their obnoxious website they feature a "Catholic Desk" that tells you, predictably enough, that according to Scripture, the Roman Catholic Church is the Great Whore of Babylon, along with all the other usual stuff about Boniface III being made the first pope, which is something I would probably find very funny if it didn't make me feel so completely weary. Haters, do you realize that if Boniface III had been the first pope, HE WOULD BE BONIFACE THE FIRST?

You big dummies. I mean, really. Is this truly what passes for scholarship in some Protestant places?

If you're typing in my web address, which is http://www.insomnimom.blogspot.com/ and you're being taken to the BibleCollegeOnline, just go to Google and type InsomniMom in the search field. I'm listed there and you can come and read via that route until I can contact Blogger and have them fix the problem.

Better yet, just bookmark this site right now. That'll work!

This time it's APPLES

Nanny and Poppy are safely home from Colorado Springs for a week of spring break, and this time, they didn't bring some kind of bologna virus, for which we were all grateful.

All of us gathered at their house today for lunch, which is the first time we'd been there since December 28 for my husband's birthday "party." I'm calling it a "party" because all of us were too weak to be very festive, sitting there with our grey faces and sunken eyes, toasting one another with glasses of Pepto-Bismal and flat Sprite and snacking on Cold-Eeze lozenges from the candy dishes my mom had sitting around.

The Christmas tree was still up in the family room.

"So that's what it looked like," said Kieren. "I wasn't here on Christmas morning."

"You were eating bologna sandwiches at home," said Aisling helpfully.

"Yeah, I know. Thanks for reminding me."

"It doesn't matter, because we were eating them here," Meelyn sighed.

"I wasn't eating bologna," said Pat. "I had a very nice breakfast, with the casserole and the cinnamon rolls and the fresh-squeezed orange juice and the coffee. It was very delicious."

Several pairs of narrowed eyes swiveled in his direction. He cleared his throat. "Of course, I wasn't really able to enjoy it fully, because I was so sad that the rest of you were sick."

It was at this moment that Dayden saved his father from a richly-deserved smackdown by asking for jelly for his biscuit. My mother retrieved a new jar of strawberry preserves from her pantry shelves, but when my dad opened it, there was no sound of the vaccuum seal popping open. Poppy unscrewed the lid and looked inside to find that approximately one tablespoon of preserves had been used from the jar. We all concluded that it had been put back on the pantry shelves instead of into the refrigerator by mistake sometime last December.

"That was my favorite kind, too," Poppy said sadly.

Dayden mourned the loss of the jelly by saying that he doesn't LIKE just BUTTER on his BISCUIT; he likes to HAVE some JELLY and my brother and sister-in-law explained to him that jelly cannot be formed out of thin air because you'd at least need some fruit. And some sugar and a large pot. And maybe some canning jars. Or you could just cut to the chase and drive to the market and pick up a jar of Smuckers, whatever.

My mom, ever the Compleat Nanny, went back to the pantry and returned with a jar of apple jelly, which she held up triumphantly. "HERE you go, darling!" she said, applying herself industriously to the opening of the jar, which with my mother means that she added a lot of dramatic flair, such as bending halfway over and struggling with the jar as if she were trying to unscrew the head of a live possum, oooofing and arrrrghing and panting until my father finally held out his hand and said, "Please."

She gave it to him and he opened it with ease; she automatically said "I loosened it up for you" and my father rolled his eyes. He handed the jar to Kieren, who put jelly on his own biscuit and then gave it to Dayden, who spooned out enough jelly to cover pieces of buttered toast laid end to end from from Arizona to, I don't know, maybe Nova Scotia. And by that time, Kiersi wanted some too. All in all, the jelly was a big hit, and my mother beamed happily.

It wasn't until later, when Pat, Angie and I were cleaning up the kitchen that Pat said, "Ohhhh, geeez. Look at the expiration date on this jelly jar's lid."

He held out the jar with a curious mix of laughter and bug-eyed horror on his face; I took it from him and read "Best if used by 4-10-2001." I counted backwards on my fingers and said, "Eeewwwww...."

"What's wrong?" asked my dad. "Is it about to expire?"

"About to expire!" yelled Pat, "That jelly is almost as old as Dayden!"

"Actually," I said, "it's probably closer to being as old as Aisling, see, because the expiration date would've been for a couple of years before 2001..."

"My KIDS are about to expire!" Pat said. He smelled the jelly and declared it smelled like apples.

"Apples from what century?" I asked anxiously. "Should we call Poison Control?"

It was eventually decided that we'd all just watch the kids very closely. Dayden did come in from playing outside to throw himself beside me on the couch for a foot rub, saying that his stomach hurt. All the blood immediately left my brain with a sucking whoooooosh until he revealed that he'd just eaten a large bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce, drunk a can of Coke and then jumped up and down many times. Once I was finished with the smelling salts, I allowed that jumping up and down after the consumption of ice cream and soda pop could make a guy feel a bit uneasy in the midsection.

They all seemed fine for the rest of the afternoon. I will keep you all posted, and if they all continue to be fine, we can all add jelly to the list of things we store on hand in case of snow emergencies and have no electricity to use stoves, crock-pots or microwaves. We can all eat bread smeared with ancient jelly and not worry a bit about sell-by dates.

You go ahead and make your sandwich first, though. I'll make mine later. After you eat yours.

Il dolce libri

Today, I read one of the most exuberant and charming lines I think I have ever read in a book:

"What a happy woman I am, living in a garden, with books, babies, birds and
flowers and plenty of leisure to enjoy them."

That bit of loveliness was taken from the semi-autobiographical novel Elizabeth and Her German Garden, written by Elizabeth von Arnim, who was actually the Countess von Arnim-Schlagenthin, although she was born Mary Annette Beauchamp and nicknamed "May" by her family. Keeping all that in mind, you might understand why, in her first book and nineteen other novels, she simply published them with no name at all. All that dickering around with names would have left the poor exhausted woman with no time to write.

At any rate, that simple sentence, once read, rung in my head like a little golden bell, striking the kind of note that enchants and soothes my mind all at once. Or maybe that sentence was like a morsel of something so delicious, it had to be savored very slowly, each word a different level of flavor, layered together in a taste so complete, it was as good as a meal in itself, a meal for the eyes and the mind.

There are certain phrases in books that do that to me and make for a gorgeous bit of reading. It doesn't always have to come from a novel; I have found phrases that make me feel happy in the Divine Office, in Julia's cookbooks, in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, St. John Vianney. As far as serious writers go, I've found lines in J.D. Salinger (but not in The Catcher in the Rye, which is a book I simply do not like) and Shirley Jackson, although I've also found them in books by Maeve Binchy and J. K. Rowling. Agatha Christie treated me to several in her fabulous autobiography.

And then there were those childhood friends down in Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee and Truman Capote; both of them have penned phrases that can wrench you so deep with beautiful pain that you almost have to lay your head down on the pages for a moment, just willing yourself to breathe, do Lord.

And of course, there are also children's books that have sublime bits, like Antoine de St. Exupery's Le Petit Prince and Margery Williams's The Velveteen Rabbit. And Racketty-Packetty House by Frances Hodgson Burnett -- how I love that book. I know this may seem unkind, but it's hard for me to imagine that the same woman who wrote about the twee Cedric, the chirpy, curly-haired twit in Little Lord Fauntleroy, was the same person who sternly wrote in Racketty-Packetty House, "[Fairies] never call or leave their cards at a dolls' house where the dolls are proud or bad tempered. They are very particular. If you are conceited or ill-tempered yourself, you will never know a fairy as long as you live" and named the dolls things like Victoria Leopoldina and Aurelia Matilda. I can't resist it. It's so much fun, it makes me shiver every time I pick the book up.

Meelyn, who, don't get me wrong, can stick her face in front of a TV with the best of them, once said to me at around six years old, "What do people do who don't like to read?"

I've never really been around people who didn't like reading. My husband didn't read much for pleasure when we first got married because he said he had to read all day at work and was sick of it. But he gradually succumbed and now gets very nervous when he's down to the last thirty pages of his current book. He likes to have a new book sitting on his bedside table, ready and waiting for him.

My parents both read almost constantly, my mother carrying on with different books in different parts of the house: one by her seat in the family room, one in the living room by the fireplace, one at her bedside, one in the kitchen. I find this behavior slightly fickle and tell her that some day, those books will all find out about each other and cast off their bookmarks all at once.

My two grandmothers, the dearest companions of my childhood, both read a lot: When my Nanny died and my mother and I were wretchedly clearning her belongings out of her apartment, we were able to smile as we hauled about six boxes crammed with Harlequin romances out of her bedroom closet. My other grandmother, Ma, read everything she could get her hands on and then passed it on to me, although she begged me not to tell my mother that she'd let me read Shelley Winters's autobiography when I was about twelve, which not only included numerous uses of the eff word, but also detailed descriptions of Ms. Winters's smoldering affairs with several of Hollywood's Leading Men, including a snippet of information about Errol Flynn that intrigues me to this day. Ma hadn't been playing close attention when I asked her, "Can I borrow this book about this Shelley person?" She said yes, absentmindedly, and then her conscience smote her about two weeks later when I had long since finished the book, and she happened to remember just how racy it was.

So I don't know what people do who don't like to read. "Maybe they play a lot of solitaire," I said doubtfully to Meelyn. "Or crochet nine-patch afghans? Or join square-dancing clubs?"

I am so happy that I found a new beloved book today.

RECIPE: Parmesan-Garlic Tilapia

Thankfully, my husband works such insane retail hours, we don't sit down for dinner until 8:30 p.m., so when I wrote that post earlier today about not knowing what I was going to cook, I was actually not too terribly worried because it was five hours until everyone was expecting me to start shoving casserole dishes into the oven (or, perhaps more to the point, shoving cardboard platters of On-Cor Family Size Salisbury Steaks into the microwave.)

[Brief pause...]

Kayte, I am just kidding. I do not serve those nasty things to my family, although I used to, back in those halcyon days before you looked at me with big, sad eyes and said, "Oh, Shelley. Shelley. Please. Please, don't buy those awful things," which is around the same time you started giggling when I asked, in innocent surprise, "Whaddaya mean, Kraft doesn't make good cheese? What is good cheese, if not Kraft?" until you realized I was serious. And then you fainted.

[Resuming....]

So anyway, I figured I still had time to burn. I sat myself down upon the couch with a cup of tea at my elbow and my book propped on my lap and read cozily until oh-my-freakin'-gosh, it was 6:30.

So I went to the kitchen and prayed for some kind of magic to happen, which it didn't. St. Zita, where are you, girl? Then I opened the freezer door and a bag of frozen edamame came flying out as if self-propelled and hit me in the head, which didn't seem magical either. But then, when I picked the edamame bag up off the floor and started to stick it back into the freezer, I saw some flash-frozen tilapia. Yippee!!!

Problem solved!

I love tilapia because it goes with just about anything. I love flash-frozen tilapia because it tastes so good and is so easy to prepare, requiring all of fifteen minutes in a moderate oven. And I love being able to make something for dinner that everybody enjoys and which also looks as if I spent a lot of time cooking it. Which is kind of the complete opposite of the Julia Principle, which is make something for dinner that everybody enjoys, but which took seventeen hours to prepare, albeit with easily obtainable ingredients.

I think Julia would have liked this recipe, though.

PARMESAN-GARLIC TILAPIA

4-6 frozen tilapia filets

2 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon water

1 cup whole wheat bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
4 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
a bit of dried parsley, for sprinkling

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 375^o

Break the eggs into a shallow pan (I used a cake pan) and beat, add the water to combine. In a separate shallow pan (another cake pan, natch) pour the melted butter and then add the remaining ingredients, stirring to combine. This mixture will be very thick and a bit clumpy.

Rinse the tilapia filets in a bit of cold water and pat dry with a towel. Place each filet in the egg wash and then place it in the bread crumb-butter mixture, pressing the crumbs onto the top of the filet. Transfer the filet to a baking sheet that has been lightly oiled; repeat the process with the remaining filets. Sprinkle some dried parsley on the top of each filet.

Place the baking sheet in the heated oven and bake the filets for 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven and serve immediately with some lemon pepper. These filets are very pretty and make a nice presentation, being not at all pale and fishy and nekkid-looking.

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

We really do live in an amazing neighborhood, this historic preservation jealously guarded by the National Historic Register, which means I have to get special permission to paint my back steps their original color (dark red, very attractive with our butter-colored house) and which also means that some of the houses are so gorgeously well-maintained with their Victorian paint colors and their immaculate gardens that our house is almost embarrassed to be near them, and some houses so unutterably dreadful that a self-respecting meth cooker wouldn't squat there.

Our house, which is just a plain old mid-Victorian gentleman's residence, sits on a corner. It was built, in its current elevation, in about 1880 or thereabouts, although our living room, which boasts walls nearly eighteen inches thick, was originally constructed as a log cabin in the 1830s, according to the former owner. And then there's the basement, which looks like it's been there since Dracula was a young lad, cruising the strip with his friend, Ra Ankh-Hamen, whose internal organs were removed from his body and put into decorative canopic jars shortly before his corpse was wrapped in fine linen. I don't go down there, because mummies and vampires? I do not care to mix with their ilk.

The house next door to us is actually an apartment building, constructed in the 1920s. Back then, it was built as an upper and a lower, with the most amazing tiled fireplaces and built in bookcases and china cupboards and little leaded-glass windows on either side of the chimney piece. The same man who used to own our house also owned this apartment building, and he cleverly divided the upper and lower flats into four separate apartments, the two front apartments being large two bedroom places with the original wood floors, refinished and glossed to within an inch of their lives, and two studio apartments 'round back where the servants' and tradesmen's entrances used to be, and those were intended to serve students at the local university.

Our house is separated from the apartment building by a very narrow driveway, juuuust wide enough for Anne to creep down, hugging her side mirrors all up around her ears, as it were. This passage was originally intended only for a buggy, so it's understandable that a plump girl like Anne might find it a bit of a squeeze. The buggy shed, which used to sit behind our house in a state of wanton disrepair, was torn down in order to make room for the parking of modern cars, since it, with room only to house the buggy and the horse that drew it, was not deep enough for a newer car. While it's always nice to have an artistic horse around the place, it would be wrong to have a tumbledown building out back just for him and his easel, oil pastels and gum erasers, which would mean we'd have to park our cars on the roof.

You might wonder if I have a point to all this, and if I do, when I'm ever going to get around to letting you know what it is, so I'll tell you that this piece is about our neighbor in the lower apartment next door and her deplorable tendency to peek out of her bathroom window and into our kitchen and dining room.

This young woman and her husband and baby moved into the lower apartment a few months ago. They're a nice young couple, quiet and pleasant. This past winter, when I was outside with the dogs, she came out to sweep the snow off her generous front porch and confided to me in a honey-and-peaches accent which ended every statement in a question that she was from Florida? And had never seen snow like this before? I apologized on behalf of the entire Hoosier state and told her that this amount of snow was uncommon even for us, and that I fervently hoped neither she nor I would ever see this much again.

She seemed nice enough.

Three weeks ago on a Saturday, the girls and I were getting ready to leave for Mass, which involves a lot of gathering up of music books, and urging Aisling to hurry and urging Meelyn to stop yelling at Aisling to hurry up, and reminding Aisling to put on her shoes, and reminding Meelyn that she is not Aisling's mother and if anyone is going to yell at Aisling for trying to leave the house wearing pink pig bedroom slippers, it will be me.

Meelyn and I were standing in the kitchen and Aisling was in the kitchen, with the swinging door open between the two rooms, and I was in mid-flow in my speech about how if Aisling would put her shoes where they belonged, she'd be able to find them when she needed them, when all of a sudden, Aisling said, "Look at that lady!"

Meelyn and I looked where Aisling was pointing, and sure enough, there was our neighbor, framed by her bathroom window, gazing into our house and at us with unabashed frankness. Well, until she perceived that we could see her just as clearly as she could see us; as soon as our heads swiveled in her direction, her mouth formed a round O of horror and she immediately dropped out of sight below the windowsill. I presume she made her way out of the bathroom by crawling on hands and knees, for we saw no more of her after that.

One week to the day later, I was at the kitchen table with my back to the window, eating a bowl of tomato soup for my lunch. I was already dressed for Mass, and since I knew that a slurp of soup would be attracted to the front of my nice top the way paper clips are attracted to magnets, I had taken the precaution of tucking a kitchen towel in the neck of my blouse. It's a good thing I had, too, because just before I stood up to get another bowl of soup, I spilled a spoonful right down the very front of me, making myself look something like a gunshot victim.

I turned around to go to the stove when my attention was arrested by the fact that someone was watching as I dabbed ineffectually at my bosom. You know how you get that weird, prickly feeling? Well, I had it, so my head snapped up and I met the eyes of my neighbor across the way, looking in at my discomfiture, soup running down my front and a bowl in my hand.

Again, she got that look on her face that clearly said "Busted!!!!" I was rendered extremely peevish by this -- who does this girl think she is? Harriet-the-friggin'-Spy? -- especially at being caught at wearing a messy bib and being greedy over my soup. I reached over and smartly switched the window blind closed.

Closing the blind is not a permanent solution, though, because my kitchen is as dark as the Black Hole of Calcutta, only not as dangerous. It was built, of course, in a time when the thing that was done in a kitchen was cooking, whereas the homes of today often combine an entertainment feature as part of their kitcheny goodness. All I can say is that if anyone wants to come out and sit at the table and watch me roast red peppers or peel potatoes, they're welcome to do so, and there's a jar on top of the microwave requesting donations for my Paint the Kitchen a Tuscan Sort of Yellow Project. That should brighten things up.

So the blind is open. Right now, for instance, it is open. And, I couldn't help but notice just a few hours ago, so is the neighbors' bathroom window. As I was sitting here typing while Meelyn and Aisling were at the YMCA, I caught her at it again -- standing there as bold as brass, watching me type.

Finally, I decided that I'd just let her look. Heaven knows, it's always nice to find someone who finds you fascinating. So I jazzed up the typing, flinging my hands into the air in a theatrical manner, as if I were playing some difficult but transcendant piece on a Steinway concert grand instead of on a Dell computer keyboard. I mussed my hair into an artistic disarray and bent forward, with my nose so close, I could have typed QWERTY with it, then throwing my head back and typing like a virtuoso, helped along by Johann Christian Cannabich's Symphony No. 57 in E Flat Major, which was pouring like wine and sunshine through the speakers in the living room.

Oh, I put on a show, I did. If she's going to be such a Stary Mary, she might as well get some entertainment value for it.

I'm thinking about having my husband build a marquee above my kitchen window, with lights, and announcing daily performances:

LIVE! TONIGHT FROM THE KITCHEN! MEELYN AND AISLING DO THE DISHES!

TUESDAY AT 3:00 PM - DON'T MISS SHELLEY SCRATCHING HER UNDERARM WHILE READING THE LIST OF INGREDIENTS FOR A NEW BREAD RECIPE!

Or, more to the point:

WATCH SHELLEY TYPE A POST ON HER BLOG ABOUT YOUR MANNERLESS, NOSEY PARKER ANTICS.

Although come to think of it, she's already seen that. I don't want to go into re-runs quite so soon.

This does not bode well for a pleasant evening....

It is 2:03 p.m. as I type this, and I have just realized that I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA what we are going to have for dinner. I just went out to the utility room and gazed thoughtfully at the large plastic bin the dog food is stored in and wondered if I could get away with making some pastry -- and I've become a dab hand at that since last summer -- and calling it something fabulous like nourriture pour chien dans la croûte.

I mean, the dog food is, according to the bag it came in, a nourishing mixture of lamb, rice and vegetables. I think that sounds perfectly delicious, don't you?