How To: Understand Women

I don't know who wrote this because it came to my inbox with no attribution, but I suspect it was written by a man. Strangely enough, my husband was the one who sent it to me and I'm not sure whether I should respond to his email by replying with a cheery "LOL!" or a "Thanks a lot for the funny email" (see caveat attached to #7), heh.

NINE WORDS WOMEN USE

(1) Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

(2) Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

(3) Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.

(4) Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!

(5) Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of nothing.)

(6) That's Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

(7) Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or faint. Just say you're welcome. (I want to add in a caveat here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot' - that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all. DO NOT say 'you're welcome' . that will bring on a 'whatever').
(8) Whatever: Is a woman's way of saying @%$& YOU!

(9) Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to # 3.
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Whatever gets you through the winter

To me, the only inspiring sight I've had this morning -- and I'm trying hard to stay away from all windows and am silently berating the person who, one hundred and thirty years ago, thought it would be a good idea to install many nine-feet-long-by-three-and-a-half-feet-wide windows ALL OVER THE HOUSE, so that no matter where I am, I'm confronted with tracked-up, ugly snow; bare trees shivering against leaden skies; dirty, salt-spattered cars going past with their drivers hunched miserably over the steering wheels, trying to coax some heat from the vents, and oh.....bugger it....I'm just going to walk around with my eyes squeezed shut and bump into the furniture like an idiot -- AS I WAS SAYING, there has been only one inspiring sight this morning.

And that was one of my great-grandmother's old blue pottery mixing bowls, one which I've been told was a wedding gift, making it about ninety-five years old, which Meelyn piled high yesterday with not-yet-completely-ripe mangoes and gorgeously green limes. It makes me feel that there actually is some warmth and sunshine out there somewhere, as we stolid citizens of the Hoosier state hunker down and prepare for an Alberta Clipper to blast us over the next few days.

It really is so pretty. I wish I could make Nicki work so that I could take a picture and show you.

RECIPE: Comforting Beef Pot Pie

This recipe is sort of reminiscent of Shepherd's Pie, only without the mashed potatoes. And it's sort of reminiscent of Roast Beef with Yorkshire Pudding, only without the roast beef. Or, er, the Yorkshire Pudding.

What it mostly is, is one of those Bisquick Impossible Pies that your granny made in the 1940s and I don't care what anyone says, those Impossible Pies are winter comfort food that simply can't be beat. They're easy, too, requiring little thought and many boxes and cans and bags of frozen vegetables, so if you're like me and you'd like to make a hot family meal that requires little energy and forethought, yet yields a tasty meal-in-one that everybody likes, try this one. I made it last Thursday out of some thises and thats I had in the kitchen and got a thumbs-up from the whole gang of them.

COMFORTING BEEF POT PIE

2# ground beef, cooked until no longer pink with one medium sized chopped onion and two cloves of chopped garlic. (Or if it just snowed again and you spilled some latte down the front of your favorite winter coat and the mail consisted of nothing but bills, sprinkle the beef with one teaspoon of onion powder and half a teaspoon of garlic powder and we won't tell Kayte. It will be our little secret. Sssh!)

2 cans cream of mushroom soup

2 cups beef broth

2 packets brown gravy mix

1/2 cup frozen peas and carrots

1/4 cup frozen corn

1/2 teaspoon salt

For biscuit topping:

2 cups Bisquick

one stick of butter, melted

2 cups milk

1 tablespoon dried parsley (optional)

Preheat oven to 400^o. Brown the ground beef in a skillet with the onion and garlic. While this is cooking, put the soups, the beef broth and the packets of brown gravy mix into a 9x13 casserole dish that has been sprayed with non-stick spray. Stir ingredients together into a thick gravy; add the frozen vegetables and salt, stir and set aside.

In a microwave safe mixing bowl, melt the stick of butter. Stir in parsley. Stir in the biscuit mix and milk. Combine all until non-lumpy. Set aside.

When ground beef is completely cooked, drain carefully and then add to soup mixture in casserole dish; stir. Pour biscuit mix over the top (it will be liquidy and will disappear into the meat-and-veggie mixture; that's where the "impossible" part comes in), place in oven and bake for one hour. At the end of this time, the biscuit dough will have cooked and risen to the top of the casserole. Yay! It's like magic! Makes eight servings.

Serve with tall glasses of very cold milk. Leftovers are even better the next day for lunch.

In the horrors

I woke up briefly at 4:45 am, stretched my feet lazily into the depths of the warm bed, and thought, "Mmmmm, Sunday...how delicious! A lovely long day to enjoy, Mass this afternoon, dinner and then early to bed...." I drowsily snuggled my head into my pillow and let my entire body sink back into oblivion.

And then I remembered. My eyes snapped open like old-fashioned roller blinds; my body stiffened, every synapse leaping like a drop of water on a hot griddle. Sunday? No, Monday. MONDAY. Monday in January! How many freaking Mondays come in the month of January? Because it seems like we've had at least eight of them and we're only, what? -- feverishly, I counted on my fingers and stifled a wail -- halfway through the month? The holidays, disappointing as they were, are over and done with and even though we spent the entire two weeks wheezing and hacking and taking one another's temperatures and passing around a snowman-shaped candy dish filled with zinc lozenges and cough drops, at least it was vacation.

I flopped over onto my pillows in despair. Why does there have to be a January? With all the cold and snow and ice and disappointment that there are no more presents or Christmas cookies to be offered (especially those peanut butter ones with the Hershey's kiss perched cheekily in the middle), it has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

I slumped downstairs and turned on the morning news, only to find that snow is expected today with an accumulation of possibly more than an inch. No sun at all, and the house is a cluttered mess from the weekend that makes me twitchy and miserable.

Mondays. Januarys. I must remember that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In particular, I must remember that when I get to about five o'clock this afternoon and my desire to give someone a sharpish clout on the back of the head begins to overtake me. I'm told all mothers feel like this at five o'clock p.m. and that I should just relax and have a cup of tea, and I wish I knew who originally came up with that ridiculous notion, because I would like to give her a sharpish clout on the back of the head. Tea, indeed.

RECIPE: Game Day Salsa and Guacamole Dip

According to my husband, there's been a lot of good football on today, which is something I consider a bit of an oxymoron, as I don't understand how the words "good" and "football" work together, like, at all.

But anyway, he's been very happy today and so have I. I've been fiddling around in the kitchen with two new and very inexpensive but delicious recipes that have made Game Day very festive and fun.

I found the two original recipes on Allrecipes.com and Recipezaar.com and then worked with them until I found what suited our taste.



The first is for homemade salsa. The thing I like about it is that you can make a very nice winter version of this recipe using tiny-dice or pureed canned tomatoes (unless you live someplace where tomatoes are ripe off the vine right now out in your yard, and in that case, just hush yourself -- the rest of us don't need to be taunted with our sub-freezing temps that grow nothing but icicles) and regular canned peaches. You can substitute half of a very ripe large mango for the peaches, if you'd like. Or you can omit the peaches entirely, if you'd like, but I'll warn you -- you'll be missing something special. The peaches take down the insane heat of all those jalapeno peppers very nicely and add a slight hint of sweetness that also removes the extreme acidity from the tomatoes.


SPICY GAME DAY SALSA

2 cans tiny-dice tomatoes OR 2 cans tomato puree (substitute four medium-sized fresh tomatoes, deskinned by dropping them in boiling water for 30 seconds and then plunged into ice water for another 30 seconds; the skin will slip right off)

1 medium onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, diced

juice of one lime

3 fresh jalapeno peppers, finely chopped OR 1/3 cup of sliced jalapenos, finely chopped

2/3 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

1/2 cup canned peaches, drained and chopped OR 1 medium very ripe fresh peach, deskinned (using manner above per tomatoes) and chopped

1 teaspoon sea salt

1/2 teaspoon ground pepper

4 squirts Tobasco sauce


Mix all ingredients together in a medium sized mixing or serving bowl. Cover with cling film and chill in fridge for two hours or so to allow flavors to blend. Serve with tortilla chips, of course!

This makes such a nice, spicy salsa (cut down on the peppers if you don't have cast-iron stomachs like we do) and it is so inexpensive to make. This is good for people like us who do everything but use salsa as hand lotion and hair conditioner. We can eat one big jar of Pace salsa, which is nearly six dollars, in the space of one afternoon.


SPICY GAME DAY GUACAMOLE

I love guacamole so much, and it makes it even better that avocados are so good for you. Every time I eat one, I feel that my complexion is nicer, my hair shinier, my nails longer. Or maybe that's just an excuse to eat the entire bowl of guacamole? Hmm. Must think on this. While I do, here's the recipe:

3 large extremely ripe-to-the-point-of-squooshiness avocados (I like Haas; usually by the time the avocados are ripe enough to make guacamole the way I like it, they've been marked down sharply in the produce department)

juice from one lime

1 medium onion, chopped

1/4 cup tiny-dice canned tomatoes

1/4 cup cilantro, chopped

1 tablespoon jalapeno pepper juice (from jarred jalapenos)

1 teaspoon sea salt


Cut avocados in half, removing pit and scooping avocado meat into a medium mixing bowl. Mash avocado with a fork. Add lime juice and stir. Add remaining ingredients, stirring until well combined. Cover and refrigerate for one or two hours before serving to allow flavors to blend. Serve with tortilla chips or as a filler for tacos, burritos, etc.

Physician's assistant

I was thinking to myself today how lucky all doctors would be if they could all have patients like me, big baby hypochondriacs who have access to WebMD^TM and an obsessive need for self-assessment -- Could that be a lump? Is my tongue coated? Pupils disassociated? Ringing in the ears? A pain in the wrist signifying the onset of carpal tunnel syndrome? Gassy and bloated? -- because I think it would save them all so much time in boring office visits.

Patients like me could just email an enormous list of symptoms, perhaps attached as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, along with an accompanying list of diagnoses. Maybe the spreadsheet would be a better idea, because it could be configured as a check-off list, or perhaps a flow chart.

Maybe the first question on the list the doctor would answer could be: "If you think this patient is a crazy, self-absorbed pain in the gluteus maximus, go to the end of this survey and prescribe a potent anti-anxiety medication and take out a restraining order."

Just a thought I was having on this day, which is a day when I have a queer pain in one foot, an ache in my back teeth that could either mean sinus congestion or maybe ginguticulitis and a peculiarly growly stomach.

Why I teach English instead of Math

British Literature class was canceled yesterday because of roads that were as slick as butter on a doorknob; my husband called anxiously home from work and said he'd seen three slide-offs on his way there and was most ardently hoping that we wouldn't add to their number.

I was kind of bummed because we had to cancel two classes due to illness (mine and Aisling's) and another class due to weather before Christmas and I was worried that we were falling too far behind. But then I had the brilliant thought of sending out an assignment via email so that we could complete the work, which is the study of the Romantic poets, i.e. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I love the Romantic poets, especially Shelley's "Ozymandias" and Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but one of my other favorite poems is one about the most famous of the Romantics and it is called "A Pig's Eye View of Literature" and was written by Dorothy Parker.

The Lives and Times of John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron


Byron and Shelley and Keats
Were a trio of Lyrical treats.
The forehead of Shelley was cluttered with curls,
And Keats never was a descendant of earls,
And Byron walked out with a number of girls,
But it didn't impair the poetical feats
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley,
Of Byron and Shelley and Keats.


Now there's you some great poetry. That Dorothy. You thought she couldn't get any funnier than when she said, "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think" when asked to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence, but you'd probably be wrong. She's also responsible for the saying that seems to be summing up my life in the past five years: "What fresh hell is this?"

Anyhoo, while I was thinking about Byron and Shelley and Keats and sending out the assignment to the students in the class, I was also preparing my presentation for next week, which is titled something like "The Women of British Literature: The Romantic and Victorian Periods." Because can you believe that our entire Brit Lit textbook mentions exactly TWO women writers, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Hello, Brontës? Jane Austen? Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, for heaven's sake? George Eliot? (Look it up if you don't already know, my dears.)

I've been looking forward to this presentation since the beginning of the school year, and in preparation, I've been researching all over the internet to assemble biographies of each of these ladies, synopses of their most famous works, even pictures of them. I was ready.

So yesterday I wanted to get ahead of the game and print out these special packets, which were going to be done on three-hole-punched paper so that they could be put into the girls' folders. I pulled up Microsoft Word, clicked "Print," noted that the document was thirty-five pages long, and asked the printer if it would kindly print five copies. Then I went away and complained about being cold.

I came back to the printer some time later, probably chafing my hands together to warm them, and noticed with alarm that the printer was wheezing and groaning. "Don't mind me. No, really. I'm okay. There's no need for alarm, even though I'm getting ready to DIE RIGHT HERE ON YOUR DESK."

"What?" I asked. "What's wrong and why are you printing out so many pages? Look at you! No wonder you're so tired! They're spilling off the desk onto the floor!"

"I am printing," the printer said through clenched teeth, "the exact number of documents you asked me to print: five copies of a document that is thirty-five pages long."

"No! Wait!" I said, scrambling to pull my Word document back up. "You've got this all wrong! The document is thirty-five pages altogether. So that's five copies that are seven pages each."

"I think if you'll read it more closely, you'll find you're mistaken," the printer said, smiling tightly and crossing its arms in an authoritative, I-know-I'm-right attitude that immediately intimidated me. "And just in case you were wondering, my black cartridge ran out about about ninety pages ago, so all the copies after that aren't even legible."

"Oh, shoot," I said sadly, looking at the blurry sheet that was heaving its way out of the printer just then. "How on earth did I manage to write a thirty-five page document on the women of British literature? That's more like a....like a....master's thesis than an informative piece for high school students to read."

"I feel your pain," said the printer in a manner that told me that he did not only NOT feel my pain, but would actually like to inflict some upon me, if he could work his cables loose enough to launch himself at my head, "but would you MIND clicking STOP PRINTING? Thank you."

So anyway, if you'd ever like to read a really long piece about Jane, Emily and the rest of the ladies, just email me.

Back to school!

In Biology today, Meelyn and I began Module 4, which is the study of Kingdom Fungi, and considering that I once had a fungus on one of my fingernails (stay well away from those do-it-yourself nails, is my solemn recommendation), I went through the assigned pages of reading thinking that maybe that Christmas bologna was going to make its presence known again. Barf.

Aisling came to the living room to say "The woman is cold" in Spanish, which was a statement of actual fact, since I was wrapped up in a fleece throw on the couch. I think I mentioned that the heating/cooling man never came yesterday, so it has tended to get a bit chilly in here as we have set and re-set and re-re-set the thermostat manually. It's 1:32 pm as I am typing and he just got here about ten minutes ago, which turned out to be awesome timing, as I was just getting ready to bash the smug, temperamental thing with a hammer for not releasing the heat I need to warm my weary bones. We keep this barn at about 66⁰, so it doesn't seem like too much to ask for the furnace and the thermostat to get their crap together and do their frikkin' JOB.

I let him go down to the basement where the furnace lives with a warning about the vampires, but I didn't tell him about the mummies because it took him so long to get here and I was kind of ticked. I hope he fixes the furnaces before they GET HIM.

Everything else has been business as usual: vocabulary, grammar, religion, algebra, etc. and it seems that it's gone rather smoothly for the first day back. We might squeeze in a little SAT prep, which I'd like to do twice a week. I'm really kind of pleased at how easily the girls have gone back to their studies: most of the day's whining has been done by me as I've groused about the cold.

You'd think it was January or something.

Just for the fun of it all, here's my back-to-school post from January 8, 2008

How'd that happen?

Actually, I know how it happened. I'd just finished applying about a half-gallon of moisturizer to my aged skin, and I guess my fingers were still a little bit slickery.

So when I took the top off my little bottle of foundation and shook it upside down to bring the makeup down to my fingers, the bottle suddenly flew out of my grasp and sailed high up into the air and across the bedroom, looking like something Ty Cobb might have flung, with deadly accuracy, at home plate.

Only, of course, as the bottle merrily twirled its way through the room, it was dispensing copious amounts of Cool Beige on the pale yellow matelasse coverlet, my clothes, the folded quilt that sits on the end of the bed, some clean laundry that was sitting on the little table at the end of the bed and the carpet. It almost took out my husband's clean and carefully pressed white dress shirt, which he had just put on, still warm from the iron, but he did this incredible, slow-motion Matrix-like movement where his entire body moved in a backwards arc, his legs kicking up in the air and his arms going out in front of him so that he was momentarily suspended in the air, shaped like the letter C.

"Nice moves, Neo," I said, laughing really hard.

"Geez, what happened?" he asked incredulously, picking up the bottle and surveying the damage. It looked like a L'Oréal factory had just exploded.

"I was shaking the bottle and it flew out of my hand," I replied, dabbing at my eyes and feeling thankful that I hadn't yet put on mascara. Because, ouch? There's nothing like a little mascara in your eyes to make you understand that it could be used as an effective substitute for tear gas, if rioters would be willing to come up close to the police, have their eyelashes coated and then get a spritz of water right in the face.

"Is it safe to give this back to you?" he asked, holding the makeup bottle out to me gingerly. "You know, you might want to try shaking it with the lid on, Grace."

I tried to get my husband to do his Letter C maneuver again, but he huffily told me that it was a one off and that I should quit joking around and trying to show him how he looked and get busy helping him clean up the mess.

Epiphany Day!

This is the twelfth day of the Christmas season, our final day of feasting and merriment (and vacation), which I celebrated by waking up at 6:45 and not being able to go back to sleep. Isn't that the way it always is on the last day of vacation?

Meelyn, Aisling and I endured the tedium of thehouse all day, suffering from a peculiar conundrum: Applesauce Anne was in the shop getting her serpentine belt fixed and the mechanics had her there all day long, so we couldn't go anywhere. And we deeply and truly wanted to go somewhere, because there's something wrong with the furnace's thermostat and I kept having to reset it every twenty-five minutes so that we wouldn't freeze.

It was a very dull and uncomfortable day, made even more so by the fact that Anne was gone all day, yet was never repaired, and that the furnace guy didn't show up. Kind of par for the course for this vacation. You cannot believe how GLAD I AM to be done with this past two weeks. Any more "vacation" and I won't be responsible for my actions. The only thing about this day that redeemed it from being a total stinker was the fact that Carol sent a box of gifts so crammed full of goodies and presents, it was practically bursting at the seams.

The Christmas tree comes down tomorrow, as do all the decorations except for the snowmen. The Advent candles are burned down to little stumps, and frankly, I'm just a little tired of looking at the rest of the junk. I feel very rueful that this Christmas doesn't have many happy memories attached to it, but I guess they all can't be candy canes and sugarplums.

The three Nativities will be with us until Candlemas on February 2 and then they'll all be boxed up for another year.

Looking back on the past twelve days-plus-three, I'd say that these things were the highlights:

1. Seeing my parents, even though they gave us the bologna virus

2. Going to midnight Mass

3. Having Christmas Eve with Grandad, who was well for the first time in the last four Christmases

4. Spending New Year's Eve with Beth, Jim and the rest of the gang

5. Getting that huge gift box from Carol today

6. Going to Gary and Katie's Epiphany party

7. Getting to spend time with Kieren and Dayden

Now, see! Look what a glass-is-half-empty kind of person I am. You should just back your eyes right up and forget you ever read this post. Here I was thinking that this Christmas didn't have very many happy memories and there I thought of seven things, right off the top of my head!

Scary

My husband came home yesterday with the news that a local Ford dealership, a family-owned-and-operated place that has been open for probably thirty years or so -- has gone into bankruptcy. It's so bad that family members' homes have been put on the market.

It's impossible to hear news like this and not have a chill of fear run through me, centering itself right in the back of my neck, where it sometimes feels like my third vertebrae is being gripped by a really big set of pliers. Pliers that have been left out in the snow.

Last year, early on, I wrote a long piece titled Reality Cheque about our financial situation and our decision to homeschool the girls despite the hardships we go through. At the time I wrote it, I was buoyed up by a fierce resolve to soldier on despite the many looming obstacles -- or, in reality, the one looming obstacle, which is and has been for the past eight years or so, money and the lack thereof.

But somewhere along the line last winter/early spring, I lost that fierceness. Oh, we definitely continued homeschooling. There was no change there. But a terrible change came inside me. I was very depressed, very bleak, very angry with God. Through His merciful patience, I made my way back from that grim place and by the beginning of the summer, I felt like myself again. This occurrence coincided with my husband's new job (the dealership where he used to work has since closed down, another casualty of the economy) and the fact that he was finally making some money so that we were able to start catching up on the rent, which we had fallen behind on, as well as a few other things. But it seemed that we'd finally made it past that really bad period when Applesauce Anne threw a rod and my parents lent us Buddy the Blazer, whose transmission ungratefully conked out and then our computer's hard drive melted as well as a number of other petty and not-so-petty annoyances that make up modern life in a fallen world.

Well, here we are in the winter again and financially, things are worse than they've ever been. I sometimes merrily think to myself that I, touchingly naive, believed we'd hit rock bottom when we had to declare bankruptcy ourselves a few years back, but as it turns out, that was mere topsoil. Rock bottom was still a good ways down, I am deeply chagrined to acknowledge.

So here's my thing: I DO NOT WANT TO GO back to that bad place in my head again this year, that place where I am convinced that God has abandoned us and that Jesus doesn't love us anymore because of all those dumb emails I deleted (except the ones from Carol, because the ones she send always seem to be pertinent to my issssshewwwwwws). So far, I made it through the Christmas season with good cheer and hopefulness intact, despite the fact that we could only afford to spend about $25 on each of the girls and $12 on each other on presents. And despite the fact that we were all spewing vomit (or worse), coming down with infections and fevers and making casual drop-ins at the doctor's office or the city's urgent care center, where they now know members of my family by name. With all of that going on, I think it's miraculous that I'm not in a tastefully decorated home right now, confined to a bed with rails on the sides, muttering unintelligibly, becoming lucid only long enough to bark at some harried nurse to bring me more drugs.

Now I need to get through the rest of the winter and I admit to you right now that I am uneasily wondering what it has in store for us. Car sales are what you might call "slow." Our tax check is a long time coming, and it is already promised to the rental office. We're still using Pat and Angie's computer. Applesauce Anne is in the shop today getting something done with her serpentine belt, which sounds like an accessory to me, but obviously is more important than as just a fashionable item, because she screams like a banshee about that belt whenever we drive her, poor girl. I'm thinking that serpentine belts must be something more along the lines of a limb, the way she's acting.

One of the few comforts I have is that we're in this mess with a lot of other people (although it makes me feel very small and mean that I even have those thoughts) because everyone else in the grocery store is walking around looking like they just woke up from a nightmare and discovered that it was real.

I hope that God will help us all persevere in faith and bring us through these difficult times.

Another one bites the dust

The Christmas holidays are nearly over -- Tuesday marks Ephiphany Day with the Last Gift of the Season for the girls, as well as a big, rowdy feast (maybe lasagna?) -- and all I can say is THANK HEAVEN. Because if the Christmas gladness went on any longer, who knows how many members of the family would wind up in urgent care?

Angie is the latest member of the family to go down like a bowling pin. Pat took her to a quick med center last Wednesday with sublingual glands "the size of golf balls," as he put it.

We had the boys over on New Year's Day for a massive taco feast and cards (me and the teens), computer games (Dayden), football (my husband) and sleeping blissfully stretched out over the entire surface area of the couch (Wimzie and Hershey). Dayden asked for that Thanksgiving favorite, a cheese taco.

"You put it in the microwave," he explained after asking anxiously if we had any Velveeta cheese in the house. We did, which was very good, but what he doesn't know is that I love him so much, I would have gone out to buy some if we hadn't had any, but there's no need for him to know that. He would only use that information to wheedle huge amounts of candy out of me. "You take a long square piece of Velveeta and put it on a tortilla and fold the tortilla and melt the cheese. And then I eat it."

"A 'long square'?" I teased. "Don't you mean a rectangle?"

He eyed me beadily. "No. I mean a long square."

"Sorry," I said, chastened.

We took Kieren (who was wearing the Aeropostale thermal shirt we got him for Christmas) and Dayden home late that evening and I slipped in to say hello to Angie: She was on the sofa covered with a crocheted blanket, looking wan and pale, but said with something of her old spirit, "I didn't know you were coming in! I look awful!"

It was the first time in a week I'd actually seen her with her eyes open and without a look of acute suffering on her face, so I think she's making excellent progress. Although unfortunately perhaps using up all her sick days at work for the entire year, which, of course, has only just begun.

I've heard of people speak of "surviving the holidays" before, but this seems a bit much.