Rub-a-Dub-Dub, Thanks for the Grub

At a church retreat I went to this fall, we had this question during an ice-breaker:  What is your favorite holiday?  In my group, all ten of us said Thanksgiving was our favorite.  That might simply mean that all ten of us have tolerable family members who won’t cause trouble at a big family gathering.

For me the best thing about Thanksgiving is giving thanks to God for the gathering of the family, for bringing us to this season, and, yes, for the delicious traditional food. 

Which brings me to my Thanksgiving survey.  If someone asks what we are truly thankful for, we often will say family and friends, as those are the most precious to us.  Nobody ever says “indoor plumbing” or “the library,” but I think we have to recognize that we are thankful for those things, too.

This survey is focused on and limited to Thanksgiving food.  Because I am an American.  Here is my question, which I also posed to my prospective Thanksgiving dinner guests:

Thanksgiving survey

Please complete the following sentence with a food item.  One entry per person. 

It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving dinner without _______________________.

Please answer in the comments.  If you want a bigger platform than this humble household blog gives you, you can go to CNN’s site.

Reading glasses... what every Thanksgiving table needs.

Capitalist opportunity

Dear Fellow Capitalists,

I have discovered a glaring gap in the greeting card industry.

Here’s the story. One of the adult scout leaders in my son’s troop was ill. As a part of my ongoing project to raise my children to be polite and respectable adults, I suggested to my son that it would be appropriate to send the scout leader some get-well wishes.  My son’s idea was this:

1.Type on the computer:

                        Dear Mr. B,

                               Get well soon.

                        From,

                        Common Household Son

2. Print it out on a plain white 8.5x11 sheet of paper. 

3. Hand it to me to put in an envelope and mail.

4. Play on the Wii.

But I insisted that he had to send an actual card.  I got out my stash of Get Well cards and found some with lovely pastels, flowers, and swirly words of cheer:

Those clearly wouldn’t do for a Boy Scout.  I looked some more and found this one, without flowers:

I handed it to my son.  He looked at me, and said, “Ducks?!  Mom!”

I tried this one:

“CHICKENS?!” he guffawed.  “Don’t they make cards with pictures of people hiking, or tents in a campground?  I can’t send a card with ducks or chickens to Mr. B.”

I spent a few hours and the grocery store, the drug store, and the Hallmark store, looking for masculine get well cards.  I found ONE get well card labeled, “For Him” with a portrayal of tools and gears on it.  I bought it, and every other get well card I found that did not look feminine or crude.

So, capitalists, here is a market niche that you can fill.  Because there has got to be a huge untapped market, worth millions, of Boy Scouts and other manly men out there looking for respectable masculine get well cards to send to their male friends.

I asked my husband about this, and he said he doesn’t believe in greeting cards.  Sigh.

Things which are not as good as

Things which are not as good as the thing they are trying to imitate:

Pumpkin pie Poptarts vs Pumpkin Pie

Wonderbread vs Homebaked Wonderful Bread

Bagel Thins vs Bagels  (bagel fats?)

Stuffed Turkey vs Stuffed Turkey

Beat it with a stick

In October I visited my parents.  I got back home on Sunday October 23rd, and the next morning I went to aerobics class.  The routines included lots of punching, which normally I don’t like, but I found it therapeutic this time around.  Not only did I sorely need exercise after 5 days sitting around at the Old Folks’ Home, but I needed to punch something.

I have mentioned before that my father has Parkinson’s disease.  The doctor who saw him in the hospital said that the only way to treat Parkinson’s is to “beat it with a stick.”  Sixteen years ago, my Dad started out fighting it with Darth Maul’s light saber.  But now it seems his weapon is reduced to a twig. 

Hospital neurologists were able to stop his hallucinations and dyskinesia (uncontrollable, random, violent body movements) by changing his Parkinson’s meds regimen – smaller doses given more frequently.  Within 24 hours of this new regimen he was restored to sanity and was no longer at risk of throwing himself out of bed.  By the time I arrived in town, he was able to carry on a conversation, which meant that I had a good visit with him.

But that doesn’t mean that all is well.  Reducing the dosages decreases his mobility.  I’ll spare you all the details, but it’s not at all easy for him, or for my Mom.  I can't even begin to say what effect all this has on my Mom.  Also, it seems practically impossible for the medicine nurse in the nursing care unit to stick to the 3-hour pill schedule.  The system they have in place works fairly well for all the patients, but does not work excellently for any one patient.

So at aerobics class that day every punch was destined for Parkinson’s Disease.  I want to beat it to a pulp.

Today Dad is back in the hospital with more of the same symptoms.  I feel trapped – I want to go there but I would have to either leave the kids here and come back before Friday or take them with me.  Either option is horribly complicated.  So I stay here, and wring my hands, and go to aerobics, and punch the air.

D.I.Y. Biological Halloween Costume

As a service to humanity, or at least parents of children with a scientific bent, I present the Common Household home-made scientific Halloween costume: the cell.

A cell lurks in the neighborhood

From my perspective, this costume was great.  Youngest Daughter bubbled with enthusiasm at the possibility of being a cell for Halloween. So I handed her an old sheet and some fabric paint, and said, “Measure twice, cut once. Don’t get paint on the carpet. Go for it.”   That was the full extent of my involvement.  She did all the work herself.

The first task was to cut a hole for her head.  She got out the measuring tape, the stiff metal kind that is useful for measuring rooms and furniture, and measured her head.  She said, “Mommy, do you really think that my head could be 2 feet around?”  Her brother said, “If you want to get an accurate measurement, use a string. Wrap it around your head, and then take the string off and measure its length.”  She bounded off in search of string.  She remembered to figure out where the center of the sheet was before she cut the hole.  Whew!

Then it was just a matter of painting the various parts of the cell.  When I was in school, a cell only had a nucleus.  Nowadays a cell is chock full of all kinds of stuff, including endoplasmic reticulum, which is fun to say but difficult to explain.   My daughter picked the paint colors herself, and outlined everything in glow-in-the-dark clear fabric paint.

Okay, bio majors, what's missing here?   

Answer in the penultimate paragraph.

This costume had a bonus.  The 7^th grade science classes are currently learning about cells, so my daughter took her costume into class, and explained it in detail. The teacher gave her not one, but two homework passes which can be turned into extra credit at the end of the quarter.  Halloween candy plus a better grade – there are no losers here.

I have been informed that this cell model is missing something.  When I called my daughter to come downstairs and explain the endoplasmic reticulum to me, she came half-way down the stairs and said, “I can do that from up here.”  To encourage brevity I said, “I’ll bet you can do it standing on one foot” (just like Rabbi Hillel).  So she stood on the stairs on one foot and told me what the endoplasmic reticulum does.  She revealed that her cell does not include the smooth endoplasmic reticulum, because she didn't have room for it.  I didn’t retain much of her explanation, except to note that there is an awful lot that goes on inside a cell.

What is your favorite home-made Halloween costume?  Or do you prefer store-bought?

The benefits of being a cell for Halloween

Just in Time for Halloween

Guest Post by Youngest Daughter - her own recipe for Witch's Brew.  Happy Halloween!

Witch’s Brew

By Youngest Daughter of the Common Household

What you need: 

a cauldron

an Israeli coffee pot 

3 hand presses of moss (shredded) 

1 ladleful of dirt 

3 coffeepots of tap water 

12 wet leaves (oak is the best) 

1 pinch of ground bark 

2 pinches of pencil shavings 

2 coffeepots of secrets ingredient 

1 large stick (not over 1 ½ ft. long)

What to do: Line the bottom of your cauldron by sprinkling it with the moss. Add the tap water.

Add the rest of your ingredients in the order above, except for the pencil shavings, secrets ingredient, and the large stick. Add the pencil shavings slowly, sprinkling each pinch around the top of your brew.

Add one coffee of the secrets ingredient, say your magical words, and add the other coffee.

Stir slowly with your large stick counter-clockwise 10 times. Stir clockwise 7 times. Allow your brew to sit for 20 seconds, then rest your stick against the cauldron in a 6:00 position.

Immediately clear away the rest of your things, and leave your brew to stew under a maple tree. The next day, your brew should have stewed long enough for it to be done. Add more water at this time if necessary.

DO NOT EAT UNLESS YOU ARE A WITCH! If you are a witch, serve cold.

Word of advice: Sitting water is better than tap water, because it has had more time to collect magic. However, if your mom won’t let you get sitting water for your brew, like mine, then you can just use tap water like in the instructions.

Science at Dinner

I was away for five days at my parents.  My Dad is stable for now, in the nursing care unit at the retirement place.  More on that another time, perhaps.  I got back on Sunday, and was able to participate in this dinner-time science lesson.

Youngest Daughter (plaintively):  Mommy, why do we have to grow up?

Son:  Technically speaking, you don’t have to grow up, but the experimental probability of not growing up is incredibly small.

Me:  If you grow up but your body doesn’t grow up, that’s not too good.

Son:  Then you’re just pretentious.

Me:  ???  Pretentious?

Son:  Yeah.  That’s on our list of 100 SAT words.

Me (after much thought):  Perhaps you mean ‘precocious?’

Son:  Yes.  Something like that....

My son went on to talk about chemicals, and mentioned phosphate.  Youngest Daughter said, “What are the two things about phosphate?” (She meant ‘What are the elements in phosphate?’)

Son: “Phosphorus and oxygen.”

YD:  “Phosphorus and ostrichen?”

He explained that phosphorus is used to make fertilizer.   Youngest Daughter was inspired to write this song about phosphate.  It is sung to a tune she learned at Girl Scout camp, more like a cheer than a song.

P-H-O-S-P-H!

A-T-E spells phosphate, phosphate.

It’s the only decent kind of compound, compound

The guy who found it must have been run to the ground, to the ground

P-H-O-S-P-H!

A-T-E you see,

It’s inside your manure,

It has phosphorus for sure,

It’s phosphate for me!

Son said, “Why don’t you write a song about an interesting compound, such as nitrogen tri-iodide?”

YD:  “Because it had to have 9 letters.”

We tried to think of another chemical compound with 9 letters in it, but failed.  And I never got to find out why nitrogen tri-iodide is interesting.