Valancy's Place

Beautiful dinner at La Casa Sena in Santa Fe last night. It was a chance to meet up with an old friend of C's, meet her fiance, and generally chat with her friends. We were seated at a lovely, long table in a beautiful old-style plaza courtyard lit with faery lights that took over delighting us when we could no longer see the flowers as the sun set. The company was equally lovely, a variety of intelligent and interesting people; I adored the older woman across from me, her stories of visiting Paris in the fifties and interest in the world. I even think I may take her up on an offer to visit her garden, a garden so lovely and big it has been listed on house tours. Everyone was wonderfully dressed as well, and the food was quite good (and C's latte genuinely divine; I stole a sip); one of those beautiful evenings that felt plucked from a movie and sprinkled with stardust.

The past two weeks have been a delight and a shock. I could with very little prompting enumerate a dozen miserable pregnancy symptoms, but without the crippling nausea, which has almost entirely disappeared, I feel comparatively great. The only part I can't quite adjust to is the pain; it's minor, but is pretty constant. Since focusing on it would just be depressing, I've simply ignored it as best I can.

That sounds depressing, but I realize in fact that I may be the happiest I've ever been. There's a fair dollop of frustration in there because of the pregnancy challenges, but there are so many good things right now that I can mostly ignore it it. C & I have never been happier as a couple, and we are deliriously happy to have made it this far in the pregnancy without "real" problems (my blood pressure, heart, kidneys, and blood sugar look shockingly good). To our surprise, we have also found ourselves increasingly unworried and relaxed about the whirlwind a child is expected to bring; being older first-time parents, we've weathered enough storms to figure this is just one more exciting time that we'll get through and adjust to.

In fact, we find ourselves oddly more confident the further we get in the pregnancy about every decision we make. Even silly things, like shelves, which have lingered for two years in the decision-making, we solved in a two-minute discussion the other day. Everything is simultaneously less important and more important; I worry less about things that used to bother me tremendously, and feel incredibly grateful for the real important things, those Thanksgiving-table things of family, food on the table, a dog, a home.

The only part I really worry about is that everything is so us-centric right now. I am just now reaching the point where I can get more than the essentials done; I do tire easily, but it's a far more normal kind of tiredness, not that forced-march haze of exhaustion that lasted for months. The problem is, I'm still catching up. I've gotten the house mostly in order, but the yard is bordering on the city getting called, and the list of to-do's - the urgent ones alone - is intimidating. As a result, my personal work and friends are rather neglected. I don't like this, but I find I haven't yet the energy to change it. I'm hoping that once we get just a few more things knocked out, I'll be able to spare a little more mental space.

I recently caught Tremors on TV and I was astonished by how much I enjoyed it. I stayed to watch it because I knew I was fond of it, but even still. (This would be especially amusing to my family, who recall it as the first movie that absolutely terrified me. I think I was 9.)

It's imperfect, of course; kills off the non-white guy, white guys prevail, questionable "Texas" accents, etc. But it's also purely good popcorn fun, the perfect guilty pleasure, with the added bonus of characters who are tough, smart, and work together to defeat the monster. (Have you ever had such fun as when gun enthusiasts Reba McEntire & hubby empty their entire arsenal into the evil worm monster? I always rewind that scene.) It's that rare horror (well, comedy/horror) film where the characters are rewarded for thinking things through, being smart, preparing appropriately, and working together.

I struggle with most horror movies - not only because I'm a wimp with visual horror (horror I can read, but watching is tough), but also because I get so frustrated. I'll never forgot watching The Grudge with my mother - in the theater, no less - and at the end, when the heroine watches her beloved boyfriend/fiance/whatever he was being murdered by the most pathetic looking monster you have ever seen while standing about five feet from her, my mother - who never speaks during movies - spoke out, "Do something! I'm nearly 70 years old and *I* could take that thing out!" Gotta say, really broke the tension. (For the record, we almost had the theater to ourselves.)

And Tremors doesn't do that. In fact, they come up not with one or two team plans, but plan after plan after plan as they adjust to contingincies. Monsters are underground? Go somewhere that dulls the vibrations and be quiet while we plan. Monsters figure out we're here? Get up on the roof. Monsters starting to tear down the building? Distract it with a tractor while you get a giant piece of construction equipment too big for even the monsters to eat and get everyone on it. Monster builds a trap to stop their progress? Ok, time to go fishing with dynamite...and on and on.

At the end, it's Kevin Bacon (gotta love him) and his plan of running to the edge of a cliff so the monster blindly tunnels off it to careen to its death that wins the day; not self-sacrifice or stupidity or sheer dumb luck. When do we get to see that anymore? I did see Chronicle this weekend and absolutely loved it. Not perfect, but some really gorgeous interaction, great dialogue, and superb performances by all the young stars. (And such a pleasure to see FNL's Michael B. Jordan again.) Come to think of it, it may be the best superhero movie I've seen; one of the most thoughtful, certainly. But even that movie focused on mostly bad decisions - albeit ones I could completely see the characters making. I sometimes feel I'd be willing to trade a little quality for a little teamwork.

I realized this week, to my amusement, that though I have no memory for lyrics, no head for direction, and hardly any recollection of poetry past original reading, food sticks with me. If you say eggs, I think of The Hours (raw), The Runaway Bride (various) or Angela's Ashes (boiled). Bread is A Wedding for Bella; baked potatoes, The Secret Garden. (I always feel so lucky to have butter and salt and pepper for my baked potatoes.) Lobster is L'Engle's Ring of Endless Light, goat cheese Heidi...the list goes on and on. My refrigerator is a cornucopia of references.

I suppose I shouldnt be surprised; cooking is a pretty fundamental part of who I am. But I am still wonderfully amused.

The past few days have been challenging, to be sure, as we've tried to find food and snacks that do not include anything the husband is definitively or potentially allergic to during this elimination diet time - gluten (celiac disease: no messing around), corn, rice, soy, almost all nuts, white beans, eggs (unless baked in in small amounts), and peas. Plus, he's not allowed processed sugar or alcohol due to his liver right now. Throw in the fact that he doesn't like mussels, celery, or black-eyed peas, doesn't like eating the same thing repeatedly (except smoothies), and the fact that he has to lose another 20 pounds, and good heavens, it is tough.

Thus, we are our library's most faithful cookbook borrowers. In our latest venture, I was looking through all the many, many forgotten cookbooks (such a curious time machine, that aisle) and discovered, to my delight, the Irish Heritage Cookbook. About a quarter-second after I remembered that the Irish have one of the highest rates of celiac disease in the world, I grabbed it with glee.

The book is a delight. It is filled with many unusual ingredients (well, unusual to me), but I'm trying to be flexible, and there are so many recipes to choose from that are naturally gluten, corn, rice, and soy-free. They cleverly use oatmeal (which I can buy gluten-free) to "bread" many of their items; "pies" made with potato toppings are naturally perfect. The heavy use of milk (which he is NOT allergic to), game, and fish are all perfect fits, even if I will have to drive across town to the only place that sells duck, kidneys, liver, etc. The salads are also unusual and rely on leeks, cabbage, chard, and other not-just-lettuce bases, and the roasted zucchini with parmesan and butter on top is such pure, simple magic I could cry with relief. There are even several desserts he can eat, like Apple Snow, once his blood sugar is doing better.

We are ordering our own copy immediately; I feel better just holding it. Wonderful Ireland!

Spring suddenly seems relentless. We're bewildered by its early, early arrival, and the winds are already getting started, but I confess I love the warmth in my feet. I hardly need socks, and Koko has taking to sleeping in the sunlight near the windows rather than huddling under blankets. The air feels bright.

While in Boston, I was introduced to the marvelous Wise and Otherwise, a game where you are provided the first half of a unique saying, and then must write down a clever ending. After each person takes a stab at it, the answers are read aloud, and you guess which is the actual correct one.

If it sounds easy, it's not; the sayings are remarkably obscure and frequently bewildering out of their culture context, certainly as odd as anything you could pull out of a hat yourself. As a result, it's reall a contest of cleverness where everyone tries to create deep, meaningful, or simply funny sayings.

On that introductory day, we had a particularly excellent group and really marvelous sayings developed. Some it's hard to explain - funny due to family in-jokes - but others are just generally fabulous. A few of my favorites that we created (not the actual sayings), for posterity.



Abstain from abstinence.
Don't open your mouth until you've thought three times.
Dry bread, go home.
Dry bread softens in a pig.
It is easy to mount the tiger's head, but less so the tiger.
Moscow has seen her share of spice peddlars.

The other day, C and I stopped at our favorite taco place and grabbed a few tacos to go. It was New Year's eve, so they were closing early, and we loaded up the condiments (really fabulous stuff, every kind of sauce or salsa and pickled carrots and onions and peppers...) and popped into the car. He remembered we were near some kind of park or nature walk, and unsurprisingly, he found it quickly through a dizzying array of little back roads. We parked in front of a blank field and, it being quite chilly outside, began to eat.

Occasionally we'd see someone walking their dog or out with their family, and a few of the dogs (a beautiful Samoyed in particular) caught our attention. But on the whole, we were entranced by the field. In our twenty-some minutes there, we saw a kestrel (very close), a flock of geese, a glorious flocks of sand cranes, and all the usual little birds whose names escape us dance about and eat and honk and hunt and silently glide. Stunning. What a perfect way to start off the new year.

In an amazingly domestic attempt to bulk up our (my) recipe repertoire, I've been spending hours each week digging through cookbooks, magazines, and online catalogues trying to find new dinners - preferably fast ones. Easy as it sounds, recipe bowling has become kind of an extreme sport in our house. No gluten, no mammals (he's trying to change that), no peanuts, no eggs, no cannellini or lima beans, no adventurous seafood (I'm trying to change that), getting tired of chicken and turkey, under an hour...it's paragliding, with measuring cups.

As a result, I've tried some strange things in attempting to get us out of our spaghetti-caldo-Tejas salad rut, notably a Norwegian fish stew that was the cuisine equivalent of swimming with sharks, but last night I may have hit a new level of weird. I don't know what I was thinking with a recipe composed mostly of broccoli rabe, chickpeas, and ricotta, but hey, it was sauteed, it was fast, and it didn't have one of our official No foods.

"This is tasteless," I said, about three bites in. "More red pepper? Lemon? Salt? No. It's just...this doesn't...work."

"So I can not like it?" my husband said, hopefully. Poor guy. He looked like he was being tortured. We both tried a few more half-hearted bites, but finally I removed the crime and made a steak for him in restitution.

On the upside, he's decided to cook tonight. And I do love spaghetti.

After our success last year, we were certain our garden this year would be tremendous. Doubled in size! Extra fertilizer! More green!

Alas. With fall here, I've had to come to terms with the fact that our poor wee garden won't be producing much. Eggplant production has been virtually nill, ditto with the squash, and while not all our tomatoes died, the remaining survivors are dying a slow death from verticillium. Despite all that, it's a cheery sight; the flowers and herbs we tossed in as why-not are really quite pretty, and the green bean vines are darling, even though I don't think they will ever, ever produce a dratted bean.

(Though, of course, if you were judging our garden by greenness, if the weeds counted, I think we might win a city-wide prize. This weekend I pulled five giant garbage bags' worth, and I've the battle wounds to prove it.)

Fall, at least, has brought consolation prizes. While I'm nervous back in choir (surrounded by far superior singers), I enjoy it, and the church ESL classes are a real joy. One of our students is testing for citizenship this year, and we are so excited we can hardly stand it.