>Getting my kicks on 66 — planning or dreaming?

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>It seems strange; we’re actively working on becoming more sustainable, remaining frugal, taking care of our family and our earth.

Yet on the Bucket List is a road trip of many miles – coasting along Route 66.

Amigo would enjoy listening to local radio, eating at diners, and meeting new people. I would enjoy the trip, blog each milestone, and probably bring a Flat Stanley along for the ride. La Petite would photograph it, when she wasn’t sleeping through the daylight hours. Chuck? I’m not sure which part of the trip would be his favorite, but he’d probably find family along the way; his cousins are scattered across the U.S.A.

My goals for the trip include seeing different sections of the country, stopping at diners and local family restaurants, taking time out to visit history museums that honor the memory of the Mother Road. That’s what really drives me: the history piece. I love the idea that we’ll be traveling a route with so many memories, so many tales to tell.

Amigo and Chuck like to try local dishes — within reason. Sampling road food would be more exciting and (mostly) healthier than identical golden arches along the way. Simply reading the menu in some places would be an adventure! La Petite has convinced me to try and enjoy sushi, at long last, but Da Boyz still resist. She’d be more of an adventurous sort with the road foods, too.

Vehicle choice is a challenge. It’ll have to be something that can take heat, both humid and dry, to make a trip like this. Both of our current vehicles are elderly; neither will be suitable for a long trip. A rental rather than a new purchase would allow us to leave the car or minivan in California and catch the train home. We thoroughly enjoyed traveling on the Empire Builder from Wisconsin west to Washington; I am certain that the trip by rail would be fascinating and comfortable, too.

As for chronicling the trip, the blog is a good place to start. Daily like my other vacation journals or by topic, such as the Coffee Diary from another travel? Either would be effective.

Cost is an object. If this trip happens at all, it won’t be soon. Replacing the shower plumbing and fixing the upstairs bathroom are higher priorities. But someday, we’ll look for sponsors or grants or lottery winnings (just kidding, I don’t buy tickets), and we’ll hit the road — the Mother Road.

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>Bumper Sticker Fun

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>Can you read this bumper sticker? Neither can I. Sorry. It was windy and cold, and we just wanted to get back in the car and get the heat on. Taking a quality photo with my cell phone wasn’t a high priority.

You might guess based on the Feingold sticker (almost readable) that although it’s centered on the vehicle, the sentiment leans to the left. It does. The bumper sticker in white on red reads:
Democratic Women are the Life of the Party.
I think I’d like the driver of this minivan. Her bumper sticker is almost as much fun as this one.

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>Zesty Orange Cookies

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>I tried it, and it worked. I took the original Zesty Lime cookie recipe and tried it with orange zest and orange juice, and the cookies are delicious. I kept the lemon extract in for the tartness. The orange peel was freshly zested, and the juice freshly squeezed. Oh, the kitchen smelled good! Here it is: yet another way to use the case of oranges from the choir fund-raiser!

Zesty Orange Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
2 eggs or 1/2 cup egg substitute
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup orange juice
1 Tablespoon grated orange peel
powdered sugar for dusting (I only needed a few tablespoons)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream butter; beat in sugar and extracts. Add eggs; mix well. Gradually add flour; mix well. Blend in orange juice and peel. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls of batter onto greased cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. Cool on pan for 1 minute, then transfer to wire racks and dust lightly with powdered sugar. Mmmm. Makes about 6 dozen.


This recipe is based on Zesty Lime cookies in the 2009 WE Energies Cookie Book. I can’t wait to try a few more.

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>Super Sunday

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>I have a Super Cold. My plan for Super Sunday includes:

  • Claim the Super Couch as my turf.
  • Curl up with magic blankie.
  • Run the Super Humidifier all day.
  • Drink Super Fluids and eat Super Oranges constantly and often. Is that an oxymoron? Fine. So be it.
  • Rest.
  • Read the newspaper, including Super Bowl predictions.
  • Renew my friendship with the Neti Super-Pot.
  • Correct and record school papers, still on the couch.

  • Review plans for week with Chuck. This week looks to be more “normal” and less emotionally wearing than the last. (Crossing fingers and toes)
  • Convince Chuck to clean Buttercup’s litter box. Even in my stuffed up state, I can sense a bit of malodorous atmosphere eminating from her cage. In order to heal my inflamed sinuses and exhausted body, I need to rest.
  • Watch the Super Bowl! On the menu: Super Burgers (Chuck’s specialty), chicken soup (to fight my cold), and the continual ingestion of mega-amounts of fluids.

And now — drumroll, please — my predictions for the game!
The Colts are the stronger team. They have the technique, the talent, and the depth. Taken only on football stats, Peyton Manning should lead his rookie coach to victory.
But…. the Saints have momentum and emotion on their side. Drew Brees is more than a quarterback; he’s a leader in motivation, not just in passes caught. The Saints’ defense isn’t rated as highly as most Super Bowl teams, but think about the NFC championship game; it was the defense that came through and sealed the need for overtime, which sealed the victory.

My prediction: Between the Budweiser Clydesdales and the Tebow controversy and the eTrade baby, there will be one exciting and dramatic football game.

Meanwhile, I’m going to pour myself a glass of Airborne to fight this Super Virus.

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>Tyler’s Ocean

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>For La Petite’s friend Tyler, who is in his last days. Tyler’s Ocean collection is being organized by Tyler’s good friend and former roommate, Eric. Here is Eric’s letter and request.


One thing Tyler really wanted to do again was see the ocean one last time. Unfortunately that is now impossible. However, with your help, we can do the next best thing for him. We can bring the ocean to him. I don’t know exactly how much time we have left but I speak for all of us when I say that I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing while I wait for his time to come. Tyler is still here, this is NOT over, and we can still help him.

So here is the plan. We need ocean pictures. If you have pictures of the ocean, we need them! We are going to take all these pictures and cover his entire room with them. This way Tyler can be at the ocean with all of his friends.

The first way and probably the easiest for everyone is just to email them to an email account I set up just for this. The address is TylersOcean at gmail dot com. This saves people trips and hassles. With your help we can give Tyler something as close to one of his last wishes as possible. With just a little effort you can help us bring Tyler the ocean! –Eric

This is not an anonymous Internet urban myth; this young man is La Petite’s friend. If you have ocean pictures that you’re willing to share, you can send them to Tyler’s Ocean.

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>The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon

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>The Great War touched everyone in London. The men went to war, became injured, died, or came home with internal emotional damage that no one could see. The families left behind suffered along with their beloved soldiers.

In The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon, Evelyn Gifford is a free-spirited young woman in a London that doesn’t know what to do with a forward thinking female. Trained as a lawyer, she successfully finds herself a position with a free-spirited firm, where she advocates well for her clients even as the judges hold back their respect because of her gender. Evelyn assists in the case of defending an accused murderer – one who had come home from the war depressed, yet a dependable and caring husband. On a weekend picnic his wife disappears, only to be found shot to death. The war-damaged widower must have killed her, or so the public thinks. Evelyn is determined to prove otherwise.

Meanwhile, Evelyn grieves for her own older brother James, killed in the war. She idolized him in life and continues to hold his angelic image in her head and heart. When a young battlefield nurse turns up on the doorstep with a young boy, James’ son, Evelyn and her family are at a loss.

The complex plots and subplots wind together for a story suspenseful, surprising, and sensual. Evelyn’s visits to avant-garde London society with her brother’s lover are almost too colorful for her shades-of-gray family. Her mother, aunt, and grandmother continue to disapprove of her career even while they depend on her income to pay their bills. The presence of their new family member and his mother bring back memories of the deceased James, but also bring tarnish to his perfect image.

The Crimson Rooms is a page-turner. It was difficult to put down; the dark moods and increasingly complex plot twists kept me rooting for Evelyn even as I wondered how much more she could realistically handle. Readers will admire her strength and still want to help heal the pain caused by the war and its aftermath, the travails of making her way into the men’s world of London’s courts.

Reading The Crimson Rooms encouraged me to look for more of Katharine McMahon’s work. She has also written The Rose of Sebastopol and The Alchemist’s Daughter. The Crimson Rooms will be available on February 8 from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indiebound online. Please looks for it at your local booksellers, too.

I wrote this review while participating in a blog campaign by MotherTalk on behalf of G.P. Putnam’s Sons / Riverhead and received a copy of the book to facilitate my candid review. Mom Central sent me a gift card to thank me for taking the time to participate. The book is an advanced reader copy; I will pass it on to friends and family so that others can enjoy the fascinating and well-written story.

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>Zesty Lemon-Lime cookies

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>adapted from Zesty Lime Cookies, from the We Energies Cookie Book 2009

Chuck teases me when I’m using my new zester file. “Don’t you have enough zest for a year? Or two?” he’ll say. To counter that, I keep finding recipes that use citrus zest in one way or another. Here’s one with lemon and lime flavor. The original was more lime; I had lemon and lime on hand, so I modified it.

Zesty Lemon-Lime Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon lemon extract
2 eggs (or 1/2 cup egg substitute)
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 Tablespoon grated lemon and lime peels
powdered sugar for dusting

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream butter; beat in sugar and extracts. Add eggs; mix well. Gradually add flour; mix well. Blend in lime juice and peel. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls of batter onto greased cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes. Cool on pan for 1 minute, then transfer to wire racks and dust lightly with powdered sugar. Makes about 6 dozen.

I wonder if it would work with orange?

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On Brahms, Life and Death, and Being There

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Our school counselor lost her husband Friday night. It was sudden, unexpected, and tragic.
A former colleague lost a brother recently; snowmobiling and fell through the ice. He was 29.
La Petite has been wrapped up in supporting a friend who is dying of gastric cancer. She and her coworkers at the school paper are preparing a tribute. The young man had an early graduation ceremony last week; he is not expected to last until the actual ceremony in May.

So much tragedy; big tragedies in Haiti, smaller emotional earthquakes in our circle of family and friends. What can people do? What can people say?

A long time ago, when I was young and studying piano, I was struggling to play Brahms. I could play the notes, it sounded nice, but my performance was lacking in the emotion and the intensity that makes Brahms’ works the dramatic pieces that they are.
My teacher stopped and thought. Then she told me:

I once had trouble playing Brahms. I couldn’t express it properly, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what was missing. I never knew what to say at funerals, either.
Then my husband died. And I realized what I had never known; that there was nothing anyone can say at funerals. All you can do is be there; and being there is the most important thing of all.
And then, then I could play Brahms.

Well, I stuck to Debussy and Chopin for a long time. But I know now; even if there is nothing to say, no way to help the grieving, it’s important to be there.

If you’d like to Be There for La Petite’s young friend, go here to make a contribution. He was an active and healthy young man until cancer hit him; swim team record-holder, computer geek, and more. The family is struggling with bills, including the rent for the off-campus apartment that he can no longer use due to his illness.

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>Trivia! It keeps me warm.

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>Long ago, when I was a teenager, and great woolly mammoths roamed the high school campus, I listened to a radio trivia contest one weekend a year. I enjoyed the crazy music that ranged from bad to worse, the mock advertisements for ridiculous and irreverent products, and of course, the trivial questions. (Who were the fairies in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty? Flora, Fauna, and Meriweather. Come on, ask me a hard one.)

Then I joined a Trivia team. This was still in the prehistoric times; rotary dial phones! We’d use the tip of a pen to dial the numbers so that our fingers wouldn’t get blistered. Really. Books, encyclopedias, and almanacs were our main sources for information that we didn’t already possess in our ever-evolving brains. (The hotel in Psycho? Bates Motel, of course. And Janet Leigh hid the money in a folded up newspaper.)

I played for this team until I transferred schools and began attending classes on the very campus that hosted the contest. By then the phones were push-button types, and the woolly mammoths had moved to less populated areas Up North, but our main information sources were still print books. (Winnie the Pooh lived in the Hundred Acre Wood under what name? Sanders.)

Fast forward several years, through contributions to a few more trivia teams, a marriage, and two kids. We now hosted a team in our home. It was a smaller team, not a top three finisher, but we held our own. Proudly, we invited people to share our home with the bunnies and the books and the new technology: cordless phones and Internet access. We still used a radio boom box, a white board for keeping track of team scores, and a spiral notebook for writing down questions. The woolly mammoths had retreated toward Canada in search of glaciers. (In the movie The Blue Brothers, what is the license plate number of the Bluesmobile? BDR529)

Telephones and radio have changed, but the Trivia contest continues. The radio has gone Internet only, which has actually expanded the contest to people in faraway locations that might still have woolly mammoths. Chuck and I no longer compete for the worthless prizes (the prizes have to be as trivial as the questions), but Amigo plays on his own. He listens to the Internet broadcast, searches for answers online, calls them in on the cordless phone or borrows my cell when the cordless’ batteries go dead. He and Chuck take a shift at the radio station answering phones to take people’s answers — each team that plays finds a way to make a contribution like this to keep the contest running smoothly. (What was the original name of the Popsicle? The Epperson Ice Pop, or the Epsicle)

Trivia (it needs no other qualifying details; all other contests pale in comparison) is a crazy and fun weekend with no equal. Some people take off for warmer climates in January; we’ve always stocked up on knowledge, coffee, hot cocoa, and phones. It keeps us warm. (When Frank Zappa was in ninth grade, he won a Fire Prevention poster contest. What did his poster say? “No picnic. Why? No woods. Prevent forest fires.”)

I still kind of miss the mammoths.

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>Laughter is the best medicine

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>I was teaching text features that signal importance, and I noticed one student took the concept of bulleted lists and ran with it. I saw her to-do list for the weekend sitting on her desk.

  • Get mom to take me to Walgreens.
  • Ask mom for money.

I think she’s mastered the concept.

More robo-calls arrived earlier in the week. The first one: “Your child has been marked absent from one or more classes.” I called the school, talked to Amigo, and tracked down the error. It was an office error, of course. However, they couldn’t fix it; the secretary who handles the first half of the alphabet had left at 3:00. The secretary on the line told me she was certain everything would be fine in the morning.
Well, it wasn’t fine at night. An hour later we got another robo-call from the school with the same recorded script: “Your child has been marked absent from one or more classes….”
I have to laugh or I’d beat my head on the wall. Laughing feels a lot less painful.

Got milk? Read this. It’s a laugh out loud, snort milk out the nose kind of story.

Have a wonderful and laughter-filled weekend.

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