boring political post

I haven't had the chance to watch much of the Democratic Convention this week, since I've been wranglin' the kids. But I have been watching clips online. And I remembered something:

I love Mark Warner (senator from Virginia):

"In 4 months we will have an administration that actually believes...in SCIENCE!"

Yay! I'm even more happy that I got to vote for him for governor of VA in 2001. In fact, I'd like WI's current governor to study how Warner dealt with Virginia's budget woes, but that's another story.

Oh joy, it's a meme! Maybe even 2 memes!

I apologize. It's Sunday night, I've been working on creating a class project all day so my brain is fried, I'm drinking cheap red wine (2...uh, 3 buck Chuck!), and so this is all I can manage.

First, the food meme:
Bold means I et it, italics means it hit my gullet and did a reverso, strikethrough means I'd rather go on Fear Factor and get covered in tarantulas.

1. Venison - I'm from Wisconsin, of course I've had this.
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile - it really does taste like chicken.
6. Black pudding -
7. Cheese fondue - Our friends D and A got THREE fondue pots for their wedding. Their solution? Return them? Nah...throw a fondue party! Brilliant!!
8. Carp - Ew. When I was a kid, I'd ride my bike to the library. This required going over a bridge over the Fox River--in the shallow part of the river, you could SEE the carp swimming around. Not appetizing.
9. Borscht -
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart -
16. Epoisses -
17. Black truffle- I think it counts if it is truffle cheese.
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns -
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes - from our own garden! awesome.
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras -
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese - my mother in law makes this every year for christmas for one of her sons. I think we get off easy...she only makes fruitcake for us.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper - but it wasn't ripe. and it was still hot.
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters -
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda -
31. Wasabi peas -
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut - See entry 1. From Wisconsin.
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea -
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O -
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala -
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut - .
50. Sea urchin - Presumably they mean the roe.
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal - have never even tried it. Huh.
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV - my husband's own barleywine is the best of the genre. no joke.
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin - Kaolin? Like, Kaopectate? Kaolin is clay.
64. Currywurst
65. Durian -
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake-
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain - LOVE plantains
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong -
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky -
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers -
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab -
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox -
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee - in the Blue Mountains, even. I would love some of this coffee...but it's expens
100. Snake

56? I fail! Hm. I'm not as adventurous as I thought, perhaps. But I'm not eating a Big Mac, so there.

Ok, now a book meme.

Bold is I've read it, italics is started but unfinished.....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - I'm so sorry, J!
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - never had any desire.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - again, sorry!!
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - well, yeah.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I don't get the fuss. Lyra is annoying.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - oh god. miss havisham!
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - complete, no. pieces, yes.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - nope, nope.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - have I ever mentioned that I hate the word "birdsong?" I know, that is weird. But I hate it.
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - I read the Death of Ivan Ilyich though. Does that count? No?
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -the whole damn thing.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Er, duh, this is one of the Chronicles of Narnia. Who's in charge of this list? Moron.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - ok, so if you are like me, and never read Austen, you're a freak. I get it. I will remedy this!
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - HA! Let me tell you all about how I read this book. No, wait, where are you going?
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - darn library due date.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - .
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - not his best, but I liked it!
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - only because my grandma gave it to me. it is not good.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I WILL finish this someday!

51! I fail again!

Well that was....a use of some time. Whee!

I never wanted kids....at least, not once I was old enough for it to be a reality. When I was young, I thought--well, I guess someday I'll have kids, but even then, there was no real certainty about it. And there was never any of that little kid attraction to babies. I never really liked playing with dolls--I preferred stuffed animals. I am an only child and only grandchild, so I was never really even around babies. So, I never thought about it.

When I got a little older, I did babysit, but I preferred kids ages 5+. Anything younger than that was boring.

By the time I got through college and into graduate school, I was pretty sure I didn't want kids. Or, if I *did* have kids, I would adopt. Not because of some Angelina Jolie-type altruism, but again, babies--ugh. And pregnancy? Horrified, terrified me...that must be like having some alien parasite in your body (note from 2008-me: Well, actually, it...kind of is. Really is. But at the same time, not so bad). Plus, I wasn't going to think about kids for a loooong time. I had things to do. First, Ph.D. Then, job...preferably at some small liberal arts college, hopefully in a really cool mid-sized city in a gorgeous location somewhere. And once my career was established, I was going to enjoy life...travel, freedom, money to do things....

...and so that was the plan. Then, in 2004, something changed. I don't really know why. I know when...we were camping with friends, who had a 1 year old at the time. These friends, R and K, were the first among our group to get married (10 years this month!!) and the first to have children. So they were not the norm, and I know this wasn't some sort of "Everyone's doing it, so we have to!" social pressure. But I digress. They had brought their laptop with them--so that they could play music while we were cooking, etc. And they, like most parents, had pictures on them. There was one, of their son in a strawberry patch, and R was kind of staring at it. His wife said, "What are you doing?" and he said, "Looking at my son."

"Looking at my son." Four words. Nothing monumental. Not even directed at me, or trying to expound on the wonders of parenthood. But when he said that, something changed in me. That night, I told S that maybe I wanted to do this thing. Two months later, I got pregnant with M.

So, we had our first, and it was great. Two years later, we started talking about expanding our family. A year before that, I had been SURE I wanted 2 kids. But after a while, I got used to M. as an only child. I still thought, we had agreed on 2, and that's what I want, so we went for it. But even after I got pregnant the second time, I had my doubts. Overall, I thought that it was right. But--how would I handle two? Was I being fair to M? After all, I was an only child, and although I would like to have adult siblings, I had a lot of resources (tangible and non-), that my friends from larger families did not. And what if I didn't love this child as much as M?

But, he is here. And now we are a family of 4. If I were to meet my college or grad school self, she'd be shocked. What happened to me? All my plans..what happened to them? I suspect she'd be a little disappointed. I do teach at a small school...but what else? I live in a small town, with not much excitement to it. Travel...ha. We've done some traveling in the States, but I haven't been out of the country since 2002.

And yet...and yet. We are a family of 4. It's not at all what I wanted...yet it's all I could ever want.

I know, I swore I wasn't a mommy blogger. And I'm not. But a lot has happened since my last post. Welcome to our world, baby boy.