TygerTyger

I had one sweeeet birthday.

10. Talked to Zack! Yippee!

9. The man and I have, I think, after 2+ years of being married, finally reached an agreement about the ring issue. I wear on the appropriate finger a ring he gave me, that my friend in Japan designed and made for me, for my birthday several years ago. He wears no jewelry at all and would prefer to keep it that way. We can’t afford any rings anyhow. And yet we have both thought there should be something. I think we finally settled on what that should be.

8. The asparagus has finally deigned to show itself. I spent a long, hard day getting that shit in the ground, and I was beginning to fear it would never respond to my ministrations. Finally! it has. Altogether, our garden is rocking. There are also many weeds growing in it that are edible, including two spinach relatives and one type of salsify. Yum.

7. T’s parents called me from Japan to wish me happy birthday. They have never previously done so, and they don’t usually call for T’s birthday either. I seriously doubt they will call for his birthday this year either. Anyway, it was nice of them.

6. My mom babysat the kid for us all afternoon and evening. My mom was thrilled; the kid was thrilled. We were able to see a movie (in a theater!) and have dinner (sushi!) and actual conversations that were uninterrupted by shrieks and howls and requests for me to, once again, sing “mata aeru hi made.” Wow, conversation with my husband. I had almost forgotten he was capable of speech.

5. Sushi for dinner. The sushi was pretty good, although the effect was somewhat dimmed by my husband’s commentary: “Why do Americans insist on putting avocado in sushi? Why do Americans put the nori inside the roll? This is powdered wasabi. Do Americans put the nori inside the roll so that it doesn’t stick to their teeth? Americans are really obsessed with their teeth. This soy sauce tastes strange.” And so forth.

4. My husband totally didn’t think I was insane when I launched into my theory of Japan and Japanese people. It was less pretentious than it sounds there. Indeed, he agreed with me and apparently came to the sudden realization that I had actually learned something during my three years there. He denied, however, that he would be completely miserable if we returned there as he contends that he didn’t care at all what other people thought of him when he lived there before, so why would he start now? He has a point.

3. A movie!! In a movie theater!! With the most excellent eye candy, George Clooney, even. How can he be so delightful and lovely and utterly perfect? How is such a person possible? Yes, the movie was Ocean’s 13, which is stylish and utterly without substance. It was fun, but I was really there for George. My husband, less impressed with George Clooney than I am for reasons that are understandable, found the movie baffling in its vapidity. I think if he were bisexual, he might have liked it better.

2. The long conversations with my husband today have demonstrated that I have not forgotten quite as much Japanese as I thought I had. It’s still there – at least, the grammar is. I forgot some key vocabulary items, but I can still use all the various types of conditionals appropriately. Sweet. I so totally rule.

1. The kid scrambled into bed with me this morning, sprawled himself out over my torso, and said, “I love you, mama.” That’s the best – that’s the absolute best thing ever.

Oh, much to be grateful for these past few days:

1. The garden is really doing well. Some things that had been looking sickly are doing better now, and the edamame have finally come up.

2. I quit my job! Yes, that just means I have to find another one, but at least the tyranny of this one will end in two weeks. What a relief.

3. This Blockbuster online deal is awesome. There is no other way to rent movies here, and now they are just appearing, as if by magic, in our mail. It’s so good to be watching movies again.

4. We now have plans for my birthday, and my mom is going to babysit for us, so we can do adult things…whatever those might be.

5. Ate pizza for dinner with my son on the front lawn. It was so peaceful. No one else was about, and we just listened to the birds singing and watched them flit about, and ate, and laughed, and smelled the beautiful roses that have invaded our lawn (from our neighbors’), and it was gorgeous.

6. I have actually been getting full nights of sleep for, gosh, a whole week or maybe even 2. I am so rested, I hardly know what to do with myself.

7. Found the perfect gingersnap recipe. It needs no improvement.

8. The cold snap a couple days ago didn’t kill everything. Some of the eggplant and marigolds perished, sadly, but most did not.

9. I like my blog friends. I like their comments. I like reading their posts. I am grateful for this thing called blogging and this service called Vox.

10. My husband is perfectly agreeable to the notion of me starting my own business, and my mom is helping me do the planning and researching. With a bit of luck, next year I will get it going. Cool.

For this day, among many things to be grateful for, I am mostly grateful – and very, very, inexpressibly grateful – for the fact that when my son fell down the stairs to the basement, he was not seriously injured. There are not words to explain how panicked I was, how terrible I felt that this happened, how my heart stopped beating. He has a scrape on his head and he’s a little stiff in a couple places, but no broken bones, no apparent head trauma, no abdominal injuries. Oh, sweet mercy – I am filled with relief and gratitude.

Also grateful for the somewhat lesser blessings of:
Mom brought me some local honey that will (we hope) help with my unbelievable allergies and also some tomato plants that look very robust. Can’t wait to plant them. She also brought me a pink silicone oven mitt that has a pig face on it; it’s cute. My husband was snuggly last night, and he just makes it so clear every day that he loves me. Blogging lately has been really fun; I love getting interesting comments. When I realized how late it was and that I had still not fixed dinner, we had some easy-to-fix foods on hand (frozen veggies, canned beans) so I was able to make something reasonably healthful in 10 minutes. Hurrah.

I relapsed a bit. Things are unsteady. I need to start doing this more often.

Tonight I am grateful for my son, for my husband, for my parents thinking to stop by and take us out to dinner, for a great brisk hike after dinner, for my fava bean plants that have put on a sudden growth spurt, for the weather finally warming up, for beautiful rose bushes that have apparently spread into our yard from our neighbors’, for finding another jar of homemade umeshu stuck back in the cupboard, for how delicious my attempt at homemade Campari turned out. I am especially grateful tonight for how much my son sings now – his singing is a mess, technically, but it is my favorite music by far. He’s also inventing words lately, and I’m grateful for the addition of “dingley” to my vocabulary (where dingley apparently means something like ‘great’ or ‘cool’).

1. My mom is on some crazy mission to get all of our shrubs pruned. She doesn’t have a yard of her own right now, and our shrubs were badly cared for by the previous owners. They’re starting to look nice.

2. The garden is almost all planted.

3. My son planted the sunflowers, in what will no doubt be revealed as a strange pattern once they start coming up.

4. Not one, but two!, good IM conversations today.

5. The allergy medicine is helping my hands.

Today I’m grateful:

1. that I noticed the dogs had wiggled their way into the veg garden before they did irreversible damage.

2. that I have friends who really do listen to me. I hope I pay them the same respect.

3. that my husband and I have reached a state of accord regarding the grass in the front lawn. I dislike grassy lawns, but I am compromising.

4. for the feeling of drinking a cold IPA in my backyard on a hot, sunny day.

5. for the totally unconditional and uncomplicated love of a 2-year-old.

6. that my husband will finally have full benefits – health insurance and all of it – starting July 1.

Oh, it’s been a long time. Things were bad for a while. Mostly today I’m grateful to finally be feeling entirely human again, to be able to laugh and play with my son, to be able to get outside in the sunshine and garden and watch the birds pulling up worms, to be able to talk to my husband, to be able to get out of bed and actually look forward to the day. Now the black weight is all lifted off my chest and I can see again how much there is to live for and be thankful for.

I am tremendously grateful for the love of my husband and son and friends who pulled me through. I am grateful to those who put aside their schedules and lives and needs for even a few minutes to take care of me, even just by saying some kind words in an email. I am thankful that the garden went on growing and the birds went on chirping and the sun went on shining. I am grateful for the books that gave me refuge, too.

There are thousands of other things to be grateful for right now, I know. But that’s a start.

1. I’m grateful that our bone marrow registration kits were so easy and that we just got them done and sent them back. No hanging around, putting it off. Just bing-bang, done. It’s good to be feckful.

2. My parents got us a dining room table and a bookshelf at a garage sale, and they’re actually pretty nice. Wow! Furniture!

3. My parents have also told us that they are soon going to replace their grill and give us theirs. Considering the grill they currently have is both enormous and really nice (and way out of our price league) this is a huge awesome thing for us. Thanks mom and Richard!

4. Oh, the garden is starting to look so nice. The daylilies are coming in, the carnations survived my son “helping” me transplant them, and the area we set aside for a firepit and sitting area is all shady and pretty. I’m thrilled.

5. The bees that are apparently very attracted to our Siberian peashrubs are not aggressive. They do their thing and let me do mine. We coexist in peace. They’re big old fat guys, too, and I’m planning to exploit their free pollination labor.

6. I’m grateful that my boss let me rearrange my schedule at work, even though my new schedule is irregular (it rotates in line with my husband’s schedule at his job). This new schedule is going to mean less stress, more productivity (which equals more money) and more sleep. At least, that is the idea. We’ll see, but anyway, I’m glad she granted my request despite the irregularity of it.

We (hubby and I) got our kits 2 days ago. Yesterday, we swabbed our inner cheeks and sent the kits back. Yay!!! We did it! From this point on, I think we are registered (er, once they get our kits back and tissue type us and all that) and it’s just a matter of hanging out, waiting to see if we ever get matched to someone.

Q: “Whatcha doing today?”
A: “Oh, nothing much. Hanging out, waiting to save a life.”

Sorry. Ahem. I’m glad we did this.

1. Whew. Got the asparagus bed dug and planted today.

2. I’m grateful for electric toothbrushes. I feel a little stupid admitting it. But they really do get your teeth so much cleaner.

3. My son has learned to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ so well now and to use them appropriately, so that his answers to questions are much more clear and reliable. I’m quite grateful for that.

4. My husband will be home from work shortly, and I don’t have to work, and it will be the first time we’ve gone to bed at the same time in ages.

5. Leftovers for dinner! No cooking, few dishes! And yummy curry I made a couple of nights ago! Hurrah!

Hey, happy mother’s day to all the mothers.

I’ve been forgetting to do this a lot lately, so these are not necessarily all from today:

1. I am grateful for immersion blenders and also grateful for the fact that my adorable son has learned to just stay out of the kitchen when he hears a blender. I’m sorry he had to learn the hard way, but when there’s hot soup being pureed, it’s not the time for little hands to be helping.

2. I got a super cute pink sun hat today “from my son” along with doughnuts for breakfast and a sweet little card. Nice! I can’t believe my hubbie remembered.

3. My mom kept my son for a while today, and when she brought him back, he came running up to me shouting, “Happy Mother’s Day” and grinning. That was the best present I have ever received, I do believe, although I dig the sun hat.

4. All this gardening is doing wonders for my muscle tone. I’m sore, but in a totally good way.

5. I’m grateful my son likes his bath so much.

6. I’m very grateful that much progress is being made in the potty training department, and it’s going so smoothly. We’re a long way from being out of diapers yet, but there’s plenty of time.

7. I’m grateful that we don’t have money stress this month. For some reason, we’re running a budget surplus. Yay!

8. The lilacs are – finally! – starting to come into bloom.

9. I’m grateful for ladybugs and earthworms and all the good things they do. I’m especially grateful that the ladybugs ate all the aphids off my purple sage. I thought that the sage was a goner for sure with such a bad infestation, but the ladybugs made quick work of it.

10. I am grateful for frozen spinach. Fresh spinach is tastier, yes, but it’s often quite expensive here, and it’s also less convenient. I don’t like a lot of frozen veggies, but spinach is one that works for us.

11. I am grateful for the fact that I am soon going to bed.

1. I am grateful to be surrounded by living, growing things and to have an opportunity to nurture them. This includes my son, the birds who live in our trees, the plants we are growing in our garden, the (suspiciously well behaved, today) puppies, all of it.

2. We got a lot of planting done today—flowers, some beets, some potatoes, some more onions. We still have so much more to do, but progress was definitely made.

3. My son was an excellent helper today, although he tends to cluster seeds. But he fell asleep tonight still babbling about the purple potatoes we still have to plant tomorrow and the nasturtiums—he seems to love nasturtiums. I’m not sure if he loves the word or if he thinks they’re pretty, but I’m quite sure he was excited when I told him that, yes, we will eat the nasturtiums. I love nasturtiums in salad.

4. The rhubarb, that had been looking very questionable and sickly, is really making a comeback. Hurrah!

5. The heretofore mysterious shrubs are Siberian peashrubs. They are a great windbreak. They also apparently produce edible peas. Interesting. They are also pretty when green and in bloom, although these were not well cared for, so we have work to do to get them in tip-top shape. But I’m glad they’re shrubs we can live with, since they are so numerous and well established. Also, they are apparently very attractive to bees, and we’re going to need some pollinators.

6. I’m so grateful that delicious pasta dishes can be made so quickly. When we’re all out in the garden all day long, it’s really asking too much to also cook elaborate meals.

7. With my summer changes – the bleaching of the hair, the pinkish tan, the muscles built from working a shovel all day long – my husband tells me I look like a supermodel. Heee. He’s ridiculous, but it’s nice to get a compliment.

8. My husband is working his butt off to help me with the garden, when I know he’d really rather be fishing. Soon, dear.

1. When I came down with a raging headache this afternoon and declined to cook, we were able to afford to get some takeout and my husband went to pick it up, even. Ooh, yummy food, too.

2. I registered to become a bone marrow donor today, and when I explained to my husband what I was doing and why, he decided to register, too. So, two kits are on their way. Yay!

3. Some of the shrubs are starting to flower, including what I think is some sort of currant.

4. My husband has made remarkable progress in the tilling of the garden, and we will plant peas and fava beans this week.

5. My husband remembered to stop and get his paycheck today.

6. My son, my gorgeous son, is finally learning not to pull up the seedlings! Oh, hooray. I think he is really starting to understand what it means that they are growing and that they will become food. He seems to be making the connection now. It’s really unbelievably awesome.

Well, it’s May 7, and I ordered my kit!!!! I’m so glad I finally did it.

And just like mooniebutt said, it was free!

Even better: After I explained to my husband what this was all about and why I was doing it, he registered, too!!!

1. Uncle Pat got here yesterday and will be here for a few days! Yay! And my son remembers him from all the way back at Thanksgiving, the last time he saw him.

2. Yummy dinner at my parents’ house tonight.

3. Thanks so much to mooniebutt and 4xman for their help with the bone marrow donor information. I’m going to sign up tomorrow.

4. Lately we’ve been getting just enough precipitation, spaced just right, so that we don’t have to do any extra watering. The strawberries are thriving. The blackberries and roses are thriving.

5. The large trees we have on this lot are homes to many (sometimes seems like thousands) of birds – robins, chickadees, sparrows (or maybe swallows; I get them confused) and a bunch of others, who all sing beautiful songs for us in the mornings. Other times, too, but it’s an especially loud and enjoyable chorus in the early mornings. I love them. I do rather fear that they will end up eating not only our strawberries but also our seeds in the veg garden, so we may have to take some preventive action.

6. Just finished a fine Ian Rankin book called Witch Hunt. I really like his writing.

7. Had a fun morning with my son, despite his refusal to put on clothes and leave the house and despite my exhaustion. Some days you really just need to chase a naked baby around the house tickling him and making him shriek with delight.

8. My husband is a solid rock for me, a permanent safe harbor, and he makes me laugh, too.

Today I am grateful that…

1. The staff at my husband’s new job are friendly, helpful, and willing to return phone calls. I had no trouble at all getting the information I needed from them today, unlike some of his (and my) previous employers.

2. My husband will soon qualify for full benefits from his job—oh, health insurance!!! Wow. It’s almost unbelievable.

3. We found a perfect spot in our garden for me to put a little tea area, just a little spot among the trees and flowers, sheltered from the wind, where we can make a nice restful space. I am so happy.

4. My son has learned not to throw glass things.

5. My son won a little prize from the credit union. Unfortunately it is primarily candy, but it came in a little treasure chest that he loves. I hid the candy during his nap.

6. Our little tiny rebates for Upromise are starting to add up, and my son’s college fund is looking respectable. It’s so funny to get three cents back on your applesauce or whatever, but, hey, it’s better than nothing.

7. Rite-Aid drugstores have a rebate program similar to Walgreens, which means we now have enough free toothpaste that we would not get cavities even in a nuclear holocaust. We’ll end up donating some of it to a women’s shelter as the stockpile threatens to take over the entire house.

8. The onions are really doing well. We should have scallions in another couple of weeks. Yay!

9. The dogs have actually learned, or so they would have me believe, to stay out of the garden. There is a fence, but they no longer make attempts to breach it.

10. Starting May 7, I can register to be a bone marrow donor for free! So I can get that goal accomplished sans credit card. Hooray!

Today I’m grateful for…

1. Man, my husband really worked his butt off today in the garden. The tilling is really difficult owing to the grass which has been established such a long time and has an obnoxious root system. I appreciate his help and perseverance so much.

2. My son runs and plays so much that at bedtime, he really goes to sleep pretty easily and stays that way the whole night through.

3. I think I got caught up on my sleep for a while. Now I can resume my zombie schedule and not be suffering miserably…for a while.

4. The guy came to fix the dryer today, and it seems he knows what’s wrong with it. He has to order the part, but then it should be easy to fix.

5. My husband agrees that moving to Australia sounds awesome.

6. So far, the “new” car is getting good gas mileage. Here’s hoping it holds out.

Today I’m grateful for

1. This fabulous weather! If heaven smiled down on me and let me choose exactly the weather I wanted, it would be this weather.

2. We’re really getting the garden going now. We have seedlings sprouting everywhere. We’re fertilizing, we’re tilling, we’re raking, and it’s all so fun (and such good exercise).

3. The pork didn’t go bad. I had pulled it from the freezer a couple of days ago and forgotten about it, but it was still fine today, and we ate it. I hate wasting food, especially when I just forgot about it.

4. My husband has these long weekends once a month, due to his rotating schedule.

5. The water here is safe and tasty straight out of the tap. It’s a near miracle considering how many people don’t have access to safe water at all, let alone straight from their home faucets.

6. The Onion archives.

Today I’m grateful

that we got the new fence built so hopefully the dogs will now be separated from the vegetable garden.

that I will get to sleep in tomorrow. Finally.

that I got a definite upper-body workout gardening. Feel those muscles building!

that the dryer will apparently be fixed so promptly.

that I finally mopped the living room floor. It was a bit crusty. Now it’s so shiny and clean. I’m very pleased with myself.

that my husband will be home for a few days.

that my son is just so happy, all the time, and so sweet.

This is the recipe from Gourmet I mentioned so very long ago. Hope you like it.

1/3 cup plus 1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon cornstarch
10 ounces (2 cups) blueberries
1 cup flour
1 3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 large egg
1/2 cup whole milk
1 stick unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 F. Butter a 9-inch square pan.

Stir together the 1/3 cup sugar with water, lemon juice, and cornstarch in a small saucepan, then stir in blueberries. Bring to a simmer over medium heat, then simmer, stirring occasionally, for 3 minutes. Remove from heat.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining 1/2 cup sugar in a medium bowl. Whisk together egg, milk, butter, and vanilla in a large bowl. Add the flour mixture, whisking just until combined (it will be a little lumpy yet). Spoon the batter into the cake pan. Pour blueberry sauce evenly over the batter. Don’t spread it around or poke at it or anything—just pour it over.

Bake 25-30 minutes until toothpick comes out clean.

Note: I don’t usually eat wheat due to a mild allergy, so I make this with non-wheat flours. I like half rice and half oat the best so far. I also sometimes use half rice and half whole spelt flour. Using a whole grain flour will change the texture somewhat, but I like the added texture and flavor of whole grain, so I would recommend it.