It's the final day of 2009, and there has been much discussion in the media about how it's finally the end of the Worst Decade Ever.

And I admit that on a world or a national level, things have pretty much sucked. Wars, terrorism, world-wide economic downturn.

But in my own personal life--we're just talking about little old me here--I'd have to say the '00s have been my Best Decade Ever.

I'll be fair and say that they were only my third decade. I mean, ages 0-10 were probably pretty good, but I only remember half of them; ages 10-20, thumbs way down. I had a reasonably good adolescence, I think, and I certainly can't complain of privation or real struggle. But at the same time, who would ever consider those years of teenage awkwardness and change the Best Ever? Not me, that's for sure.

Which brings us to the years 2000-2009, which happen to coincide with ages 20-29 for me. So far, totally the best decade ever.

As the new millenium dawned, I had recently started dating a boy whom I was pretty sure was going to become my husband, so that was a good thing. I spent the first month of the decade--January 00--living in England with my friend Meg and some other Linfield students, ostensibly "studying British literature."


I do recall writing a few essays and attending "classes" in the bar of the hotel we were staying at, but mostly it was just traveling around England having the time of our lives.

That summer I lived in a little apartment with my friends Connie and Erin and Elisha and worked three jobs (hostess at Mongolian Grill, checker at Mervyn's department store, writing internship with the state of Oregon's Agriculture Department). Yes, I worked all the time and was still poor, but it was a lot of fun too. Got engaged right before classes started for the year; I was right about my hunch on that boy I'd just started dating.

Junior year of college--editor of the student newspaper. Once again, worked all the time but had a lot of fun. Looking down at the sparkly diamond on my finger never failed to make me happy.

Summer of 01--wedding planning. Intern at Corvallis Gazette-Times.


Married a completely stellar man on Aug. 18, 2001. Honeymoon in London! Rock on.

Returned home just in time to start my final semester of college. And to wake up one morning to learn that terrorists had just flown planes into the World Trade Center. A heartbreaking event, but one that had little personal impact on me.

Got my first real reporting job: the Polk County Itemizer-Observer. I wrote birth announcements, obituaries, and everything inbetween. School board, city council, cops, human interest--you name it, I wrote it.

Finished college. Woohoo! Started work at a daily paper closer to where I lived: the Albany Democrat-Herald.

I was the cops reporter for most of my time there. That means I started out each day reading the county 911 logs from the previous 24 hours. Every single day I wrote about drug deals, car crashes, court cases, fires and drownings. It was alternately funny and horrific, tragic and fascinating. I covered the deployment of a local National Guard troop. I watched families wipe away tears as they were separated, and again when they were united.

And though I cared about the stories I wrote, and sympathized with the joy and pain of the families I wrote about, my own personal life--the way I lived out my day to day--was not changed, despite the war and turmoil I wrote about. Through those years, I experienced nothing more tragic than a parking-lot fender-bender. (Oops. That Dumpster just came out of nowhere, sweetie).


June 9, 2004: I start this blog. Pretty much the rest of my decade is chronicled here, but I'll save you from reading through five and a half years' of archives and just continue with this highlights reel of a post.



Aug, 2004: My daughter Beth is born and I begin the most life-changing undertaking I've ever experienced: figuring out how to be a good mother.

2004-05: I went to working only part-time, and most of those hours from home. It is the sweetest deal ever, and yet I still found it frustrating to "juggle" taking care of my one easy little baby with work. I blogged only sporadically, mostly because I couldn't really figure out what to write about. I had this idea that being a "mommyblog" was somehow cheesy and meant that I couldn't find any REAL, important subject matter.

2006: I bite the bullet and realize: Hey, I like writing about being a mom. Blog posts in 2005 = 29. Blog posts in 2006 = 181. So much for not having anything to write about.

Spring 2006: I quit the D-H altogether so Eric can take an internship in Wilsonville. (The amount of time I have on my hands after quitting could contribute to my jump in blog posting as well). We move to Wilsonville with me 6 months pregnant.


June, 2006: Lucy is born! My sweet, sweet, middle child. I begin attempting to mother two children at once. Life gets ever more interesting.

2006-07: We move to Corvallis so Eric can finish up his engineering degree. I start freelance work from home.
Eric graduates. We make tough choices about what job he ought to take. We buy a house.

2008: Little Evie is born. Our third tiny blond terror. The final installment of the Rouse Girls Trilogy.

And...life just keeps chugging along.

Were we hurt by the recession? Well, our house probably lost value. Some of my freelancing got cut. For awhile there our budget was stretched pretty darn thin. But Eric has always had a job, and I've had work of some kind for most of the time. We've been healthy. We've never been in real need.

There have been hurts and troubles along the way. Disagreements with people I love. Times when I've been anxious and worried about situations I really couldn't change. Relationships that aren't what I wish they were. I have wasted time worrying about what others think of me and things that I've done or said.

I didn't spend my twenties doing fabulous things in the big city, or carving out a remarkable career, or traveling the world. Sometimes I regret that.

Still, at the risk of sounding intolerably smug, this has been a decade of good, good things. Love, work, family, friends--what more could a girl ask for? By the grace of God, I am blessed beyond what I could ever deserve.

2000-2009? Best Decade Ever.

Two solid days of multiple Christmas festivities and minimal sleep, and three little girls who survived it without one single temper tantrum, sobfest, or breakdown of any kind.

A Christmas morning filled with stockings, smiles, surprises, hot cocoa and marionberry pancakes.

Three little girls who are now sound asleep in their beds.

An apple pie so good I went ahead and had one of the two remaining pieces for dinner.

Two entire families filled with relatives who love us dearly.

A thrill of hope that causes the weary world to rejoice.



And three children who all managed to smile, look at the camera, and stand still long enough for mom to get a picture.

Now that's a miracle.

I shudder to think what my poor children or the staff at the old folks' home are going to do with me when I'm old. I sometimes feel like I've already lost so many of marbles, there really aren't going to be any left at all by that time.


Let me give you a little illustration: I saw a recipe awhile back in a magazine for an apple-ginger crumb-topped pie. It looked delicious, so I determined I'd make it for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. At Thanksgiving, I went with pumpkin and chocolate instead, so now that it's Christmas time I get to try the new apple pie recipe.

I knew that I went to the store and bought a whole bunch of apples, along with everything else on my list.

And then two days ago I found myself looking at the fruit bowl and realizing that there were only a couple of apples left. Not nearly enough for a pie. Now how in the world did we manage to eat all those apples already? I thought to myself. I bought a ton of apples, enough for snacking and baking, I know I did!

Or did I? Did I just think about buying lots of apples but not actually do it?

And so I went to the grocery store again (I feel like I've been at the grocery store practically every day this week) and bought more apples.

And then, as I got home and was putting the groceries away, I thought, I'll hide these apples in the vegetable drawer of the fridge. That way my family won't eat them all before I have the chance to make a pie for Christmas.

But when I opened up the vegetable drawer (which is clear, by the way. I can see what's inside it every time I open up the fridge) I couldn't put the apples I'd just purchased into the drawer.

Because the original apples that I purchased earlier (and wanted to save for the Christmas pie) were already in there.

D'oh.

If only such a thing were a rare occurence.

But it's not. Just this week I also ordered the wrong quantity of some craft supplies I needed for a Christmas present I was making, which left me a week before Christmas frantically calling all the craft stores in the area to see if they carried what I needed.

And then there are memory lapses like this. And this.

No, sadly enough, absent-minded misadventures seem to be less an occasional lapse and more a way of life for me.

So...now I really have a lot of apples.

But apparently only two or three marbles left rolling around in my head.

1. I really, really ought to be working right now. It is Nap Time, the sacred hour when the kids actually leave me alone, even if they're not asleep. And I have a story that I have not even completed one interview for yet, and the holidays are coming up which means good luck actually getting in touch with anyone, plus I'm extra busy with happy Christmasy stuff. I'm really not quite sure how I'm going to manage to get this one done. And yet here I am, blogging away.




2. My family gets to go to the coast this weekend! It's really not ideal weather for playing on the beach, but getting away for awhile is always nice. And it's thanks to my in-laws and KFIR radio. If you're not from Sweet Home, Oregon, you've probably never heard of KFIR. But it's a little local AM radio station that apparently was having a giveaway, and my in-laws kept calling and calling until they won a whole bunch of gift certificates to a hotel in Newport, and now the whole family is going over there this weekend for my sister-in-law's birthday. Thanks KFIR!, And, thanks in-laws with mad phone dialing skills.

3. The hotel we are staying at has a pool. Which the kids know about. And they really want to swim. Which means mommy and daddy have to put on swimsuits too. And I am not quite in the same shape I was when I went to Grenada last year. Not so much looking forward to pulling on a swimsuit in the middle of December. I can't wait till they're old enough to swim by themselves.

4. I am not quite done with my Christmas shopping. Almost. But not quite. Also I still need to pack and do some laundry for the Newport trip. And did I mention I'm supposed to be working on a story?

5. I am one of those people who stocks up on Christmas presents throughout the year if I see something that seems just right for a particular person. The idea is that then, I already have some of my presents purchased, so I'm not spending a ton of money all in December. The problem is that I keep seeing MORE things I know my children would love, even though I already had all the presents I had originally intended to buy them. It's so hard to restrain myself when I keep seeing things that I just KNOW my kids would love.

6. I like to sometimes get up early to accomplish things before my kids wake up. That's how the theory goes, anyway. The problem is that two of kids are fairly light sleepers who tend to rise early anyhow, so no matter how quiet I am, they wake up and foil my plans. Today I got breakfast ready in the kitchen in the dark so the kitchen lights wouldn't shine into the hallway. I didn't even make coffee because the coffee pot is too noisy. I took my cereal to the office and closed the door while I checked my e-mail. Within minutes, Evie was crying from her crib and Beth was standing beside me.
"Why are you up so early?" I asked Beth. "I was being so quiet!"
"Oh, well, I heard some noises," she said.
"No, I was being super-quiet," I said.
"Noises like this," she said. And then she took my spoon and ever-so-lightly tinked it against the side of my cereal bowl.
Seriously? That woke her up? I just can't win. My children apparently have Superman-like-powers of hearing. Now if only I could find some way to use those powers for good and not for just waking-up-early-and-bothering-Mommy.

7. I know it's still a whole week till Christmas, but I feel like it should be this weekend, for some reason. And I also feel like I ought to be getting some time off soon, for some reason. I think it's because Beth is done with school as of today, therefore I feel like I ought to be on Winter Break now too. No more laundry or cooking or article writing or diaper changing for me! I'm on break, thank you very much.

A girl can dream, right?


More quick takes can be found at Conversion Diary.

Another installment of everything you ever wanted to know about how Jen cooks bread! This recipe for French bread is a recipe that came in the booklet of the bread machine I received as a wedding present nearly nine years ago--the bread machine that is responsible for my love of baking homemade bread.

This bread tastes delightful, every time. Just what you want French bread to be--crispy on the outside, soft and light on the inside. I am not, however, especially skilled at shaping the dough into a baguette shape, so my bread normally tastes excellent but doesn't look that pretty. I've tried rolling the dough out flat and then rolling it up like a jelly roll, which I had been told was the way to do it, without great success. My current method is just to sort of stretch and pull and roll the lumps of dough into baguette-ish shape and hope for the best. If anyone has any tricks for dough-shaping, I'd be glad to hear them!



Here's the recipe, originally from the Welbit bread machine instruction manual, including some notes from me.

French Bread

1 2/3 cup water
2 1/2 tsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
5 cups flour
1 Tb yeast

Add ingredients, in the order listed, into a bread machine and set to "Dough" cycle. Go do something else for an hour and a half.

Come back, punch dough down and pull it out of the bread machine bucket. Set it on a lightly floured surface and let dough rest for 5 minutes (Note: I never let it rest, I just shape it immediately. I didn't remember that I was supposed to let it rest until I was typing the recipe out just now).

Divide dough into halves, form into a long rope and place in trough of a lightly greased, double trough baguette pan (maxiumum 3-inch wide trough) or on a lightly greased cookie sheet. (Note: I always use a cookie sheet and just lay the two loaves side by side, since I do not have any baguette pan, much less a double-trough one. Perhaps this is the problem with the shape of my finished baguettes).

Glaze each baguette with egg whites. Slash five times diagonally with a sharp knife. Place in a warm, draft-free spot to rise until doubled in size, about 45-60 minutes. (Note: This rising after shaping is where I run into problems with the shape of my baguettes, and now that I'm re-reading the fine print on this recipe for the first time in years I'm thinking it's because of my lack of a baguette pan. What happens to mine is that when it rises it tends to poof out and flatten a little bit, for a more oval loaf than a classic narrow French baguette look. If they were laying in a maximum 3-inch wide trough and not just on a cookie sheet, they'd probably stay narrow).

Glaze unslashed portions again with egg white. Bake in preheated oven at 400 F for 25-30 minutes, or until deep brown. (Note: if you glaze with egg whites, the crust will be a deeper brown, and shinier. I usually can't bring myself to waste an egg, because we go through eggs like crazy here, so I often glaze it with olive oil instead, for a lighter and less crunchy but very tasty crust).

Let cool on a wire rack before slicing.

Now, if you don't have a bread machine, my first advice is to try to get one, because they make bread-making so easy, and you can often find them for cheap at garage sales or craigslist. My second piece of advice is that if you have a KitchenAid or some other sturdy stand mixer, you can let it mix and knead the dough for you, and then just put it in a bowl and let it rise for probably an hour or so. My third piece of advice, if you're old fashioned and just like to do things by hand, is to just mix and then knead the dough ingredients by hand. You will have to knead the dough for quite a while, for probably 10 minutes or so, for a very smooth and stiff dough, and then put it in a bowl and let it rise for an hour or so. I've never done it by hand, but I'm sure it would work.

I have never had this recipe fail me. It is super-tasty and people will be impressed that you made French bread, even though it's really very easy. And if you figure out how to shape your dough so that it actually looks like a baguette (especially if you manage it without this mysterious baguette pan the recipe is talking about) then you have my permission to feel triumphant. And also you are ordered to share your secret with me!

If you like adorably retro aprons like this one, I'd advise you to head over to This Heavenly Life today. It's Sarah's one-year blog anniversary, and she's having a giveaway--an apron from Jessie Steele. So if you're interested, hop on over and tell her how much you like her blog, or her aprons, and maybe you'll win one!

Maybe one of these years I'll actually remember when it's my blog-iversary and do something for it. I may not give away prizes, but I always think that I will at least remember, and do a post that says: Hey look everyone! I've been blogging for such a long time! But I never do. Maybe 2010's my year. Keep reading till June (I forget what day I started, but I'm pretty sure it was in June. I know I was enormously pregnant at the time) and we'll see if I manage to remember this year.

I was not a in a sorority when I was in college, and I secretly (or maybe not so secretly) felt somewhat superior about this.

Most of my friends were in sororities, and while I thought that was fine for them, I knew it wasn't for me. I thought that friendships should just develop naturally, not be mass-produced by an outside group. And the fact that you had to pay money to join was particularly off-putting to me.

A year ago, though, I joined Mothers of Preschoolers--MOPS--a group that I have to admit, has some similarities to a sorority--except it's a sorority for moms.



Making friends when you're an adult is kind of hard. Especially when you're a stay at home mom, and you spend the majority of your days hanging out with toddlers. Even when you're a very busy mom, and you're out of the house going to storytime, playing at the playground, taking your kid to preschool--you'll see the same other parents at these places, over and over again, and you'll say hello and maybe introduce yourselves, but turning those moments of chit-chat into an actual friendship is hard. It takes boldness, and work, and time, and it doesn't happen with great frequency, in my experience.

Enter MOPS. It is admittedly, a manufactured environment for moms to connect in. A dozen moms don't generally just happen to find themselves all with babysitters for two hours on the same morning, nor do they usually have the time to arrange a location, a meeting time and food, plus some interesting speaker, activity, or topic to discuss. Those kinds of things take work. Commitment. An actual organization.

So that's why every two weeks I find myself sitting at a table drinking coffee with other women I didn't know at all two years ago. We all have at least one thing in common: we have kids about the same age. That gives a starting point for conversation, and from there it heads off in all directions. From my MOPS group has grown both a writing group and a book club. One MOPS friend is going to teach me how to compost, and another is going to teach me how to make jewelry. We swap babysitting and recipes and toys and clothes. A MOPS friend gave me tomato starts for my garden last spring; I have plans to run in a half-marathon with a different MOPS friend this spring.

I always walk away from MOPS feeling refreshed and uplifted; I love the connections that this group is bringing to my life.

And yes, I did have to pay dues to join (they weren't extravagant, and they're used for activities and childcare for the meetings). And no, this group of women I've met did not just sprout organically from the Oregon soil. There is a national organization plus a dedicated local leadership team who have decided: fostering friendships among women is valuable, and we're going to put work into it.

I'm okay with that. Friendship is worth it, no matter how you make it happen.

I am not a great runner. I am not a fast runner. But, I think it is safe to now call me a dedicated runner. Because I spent all day Saturday--all day--in the 20- and 30-degree weather, running a relay race with four men I'd never met before.

Now, it wasn't originally supposed to be me and four strangers. It was supposed to be me, my husband, and these three guys he used to work with. But at the last minute Eric had to be out of town on business. And--strangely enough--I wasn't able to convince any friends to spend their Saturday running 10 miles in the freezing cold. Don't they know how to have a good time? So instead Eric's replacement was yet another guy I'd never met.

These men were all pretty nice though. They were all engineers. If I may generalize a bit, after having been married to an engineer for eight years, I can say that your standard engineer is a loveable, mechanically-inclined mega-nerd. They love machines, computers, comic books, sci-fi, and spreadsheets. Engineers are very big on spreadsheets. This is why I wasn't really that surprised when, the day before the race, the team captain e-mailed me a spreadsheet.

He had titled it "crude estimates," but it was anything but crude. He had taken our self-reported 5k running times, coupled that information with how long the various legs of the relay were and who was assigned to which leg, and calculated out--down to the second--exactly how long each leg should take each runner to complete. So that, just in case I was curious, I could look at my spreadsheet and see that I was due to start my first leg at exactly 9:20:50 a.m. and complete it at 9:40:54 a.m. Good to know.

I was pretty nervous about the race. I'd never done a relay before, and I was afraid of a lot of things: that I would be incredibly slow and mess up the spreadsheet calculations; that something I ate wouldn't agree with me and I'd have to be dashing for a port-a-potty all day long (or worse, the side of the road); that the four engineers would not like me and it would be a long, awkward, silent day in the car whenever I wasn't running. However, I am happy to report that none of these fears came true.

Since this was a "sprint" relay, the legs were nice and short. My shortest leg was 1.8 miles, I believe, and my longest 2.6. When you know you've only got to go 1.8 miles, you can push yourself a little harder. It didn't hurt that it was in the low 20s when I started running, either--you could just whisper to yourself as you jogged along, "The faster I run, the sooner I can get back in the car." My toes were actually numb for awhile, but eventually all the running got the circulation going again. Plus, I really didn't want the guys to think I was a horrible slowpoke (some of them were pretty fast--like running a mile in under 7 minutes) so I did my best to push myself, and was able to run faster than I thought I would.

Also, the food thing didn't trip me up at all. I ate two Luna bars and a tangerine and drank some water over the course of the race, and that was it. I really wasn't hungry at all and I didn't get all crampy or anything. I was suddenly, intensely hungry once the race was over. We were driving back from Eugene to Albany and I saw the big glowing sign for the Pioneer Villa and I wanted a hamburger sooooo bad...but during the race I was fine.

And, I needn't have worried about getting along with the four sweaty guys I was riding with. They were nice, and we found things to talk about...and when we did lapse into silence, I think it was mostly just because A) they are guys, and most guys don't feel the need to chatter incessantly; and B) we had been running all day. We were all really tired.

At the end of the day, our team ("Army of Darkness"--I didn't pick the name, someone else did; I told you engineers like sci-fi) came in 15th out of 25 teams. We ran the 50-mile course in 6 hours, 58 minutes, and our average per-mile pace was 8:04. I was pretty impressed with that, but there were teams who were much more amazing than that--the winners did it with a 5:21 per-mile pace! Oh, and the down-to-the-second "crude estimates" spreadsheet? We were within two minutes of the finish time the team captain calculated. Pretty impressive. If ever you need a handy-dandy spreadsheet, just ask an engineer.

So would I do the Civil War Relay again? Yes, I definitely would. But next year I'm going to be looking for at least one other girl with the guts to run with me. And some temperatures that are above 40 would be nice. Maybe 50 degrees, sunny, no wind or rain. In Oregon. In December. Anything's possible, right? Check back next year to see if that happens.

The first night the neighbors put their Christmas lights up

Out of the darkness, a gleaming surprise
Lights mirror the glow in my daughters’ eyes


You can read more couplets from Perfectly Poetical participants at The Little Stuff of Life.

Beth, coming up to me while I'm folding laundry: Mom, you are going to be our queen.

Me, continuing to fold: Oh, sure. Thanks.

Lucy: Because we need a queen and we couldn't find anyone else.

Me: OK.

Lucy: So you need a dress.

Me: Oh, well, I'm not going to go change my clothes right now. Maybe I'm just a queen who is dressed like a common person today.

Beth, eyeing my jeans and T-shirt critically, then nodding: Yes. There are bad people after you, so you have to be hidden. So that's why you are dressed like a maid, and that's why you are doing a maid's job. So you don't get caught.

And I continue folding laundry, now with new purpose. I knew I was doing this for a good reason.

1.Proof that I am in some ways a different person than I was 10 years ago, before I started dating the man who would become my husband: last night I watched an entire football game, all by myself, and I was really into it.

Now, granted, it was the Civil War game (for you non Northwesterners, that's the annual match-up between rivals Oregon State and University of Oregon), and this year the winner got to go to the Rose Bowl (That's a really big deal).



I grew up aware of football, to be sure; my dad loves it. But I never undrstood it at all, not even a little bit, until Eric explained it to me. The Beavers are the only team I follow, and I am by no means a rabid fan--but still. The fact that I chose of my own accord to spend an evening watching football--well, that's saying something. As for the actual outcome of the game...when Beth woke up in the morning and I told her the results, she cried, "But I didn't WANT the Ducks to win!" None of us did, sweetie. But we survive.

2. And in a nice segue, here comes topic No. 2. This one will give you complete proof that I am crazy, in case you were wondering: I agreed to run in the Civil War relay, which is a race held every year on the weekend of the Oregon State/University of Oregon football game. This year the route runs from Albany to Eugene, starting at Linn-Benton Community College and ending at Autzen stadium.



It's a relay, so it's divided into legs, of course, and each leg is not too long; my longest leg is only 2.6 miles, I think. But I have to run five legs, for a total of 10 and a half miles. In what's supposed to be 30-degree weather. Gosh, this is going to be SO MUCH FUN, right? So if you happen to be driving on Seven Mile Lane, or through Brownsville, or on Gap Road or Coburg Road tomorrow, and you see an exhausted woman trudging along through the frosty air, smile and wave from the happiness of your warm car. I'll nod and wave and try not to curse out loud.

3. Speaking of running, I've never done a relay before, and it's pretty much an all-day running event. Usually I don't ever eat before a long run, or during one. But there's no way I'm going to be able to go from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. without food. Do any runners out there read my blog? What should I eat that's not going to make me sick to my stomach while I run?

4. Can you tell I'm kind of nervous about this race thing?

5. Let's move on to happier topics: food. I made this butternut squash pasta sauce recipe from Simply Recipes today and it was divine. The butternut-cheese sauce was so yummy, I seriously think that if you made your puree thick enough, it would be tasty enough to eat on bread or crackers, like pesto or hummus. Delicious.

The only flaw in this recipe is that it does not give you an actual amount of pureed squash to use. It just says to start with a 2.5 pound squash. Well, I didn't weigh my squash before I roasted it. But it was quite large--I got it from my friend Rebekah; apparently they grow hearty squash out on their farm. I used about two cups of the puree I got from it, and I still have tons of puree left. But two cups worked well for this recipe. I must say, as I eyed all that bright orange pureed squash, I had flashbacks to the days of making baby food for my kiddos. Oh my gosh, I just dumped baby food into this nice sauce! But rest assured, it did not taste like baby food. It was good.

Oh, and also: I used onions rather than shallots, milk plus a little melted butter instead of cream, Swiss rather than Parmesan cheese (because I ate up all my fresh Parmesan because I love it so), and dried rather than fresh parsley. Does that still count as the same recipe? I think so.

6. Speaking of baby food, let's move on to topic six: babies. My husband sent me a link to what looks like a really cool documentary: "Babies: The Movie." It follows the first year in the lives of four babies, one born in the U.S., one in Japan, one in Mongolia, and one in Namibia.

Here's the trailer. Watch it. It looked really intriguing, and also sort of made me want to cry. Does that sound like a recommendation? Because it was meant to be.



7. Moving from movies to music (I'm all about the segues today), I was reminded by Jennifer and Heather this week that you can get FREE Christmas music from Amazon and iTunes at this time of year. My favorite new download so far? "Why can't it be Christmastime all year?" by Rosie Thomas. I'd never even heard of Rosie Thomas before, but I'm really digging her mellow voice and this upbeat, dancey Christmas song.

Have a good weekend, everyone. More quick takes for your enjoyment, here.

Autumn



The leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,

as if withered in the distant gardens of heaven;

with nay-saying gestures they fall.



And in the nights falls the heavy earth

from all the stars into loneliness.



We all are falling. This hand there falls.

And look at the other: it is in all of them.



And yet there is one, who holds all this

falling with infinite gentleness in his hands.




--by Rainer Maria Rilke



I am so grateful; where would we be, all of us lonely falling souls, without an infinitely gentle hand to hold us?

Forgive me for falling back on Rilke again, but I never cease to find his poetry beautiful and thought-provoking. Makes me wish I knew German so I could read it in the original. I hope you enjoy it too.

You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so

only because I seldom hear you breathe;

I know: you are alone.

And should you need a drink, no one is there

to reach it to you, groping in the dark.

Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.

I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,

and by sheer chance; for it would take

merely a call from your lips or from mine

to break it down,

and that without a sound.



The wall is built of your images.



They stand before you hiding you like names,

and when the light within me blazes high

that in my inmost soul I know you by,

the radiance is squandered on their frames.


And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,

exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.



--Rainer Maria Rilke

I especially like the idea here that it is our very images of God--our own human conceptions of him--that limit our understanding of all he really is.

I am firm about Christmas and its rightful place in the seasonal calendar.

Christmas decorations, recipes, music, movies, and all other general forms of holiday merriment can (and should) be enjoyed to the utmost during the month of December.

However, breaking them out before Thanksgiving not only undermines the legitimacy of the national day of gratitude, it also makes it all the more likely that everyone will be sick of Christmas stuff by the time Dec. 25 rolls around--thus devaluing Christmas itself.



This is my Christmas manifesto, and I'm sticking to it. I'm not a grinch, I swear...but I am kind of the Christmas police. The secret Christmas police, that is. Stores, restaurants, or houses that break this personal taboo of mine are likely to be mocked...but only from the safety of my own car or house, where the perpetrators are not able to actually hear me.

My girls have fully adopted my militant Christmas views. What they haven't mastered yet is the secret part. Rather than keeping their scorn to themselves, my girls voice their disapproval of early decorators loud and clear.

And, since stores seem to decorate earlier and earlier these days, it seems that every trip to the store for the last month has gone something like this:

We get out of the car and into the store, where we pass through the doors and are greeted by Frosty the Snowman displays, faux pine boughs, and "Jingle Bells" blaring on the store sound system.

Girls: Christmas stuff! Already? It's not even Thanksgiving yet!

Me: Yes, well, some people like to decorate early.

Girls, glaring at store employees: Don't these people know it's not time to decorate for Christmas yet? You CAN'T decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving!

Me: Girls, talk more quietly please.

Girls, pointing at large seasonal displays: But Mom! They have Santa Claus pictures everywhere. And it's not even December! These silly people are doing it WRONG!

And so I slink my way through the store, hearing my own critical views coming back out of the mouths of my own babes, at full volume.

But now, thank goodness, Thanksgiving has passed, December has rolled around, and I am ready to embrace the season. Now instead of complaining about the holiday decor, we can freely oooh and aaaah over ever single reindeer, angel, and candy cane we pass.

The Christmas police are retired. For this year.

Perhaps you read the last recipe in my little bread-recipe series. Perhaps you even tried it out. Now, back for your baking pleasure, is another favorite bread recipe that I frequently make for dinner. It's not quite as fast as the last recipe, but it is just as easy. Perhaps even easier. It's No-Knead Artisan Bread. If you can stir, then you can make this recipe! Seriously, all you do is measure, dump and stir.



So this recipe can take as short a time as about 3 hours, or as long a time as overnight. I think it would work well to mix the ingredients, stick the bowl in the fridge, and then come home and bake it at night. Or, if you're a stay-at-home type, you can do what I usually do, which is start it some time mid-afternoon, leave it sitting on the counter for awhile, and then wander back into the kitchen and bake it some time in the evening.

I got the original recipe from the Democrat-Herald, but I've modified it a bit. Here's my version:

Easy No-Knead Bread

Ingredients:

1½ tablespoons regular yeast

1 tablespoon salt

3 cups warm water

3 cups whole wheat flour

3 cups white flour (you can change the flour ratio here to suit your preferences)

Flour for handling the dough

1 cup of hot water

Directions:

Measure yeast and salt into a large mixing bowl. Add 3 cups of lukewarm water (no hotter than 100 degrees - water that feels warm to the wrist), and stir the mixture until the salt dissolves.

Add flour to the liquid mixture, and stir until there are no dry lumps or patches of flour. The dough will look rough, but this is OK. I sometimes add a little more than the 6 cups called for. You want to be able to touch the surface of the dough and perhaps pull a chunk off; it needs to be dough, not goo, but it's not going to be a smooth dough the way it would look if you kneaded it, either. Cover the bowl with a clean cloth towel or paper towels. Let the dough rise, at room temperature, for up to 5 hours, or as little as two.

Preheat oven to 450.

Flour your hands well, and gently shape the dough into one large loaf. I sometimes prefer to make it into two vaguely oval shapes and use two regular size loaf pans--it cooks faster that way. Use enough flour so the dough does not stick to your hands. The dough should fill whatever baking pan (or pans) you use, to at least half full. You can take a sharp knife and make a slash or two in the top of the loaf if you wish.

Put your bread in the oven and also place a cup, filled with water, on the lower oven rack and immediately close the door. (I don't really know what the water is supposed to do. Release steam into the oven that somehow affects the baking, I guess. But the recipe says it, and it's easy to stick some water in there, so I do it.)

For one large loaf, bake about 60 minutes. For two smaller loaves, bake 30 minutes. They will have a hard, crispy, dark brown crust.

Once it is out of the oven, remove the bread from the pan, and let it cool on a hard surface.

This makes a really yummy bread with a hard, crispy crust. It's not a lovely, perfect looking loaf, but a more sloppy, "rustic" bread. It goes perfect with soup. You can dip the crusty bread in the warm soup and it's so good. It's what we had for dinner last night. The girls usually tear off their crust and just eat the soft inside of the bread, but they give the crusts to Eric and I and we eat them, so we don't mind.

As I said, I usually bake this in two smaller loaves. This gives you one loaf to eat with dinner that night, and extra to have for toast in the morning. It make super yummy toast, too. Mmmm...can you tell I really love bread?

I just noticed this note on the original recipe: If the dough is refrigerated overnight, or even up to a couple of days, let it sit at room temperature for at least 1½ hours, then shape the dough, and bake as mentioned above. So I guess it wouldn't quite work to leave the dough in the refrigerator, take it out when you come home from work, and pop it in the oven to have with dinner. Unless you get home from work two and a half hours before you were planning on eating, which I never did, back in the day when I actually had an office job. So maybe plan it for a weekend day instead.