Eating French?

A while ago I read Bringing Up Bebe by Pamela Druckerman, and loved it. More recently, I finished French Kids Eat Everything by Karen Le Billon and I loved it too. I am apparently a closet francophile because I also have French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano and several other French-living advice books, and I adore them all. It is my own little French paradox.

Since I read French Kids Eat Everything I have been trying to relax my vigilance about making sure that Mimi eats a certain amount of calories, and have been giving her more varied foods and less of her dependable staples. She won’t starve herself, right? Well, perhaps that will be more true once she gets some molars so she can actually chew things. Anyway, what she is eating has been more closely in line with what we are eating.

I am also trying to incorporate more fruit and vegetables into our diets and to make eating more enjoyable (would Sparks give me a blank look of confusion if I told him that?) I bought some baguette and ate it with butter, honey, and fresh fruit. Mimi was even able to gum it up if given enough time. I am pinning nice vegetable recipes on Pinterest. This week I plan to make stuffed tomatoes and ratatouille, among other things.

And I have returned to the morning bowl of yogurt and fruit with a pinch of brown sugar, as pictured above (actually, far too much brown sugar in the picture above). In the few days between Mimi and I returning from the hospital after she was born, and my parents arriving to help, Sparks made me breakfast on a tray every morning. Toast, scrambled eggs, and a bowl of fruit and yogurt with a little sugar on top. He kept the kitchen sparkling clean. He took the tray to me wherever I was, in bed or on a sofa. I was in that postpartum phase where you cry over every little thing, and I remembered that long ago, before Mimi or Sparks or Pudding or the Little Gray House Of Mine, back when I was severely Alone but buying home goods with blind faith that I’d someday use them, I had bought that tray thinking that some day I could use it to serve a sick husband or child. And now, my husband was using it to serve me. (Cue a good sob).

Anyway, yes, these fruit and yogurt bowls are delicious and a great way to work in some fruit and some protein. Now that the baguette is gone, I eat a toasted English muffin alongside it. It keeps me going until lunchtime. Oranges are very good with brown sugar, too.

Bedroom paint

You may remember, but probably don’t, that my bedroom at the Little Gray House Of Mine was painted a warm pale pink from Martha Stewart’s defunct line for Lowe’s. The color was called Paris Pink. It was perfect.

When we renovated Low House I wrung my hands about what color to paint our bedroom here. Both my mother and Sparks’ mother chimed in with the opinion that a man should not have to sleep in a pink room. And so no paint color went up at all. And the room is white. With white furniture. And beige curtains.

I think I have a color now, though. Yesterday Mimi and I were emptying out a drawer (her favorite occupation right now) and found a pile of paint chips from the renovation, including a lot of defunct Martha Stewart colors. One of them is called Glass Bottom Boat. It has equal amounts of blue and green in it I think, and very little gray to take it down. It sort of glows and shimmers. And all of the bedroom pictures I have pinned on Pinterest have a lot of aqua and cream and gold in them; it’s just a magical color combination for me. Can you imagine?

Glass Bottom Boat with the beige curtains

Glass Bottom Boat with all of the pink and green and gold stuff in the room, completing the color spectrum (something I’m a fan of)

Glass Bottom Boat with all of those pink and green and gold quilts, ditto

I even think I like it with the Hibiscus Pink bathroom. It reminds me of paintings of cherry blossoms against the sky.

I think that this color is probably still available in the regular Valspar line; that was the case with another color that we gnashed teeth over when it was discontinued mid-renovation. I will check. I have no idea when we could possibly get our act together to paint our bedroom (I mean, seriously?) But if we ever do…

You like?

Iris iris iris!!!

I just stepped outside to get the mail and LOOK WHAT I SAW! WWOOOOOOWWW!!!

This is one of the fancy irises I bought from Schreiner’s last fall. Almost all of them have sent up a flowering stalk, and this is the first to bloom. YOWZA. Yes please. Please sir may I have some more?

The blue and white columbines are blooming

And… um… these emo columbines. Why did I buy those?

Silvery groundcover in the patio bed has erupted in little white flowers

This Year’s Petunias are still alive

Dutch iris are beginning to open all over

And finally, I Break For Monster Buds. Mama’s gonna have some poppies this year!

Grandpa Maynard

Grandpa Maynard, one of seven children of a Dutch preacher. Kalamazoo was his hometown, I suppose. Grandpa who went to one semester of college, and took English, Latin, and Dutch. Grandpa who was drafted, got a march fracture, and was sent to guard German prisoners in Indiana instead of being sent overseas. Grandpa who met grandma and married her when she was eighteen.

Grandpa who was Assistant Postmaster. Who collected stamps. Who liked to fish. Grandpa and his father-in-law in their little fishing boat in Florida.

Grandpa who played piano. I have his Reader’s Digest piano music books still. Grandpa who sang bass. Grandpa who sang at church. Grandpa who always sat and listened when I played piano, and sang along when he knew the words. Grandpa who would regretfully tell me when I was hitting wrong notes.

Grandpa who took me to lunch at Pizza Hut. We would order personal pan pizzas and they would put a little timer on our table. If they took more than 30 minutes to make our pizzas, they were free. The pizzas always came in less than thirty minutes.

Grandpa who took me to the swimming pool.

Grandpa sitting on a high stool by the kitchen sink, washing dishes, telling me where to put the silverware. Grandpa sitting at the kitchen table with his stamp albums in front of him, rearranging them, and showing me the rare and new ones. He had the misprinted African American Cowboys plate. Grandpa who had my dad buy plates for him at the philatelic window at the downtown post office.

Grandpa with his driving cap, his square bifocals, his blue windbreaker, his cane, and his one shoe built up because he had one leg shorter from polio. Grandpa in shorts and knee socks, with a knee-replacement surgery scar that I couldn’t resist playing with when I was little. Grandpa with his wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Grandpa who I remember with blue eyes, then remember with brown. Grandpa doing knee exercises, using an old coffee can wrapped in a hand towel. Doing the exercises with him when I was about five.

Grandpa writing letters to me as soon as I learned how to read. Grandpa sending me Campbell’s Soup labels to turn in at school. Grandpa’s squareish cursive and rough yellow writing paper, and then his electric typewriter, and then handwritten again on the stationery I “made” for him with our bubblejet printer. I still have every one, sorted and piled in the third drawer of my mother’s secretary desk.

Grandpa who was always ready to read a book to a small child, who made different voices for the characters. Grandpa seemed genuinely interested in my toys and drawings and projects. At his funeral everyone remembered how much he loved children, and how much they loved him.

I was staying with them in the summer of 1992 when grandma’s mother was dying of pancreatic cancer. Grandma had sat up with Kit the previous two nights and was fast asleep upstairs with noisy box fans running. I was tucked away in the guest room downstairs, just starting to drift off, when grandpa yelled. He had tripped and broken a hip. I was able to awaken Grandma and she called an ambulance. I was sent to Aunt Mary’s for the night, where I slept a deep and dreamless sleep in a fluffy white bed amid mirror-shiny wood furniture.

Grandma and grandpa, the people I called when I dumped my first boyfriend while my parents were on vacation, and I was too sad to stay alone in the house for a week. I went to stay with them and they were so kind. I didn’t expect anyone to take my grief seriously, but they welcomed me like someone who was in a real crisis, they sat down with me and sympathized and told me I had done the right thing.

Grandpa had bone cancer and his vertebrae began to collapse. He lost about eight inches of height. He broke ribs in his sleep. He wheezed. He napped. He sat in his chair and read books about World War II, book after book. He went to church when he felt up to it. One afternoon when everyone else was on a walk and I was sitting at the table with him looking through war souvenirs, he broke down and cried. He didn’t understand why he’d gotten to stay safe in America while the men he trained with were sent overseas to die. One of those men was a cousin of his. I held his hand while he pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes. His hands were bony, and the backs of them were darkly discolored with age and sickness. Grandpa said that he wished he could write letters more often. He wished he could come to visit me at college and take me out for dinner, but… he lifted his hands and dropped them hopelessly. His body wouldn’t let him.

I last saw him about two weeks before he died. Insurance had provided him with a motor scooter, and it was a glorious autumn afternoon. We all took a walk and he went with us, in his scooter. Intoxicated with the freedom and independence, he zipped far ahead of us, ignoring us when we called to him to wait. For once in his life, the preacher’s boy was being a little bit naughty.

I was at Purdue living in the graduate house then. My father had been working on that side of the state and had taken me out for dinner. Just as he dropped me off at the graduate house he got a call. Maynard was in the hospital. His oxygen saturation was low and this might be it. My dad took off to drive across the state. By the time he got there, Maynard had passed.

Grandpa, my grandpa. He loved to take grandma on Sunday drives in the Indiana countryside. He loved to drive his Buick. He loved to point out the mismatched intersections, and say that they were so because of the curvature of the earth. Grandpa who took naughtiness in children as a personal affront. Grandpa who held his silverware overhand. Grandpa who climbed out the bedroom window to shovel snow off of the flat porch roof. Grandpa who always believed you would take a genuine interest in his souvenirs and letters and projects. Grandpa drinking coffee. Grandpa persistently and publicly admiring and loving his wife, in very much the same way my own husband does.

Here’s a picture for you, grandpa Maynard. Same piano, different baby. Your Reader’s Digest book on the music stand.

100 Things #4: Window treatments

If your home is a legal dwelling, it has windows, and unless you like to rise with the sun and have no neighbors within ten miles, you want some kind of window treatments. Here is what I have learned about them…

Miniblinds are common in newer builds and very flexible in terms of function. They can be adjusted to let various amounts of light and air flow through them. Many new windows even have the miniblinds enclosed inside the glass so they don’t get dusty or damaged. This eliminates one of the drawbacks of miniblinds: they get dusty and damaged easily. If you have them, you dust them by lowering them completely then shutting them completely in one orientation, gently dusting them, then shutting them completely in the opposite orientation and dusting. Wind, cats, and small children are all hazards to the well-being of your miniblinds.

More substantial wooden blinds are popular in higher-end houses right now. They present the same advantages of miniblinds while being sturdier and more attractive. There are also vertical blinds, popular in my childhood, which are both delicate and hard to dust. All blinds can provide 100% privacy, but none of them really provide 100% light exclusion.

If you want to exclude light as thoroughly as possible (in a bedroom for example) you will want blackout curtains. You can buy these ready-made, have them made custom for you, or make them yourself by sewing a length of blackout backing onto the decorator fabric of your choice. If you want them to do their job well you will want them to hang as close to the window as possible, preferably touching the sill. There are special curtain hanging systems available that allow this.

Drapes provide 100% privacy and, if blackout backed and hung close to the sill, excellent light exclusion. They can be made of any fabric so they can be very attractive and match your textile decor. Swags and other headers for drapes used to be more popular than they are now; the current fashion in drapes seems to be just the vertical elements hung from a rod with hooks or rings.

The picture included with this article is of drapes in my living room. These are not functional drapes; they just hang on place from cafe curtain rods. This style is popular in the southern United States and provides no function, just good looks.

If the windows in your house are bad–if you can feel the cold as you approach them in winter, for example, or if they frost over on the inside, or if you can feel drafts around them, you will save a lot in heating bills by either attaching temporary plastic covering to the insides of them during the cold months or investing in some heavy drapes (or both). Blinds won’t help you with this problem.

If you are only concerned with privacy and not light exclusion, there are many sheer and lace curtains available. People who live in close-packed city houses often keep such curtains permanently pulled.

Unfortunately drapes need to be cleaned occasionally. Because you cannot afford any shrinkage in drapes and because they are so often made of fabric that is not machine washable, dry cleaning is usually your best option. I would do this job every year or two, freshening them up with Febreze in between. If you do take on the laundering yourself, make every effort to avoid shrinkage. It is coming time to clean the drapes in my own house (it has been two years since I put them up after we moved in). They are all cotton decorator fabric with blackout backing. I plan to wash them on cold/delicate and iron them dry.

Shutters are sometimes permanently affixed to the outside of a house for good looks. If you live in an area that is prone to hurricanes, you may have real, functional shutters on your house. These protect the window glass from flying debris.

And that, dear readers, is the short and sweet of window treatments.

100 Things #3: Plumbing

What I have learned about plumbing includes this interesting fact: water pipes aren’t the only ones that are plumbed, gas lines are plumbed too.

Your house may or may not have gas available to it. If you do have a gas line in your house, it is a relatively inexpensive matter to have a plumber hook it up to a gas furnace, a gas stove, or a gas log in a fireplace. You shouldn’t attempt to do it yourself unless you are thoroughly competent in the procedures involved, because gas leaks are highly explosive. Natural gas has no odor of its own, but the gas company adds a chemical to it to give it a strong, tell-tale scent. If you ever smell gas in your house you should shut the gas of at the main (make sure you know how to do this) and exit the house immediately, leaving the door open behind you to help vent gas out of the building. Then call the gas company.

On to water pipes. Unless you live in an extremely old house with no updates, you have indoor plumbing. Somewhere between the street and the place the water line enters your house, the water company’s responsibility for the pipe’s well being ends and your responsibility for it begins. This is important in three situations: (1) when you are digging on your property, to make sure you don’t damage the water main, (2) when tree roots have grown into and damaged the lines entering or exiting your house, and (3) when pipes freeze in cold weather. I only have personal experience with issue (3).

Usually the point at which you become responsible for the pipe is where it actually enters your house, and at that point you can take steps to prevent your pipes from freezing. Only pipes that run along outside walls are at risk, because the inside of your house is heated. When you move into a new house, make sure you know where the water lines are running. Find the point where the main enters your house, and take note of where all the sinks, toilets, tubs, showers, and washing machine hookups are. If any of these are on an outside wall, you may want to wrap the water lines with insulation, leave the cabinets they run inside open at night to let warm air from the house circulate better, or (worst case scenario) let the tap drip overnight to keep un-frozen water running through the pipe. If a pipe inside your house freezes, the expanding water will damage the pipe and when it thaws later you will have a water leak. The leak will be your problem.

It is possible for the pipes to freeze outside of your house, where you are not responsible for them. If this happens, you will wake up one cold morning with no running water. You should call the water company to tell them. They will send someone out who… here my exact knowledge fails me, but this person has a machine that they attach to the main outside your house which, I think, runs electric current through it and heats it up, removing the frozen blockage.

You want to treat your pipes kindly. Drains require especial care, because things other than water go down them and these things can stop them up. If leftover cooking fat is the kind that turns solid when it gets cold (butter, Crisco, lard, and bacon and beef drippings are all in this category) then DO NOT put it down your sink drain, as it will adhere to the pipes and over time cause a clog. My method is to let the fat cool in the pan, then pry it into the trash with a spatula. You can soak it up with paper towels, too, or if you’re a certain kind of hard core foodie you can keep it for more cooking later.

Other things can cause problems with drains, especially if you have an automatic disposal in your kitchen sink and therefore are less careful about what goes down it. One especial danger is things that have a fine, sand-like quality. These can compact in the pipe–especially where it bends–and clog the pipe. Egg shells and coffee grinds are the two often-named culprits for this, and I can personally attest to coffee grounds causing problems.

If you have an automatic disposal, read the instruction manual for it. Some say that grinding small bones is good for the disposal blades because it cleans them off, while others say they will damage the blades. Putting some ice cubes down the disposal periodically is definitely a good idea. Putting citrus peels down the disposal can help the drain to smell better.

If you do not have an automatic disposal in your kitchen sink, then you need to keep a trap in the drain to catch bits of food. When you are done using the sink you empty the trap into the trash.

Bathroom drains are apt to clog with hair and soap scum. Put a hairpin turn at the end of a piece of wire about 12″ long. When a drain begins to run slowly, remove the stopper (you will have to figure out how yourself, as there are many stopper mechanisms and they all come apart differently) and use the wire to physically remove most of the clog. You may find it necessary to use a chemical to further unclog your drain after doing this, but you probably won’t. Go easy on these unclogging chemicals because they are bad for your pipes.

A good routine for keeping drains fresh and running smoothly is to shake a good amount of baking soda into the drain, let it sit for several minutes, pour some white vinegar down the drain and let it sit for several minutes, then pour a kettleful of boiling water down the drain. This will help to break down greasy buildup and deodorize. Pouring some bleach water down a drain periodically couldn’t possibly hurt, either.

Your drains might run to a city sewer system or they might run to a septic system. If you have a septic system you need to know how to maintain it, which includes a knowledge of what chemicals you cannot put down your drains.

Your water may come from a city supply or may come from your own well. Again, make sure you know how to maintain your well if you have one.

Many houses used to have a cistern to supply water to them. In these systems water would run off the roof into the gutters, then into a holding tank in the yard or the basement, and this was the water for the house. I would guess that the number of houses that are still using cisterns instead of wells is vanishingly rare, but I don’t have any statistics to cite.

If the water in your area is extremely hard you may wish to install a water softener (or you might already have one). Old water softeners needed to have bags of salt pellets poured into them periodically, but I believe that newer versions use silica beads and need less maintenance. Extremely hard water will leave rust stains on your plumbing fixtures and cause soaps and detergents to be less effective. Over-softened water will make it hard to rinse soaps and detergents away. It also tastes bad compared to slightly hard water. My own preference is to avoid a water softener unless the water is so bad that it leaves rust stains.

Low-flow plumbing fixtures are environmentally responsible but come with some drawbacks. A faucet or shower head can be fitted with a device that reduces the amount of water that flows through it without affecting the water pressure. This results in reduced water usage. It can also take longer to rinse shampoo out of your hair in the shower, and it will definitely take longer to fill pots and glasses from such a tap. If you are interested in one of these devices, try it and see if you like it. You may not notice the difference. Low-flow toilets used to flush with less force because they were sucking less water down with each flush. As a result, it could take two or three flushes to empty the bowl. New toilets may use less water and also flush with decent force, I don’t have any information about that (our house still has the toilets that were installed in 1974).

The width of the drain the toilet flushes into determines how liable the toilet is to clog. If you are building or renovating, it is worthwhile to know what diameter drain is being put in.

A toilet sits on top of a wax ring that prevents leaks out the bottom. The wax can compress and dry out over time. It is probably worth replacing this ring every ten years or so.

Finally, a flush toilet is a simple mechanism, and if the pipes are sound and clear it cannot “break” in any way that you cannot fix by taking the top off the tank and fiddling with the mechanism. If your toilet stops flushing, take a few minutes to learn about the mechanism on the internet, and fix it yourself.

Shower heads are almost ubiquitous in the United States. An American feels riotous when faced with a bathtub that doesn’t have one. Many older houses have a shower head that is placed too low to get your head under. My explanation for this is that people use to wash their hair far less frequently than they do now, and when they did wash it the job was done in a sink–so shower heads were fixed low to keep hair dry. I find that a hand shower is more useful than a fixed shower head. You can more easily bathe small children with one, you can rinse the whole shower surround after scrubbing it, you can spray sand or grass clippings off of just your lower legs. Hand showers are either attached to a bar on which they can slide up and down, or to a hose, and they then have a holder to fit into somewhere. Many cheap hand showers come with a plastic hose that will crack after a year or two. You can buy a metal hose to replace it without buying a whole new shower head.

And that, dear readers, is all I feel like writing about plumbing right now.

Sycamore Lane

My imagination has been inventing another setting, for which I have no particular characters or plots. I’ll throw it out there in case you enjoy it. Of course I have a Pinboard started–I call it Sycamore Lane.

Sycamore Lane is a country road that stretches between two rural communities. The trees grow right up to the edge of it. There are a few fields that have been cleared along the way to graze horses and cows, and a dotting of little farmhouses. Some are white clapboard and some are cinder block, and they mostly have flower gardens out front and chickens wandering round.

Sycamore Lane is a severely female place. There aren’t many men around and the ones who are there behave themselves. Sycamore Lane is a bastion of good housekeeping. Being somebody will make you important there, but so will a well-kept garden, clean floors (even the corners), ironed bedsheets, polished silver, and blocked lace on your hankie. There are a lot of widows and spinsters here as well as a few flighty young wards. Marilla Cuthbert would like it here. So would the ladies from Cranford. Tasha Tudor would probably be on the outs. Jane Eyre is Sycamore Lane’s idea of a really juicy romance.

Sycamore Lane is feminine but not sweet; it prefers blue to pink, cream to white, brown to green, and shuns excess ornamentation. Embroidered monograms are honorable, embroidered flowers are frippery. The ladies especially like plant and bird motifs–and Audubon prints are the high-holy of household art here with English landscapes coming in a close second. Sycamore Lane is well kept, not shabby chic. There is no peeling paint or disintegrating lace. The aesthetic wanders in a slightly Colonial, slightly Primitivist direction.

Basically, Sycamore Lane is a good place for any 18th or 19th century novel to have taken place (except that it would also fit right here in central Illinois). Anne of Green Gables could have happened there. While it is fussy and rigid I don’t intend it to be so in a bad way. The ladies are the way they are because they can be, because they are comfortable, because they are past the part of life that worries about marriage and babies. In a way it’s not only a feminine but a feminist place, because it isn’t about how the ladies look or who they can attract or serve, but about what they do for themselves, and what they do is varied and hands-on work with immediate and personal gratification.

Do with it what you will. Enjoy!

Pain perdu

Here is a picture of the ridiculously huge piece of french toast, and the macerated strawberries, that I had for breakfast this morning. The leisure to treat myself this way is provided by a little “secret” I haven’t shared with blogland yet: we have begun sending Mimi to daycare two mornings a week.

I know that I am supposed to feel embarrassed that just staying home with just one toddler was driving me mad. There’s only one of her and she’s a sweet little girl. We have a ton of fun together. Unfortunately, in her first year there were certain issues I had with worrying incessantly about her. It began during my failed experiment in exclusively breastfeeding and continued as Mimi’s weight percentile dropped throughout her first year. Coming up to her first birthday and her twelve month checkup I was a nervous wreck and just needed some time when it wasn’t my job to worry about her.

By the way, her twelve month checkup was fine. She has settled into her own growth curve and the doctor isn’t worried. Lesson to new moms: doctors like to scare you.

The internet likes to scare you too, and also to make you feel guilty. Dr. Sears wants you to give up your body, your bed, your sleep, your naps, your everything and if you don’t your baby will be emotionally damaged. Lucky women who are able to breastfeed are militant and judgmental and even La Leche League wants you to know that if you don’t EBF for the first year and continue until the kid is in kindergarten, the baby will be stupid, fat, and asthmatic–also if breastfeeding isn’t working it’s because you aren’t trying hard enough. Baby health websites are afraid of liability issues and construe everything as a worst-case scenario (and if they don’t, your own mommy-mind will). It’s rough out there for moms.

And then I read a NYT bestseller that my mother mentioned to me: Bringing Up Bébé, a book written by an American living in Paris, on her observations about the differences between American and French parenting. What a breath of fresh air! This book tells me all the things I had felt were probably true. Maybe that’s good marketing on the author’s part, but I felt so elated while I was reading this book. It emphasizes children’s emotional resilience, the value of letting them be independent wherever possible, the crucial importance of boundaries, and above all–the mother’s right to continue being a fulfilled human being who takes time to keep doing the things that made her happy before her children were born. And that means putting the kids in daycare. At an early age.

My mornings alone aren’t all french toast and bubble baths. Mostly it is a time for me to get serious housework done. It’s when floors are vacuumed and mopped, furniture is dusted, beds are laundered and remade, and I attend to oil changes and dentist appointments and all those errands that are excruciating or impossible if you have to manage a small child while doing them.

Mimi’s mornings at daycare are about meeting new people and doing new things. There are different toys. There are different adults. There are other babies to meet and play with. There is different food to learn to eat and like. There is a different place to learn to take naps.

We do not belong to a church with a MOPS group and a preschool and a nursery. We do not have family close by for Mimi to spend an occasional morning or afternoon with. What we do have is a lovely daycare center just a block from Sparks’ place of work, where he can see her in the playground from his window, and where the caretakers know us and also Mimi’s grandparents, and have for years. I like to think that it is a lot like the French Creche daycares. There is no emphasis on early learning or accelerated reading, which pleases me, because I didn’t learn to read until they taught us in first grade, and I got a Ph.D. at 26 so obviously I didn’t suffer. Mimi just plays-plays-plays, explores-explores-explores, gets an opportunity to interact with peers and to be out from under my mommy-goggles for a while.

It seems a little bit like my French toast. You take something that seems less-than-ideal (in this case a piece of toast Sparks forgot about) and you make it into the best thing you can. And it will be good enough. No, it will be better than good enough. It will be great.

With mommy-guilt melting away, I finally bought a dishwasher basket for Mimi’s bottles and stuff. I had been hand-washing and hand-boiling them for over a year. Just to prove to myself that I was willing to do “my best” for Mimi. Pffffffft. Get yourself a dishwasher basket, mom.

I think we’re all doing just fine.

Pondering paint

Taking a break from 100 Things…

The main living space in our house is an L-shaped great room that is all white, right now. The walls as well as the fancy ceiling are all painted in Valspar’s “Swiss Coffee”, which is the perfect white–not too stark and not too creamy–and the idea was to, well, to cover up the avocado green stain on the wooden ceiling, but also to create a “Scandinavian Eclectic” look because you know how those Scandinavians love to paint everything white.

But sometimes I ponder adding some color. I have three ideas about that, I’ll show you and you’ll tell me what you think of them.

The first, most expensive, and least convenient (therefore least likely to happen) would be to paint the ceiling a very pale sky blue and leave the beams white. I saw this on HGTV last night and thought it looked sharp. If we ever replace the old canister track lights it might be less annoying to do it then. I kind of like the lights though. I mean, it’s a 70s house. Why fight it.

The second idea is to paint this columny, bump-outy part of the wall. I think I’d like a color equidistant between blue and green, not too dark, and with a touch of gray so it doesn’t jump out and scream. Bluer than celadon but greener than sea glass.

Third idea is for the long narrow bedroom hallway: to paint the ceiling silver. It won’t be mirror-y silver, it would look more like someone had applied silver leaf. Such a small amount on a ceiling wouldn’t be too-too much I think. If you’re having a hard idea understanding why I’d want to do that, well, Sparks and I love the Light Tunnel in the Detroit airport and have speculated on ways to create a similar effect here (just to turn on for special occasions, like the hopping parties we never throw). A reflective silver ceiling would help that along. Hmmm.

Thoughts?

100 Things #2: Climate control

Exposed forced-air duct in our kitchen ceiling during the 2009 renovation

What I have learned about climate control in a dwelling falls into three categories: heating, cooling, and humidity control.

Heating keeps a house warm during cold weather. A few old houses may still be heated by fireplaces, wood stoves, or propane heaters like the Warm Morning heater. Other houses may have a furnace that takes advantage of passive heat flow. In these furnaces, a tube goes up from the furnace (in the basement) to each register in the house. The warm air created in the furnace naturally drifts upward.

By far the three most common kinds of heating at this time, though, are radiators, baseboard heaters, and forced-air furnaces.

A radiator is a metal device filled with water and connected to a boiler. When you turn the heat on the boiler heats the water and the hot water circulates through the radiator, which then radiates heat into the room. Old radiators are bulky. New radiators have low profiles and in new bathrooms, are often replaced by heated towel racks tied into the boiler, which sounds like a nice luxury. The drawbacks to radiators are that you need to keep them away from furnishings or the heat will affect the furniture over time (and they will radiate less efficiently), that they can get air in the water lines which creates a noisy creaking sometimes called “air hammer”, that once water has gotten in the lines the only way to fix the problem is to drain the whole system and fill it up again, which is an involved process that many landlords are reluctant to undergo just to remove a noise problem for their tenants, and that radiators do not circulate air inside the house. Radiators are often old installations in buildings and not necessarily tied in to a thermostat; many people find that even those that are, are almost impossible to control. I lived with radiators in a college dormitory and the only way to be comfortable when the heat was turned on was to keep a window open too.

Baseboard heaters are electric heating units installed along the baseboards of a room. They were more common in the middle of the twentieth century than they are now, though there are places where they are still common in new houses. Like radiators they provide radiant heat that is in theory silent–though older metal units often creak as they heat up and cool down (like a forced-air furnace, baseboard heaters are tied to a thermostat and will heat up and cool down intermittently). Also like radiators they need to be kept away from furnishings, and they do not circulate air inside a house.

Forced-air furnaces are the most common kind of heat where I live. In this system a gas or electric furnace is tied to a thermostat, and will periodically fire up, heat and blow air through ductwork and out of registers in the rooms, and turn itself off when the house has warmed up a degree or two. Other than keeping registers uncovered, you do not need to worry about their effect on furnishings. They circulate air inside a house, helping to keep humidity levels steady throughout the house. These furnaces are always noisy while they are turned on, so having a furnace tucked away in a basement or garage instead of, say, in a hallway closet, is an advantage. Forced air furnaces come in a range of efficiencies, with more efficient furnaces costing less to use. The drawback of more efficient furnaces is that they have more parts, and more parts means they are more likely to break. If you have a high-efficiency furnace you are going to wish you had access to someone who knows a few basics about how to twiddle their parts to keep them going–or you will learn yourself. Forced air furnaces all have air filters somewhere inside them. These filters take dust and pollen out of the air before blowing it around your house. It is extremely important to keep these filters clean; as Mike Holmes says, they are the lungs of your house, and if the house’s lungs don’t clean the air, yours will.

There are a few variations on forced-air heating that don’t use a gas or electric furnace to generate hot air. One is a heat pump and another is geothermal heating. I know very little about them.

Cooling falls mostly under the umbrella of air conditioning. There are three types of air conditioners I am familiar with. The first is the window air conditioner, which fits into a sash window or a special cutout in the wall and provides enough cool air for one room. These are usually noisy and desirable only when installed air conditioning isn’t available.

The second kind is the one I am most familiar with, in which a large air conditioner sits somewhere outside the house and pumps cold air through the same ducts and registers that the forced-air furnace uses. It usually uses the same thermostat the heating uses. The large air conditioner is unsightly and is usually hidden behind the house or a shrubbery. You can’t really service it yourself if there is a problem; you have to call a professional. This kind of air conditioning, just like forced air heat, requires that ducts of a certain size be run through the walls and floors of the house. Houses with plaster-and-lathe walls often cannot accommodate the ducts.

The third kind is popular in the Caribbean. It consists of small permanent wall units that provide enough cold air for one room.

There are other strategies for cooling your house: shade trees that protect the house from the sun, awnings that stop the sun from shining into windows and doors, windows open in the cool nighttime and closed in the heat of the day, and an attic fan that blows hot air out of the attic are all worth pursuing.

Lastly and most often neglected is humidity control. A dehumidifier is mostly useful in damp basements and rooms that have been recently flooded. For whole-house dehumidification, forced air heating or cooling are effective–so effective that many forced air units include a built-in humidifier to put some moisture back in the air. Having a whole-house humidifier makes the cold months much more comfortable, as humidified air minimizes winter problems such as dry skin, static electricity buildup, and the discomfort of head colds. If your furnace doesn’t have a humidifier, you can buy small units that humidify a single room. There are many kinds available, some that create hot steam and some that create cool mist, and you should do your own research to decide which you like best. I seem to be in the minority in preferring hot steam humidifiers. I like them because unlike every other kind, they do not have a filter that needs to be regularly cleaned and replaced lest it begin to grow mold and spew mold spores into the air. The drawback of a hot steam humidifier is that a small child may be burned by the steam jet, and the steam itself can sometimes irritate a person who is sick with a cough–a problem that can be fixed by pointing the steam jet away from, instead of towards, the sick person.

And there you have it; a very dry entry in my list of 100 Things About Housekeeping. Hang in there folks, we have a couple more dry topics to cover before we move on to fun stuff like bed linens and pantries…

100 Things #1: Shelter

The first issue in housekeeping is having a house to keep. Your “house” might be an apartment, a condo, a row house, semidetached, freestanding, 300 square feet or 30,000. It is the place you retreat at the end of the day. Most of us sleep, eat, bathe, relax, and entertain in our homes on a regular basis. It is where we find our domestic unit if we have one, whether it includes pets, roommates, partners, children, or extended family. It is also where we keep our stuff, with all of its useful, beautiful, and intensely self-defining qualities.

Enough pontificating. Here is what I have learned about choosing your shelter:

First, that you often don’t have much of a choice. The rich and self-entitled on HGTV have given us all the wrong idea about what we can afford and what is generally worth having in a house. Dedicated guest bedrooms, dining rooms, offices, workout rooms, and multiple common living spaces are expensive. Since you will pay through the nose for every extra room, I encourage you to think hard, and outside the box, about what spaces will fit your life. I do believe that you should take advantage of every square inch available to you and turn every room in your house into one that is used every day. Can a guest room serve as a dressing room for you or your spouse? Would you like to have a library instead of a formal dining room? Would you rather have a king-sized bed in your studio apartment than a sofa, table, or desk? Follow your bliss and make it so.

There are some concerns about a house that I have become familiar with over the years. They are the following:

1. What are the windows like? Are they modern insulated windows or old aluminum or wood frame ones? This will make a huge difference in your heating bills and the temperatures in various rooms.

2. Do the windows open? Many high rise apartments do not have opening windows for safety concerns. Many mid-century houses have big picture windows that do not open. Fresh air is important, and without it you at least want a very good, quiet, high-volume air circulation system. Modern high-rises will have one. Mid-century houses won’t.

3. Does it share walls, floors or ceilings with neighbors? If so, how well was the building built and soundproofed? Which rooms share walls? How much does noise bother you? In my experience tenants, landlords, and police do not care about noise issues and will do nothing to help you with them. Your only choice is live with it or move.

4. How many bedrooms and bathrooms does it have? If you watch a lot of HGTV, you know that people often can’t afford as many as would be ideal. If more than one person is living in your house you will be much happier with at least 1.5 bathrooms if not two. Many older houses only have one.

5. How many electrical outlets are available, and what kind are they? Many older homes have fewer outlets that you could wish for, and practically no grounded outlets (the kind with three holes; you cannot plug an appliance with a three-pronged plug into an ungrounded outlet!) For that matter many older houses are in need of all-new wiring and electrical panels if you’d like to, say, run the dryer and a window air conditioner at the same time.

6. Finally, think about dust, allergies, and air quality. Would rather live with carpet, which is always a little dirty but usually looks clean, or with hard floors which can be cleaned thoroughly but which show dirt and dust easily? How is the house heated? If it has forced air, are you happy about the increased air circulation within the house or unhappy about having dust thrown into the air? Have you ever lived with radiators? With baseboard heaters?

Enough about shelter. Of all 100 topics I will write about, this is the one over which most of us have the least choice and control. The key to happy housekeeping is to make the space work for you.

100 Things about housekeeping

I guess it’s an accidental secret that I have a LiveJournal in addition to my WordPress blogs. Don’t worry, you aren’t missing anything. It is locked, only four people can see it, and of those four only two actually read it. Into my LiveJournal, I pour my incessant worrying about Mimi, rolling lists of chores, day-to-day-irritations, and household aspirations.

One of the two people who read my LiveJournal recently began doing an LJ challenge called 100 Things. In this challenge you write 100 blog entries along a theme of your choice, link them with tags, and thereby draw a huge following for your blog and revitalize the LJ community. It sounded nice. But for an audience of two (sometimes four), well, too much work. So I am going to do 100 Things here, on WordPress.

My chosen theme is What I’ve Learned About Housekeeping And Still Don’t Know. It is an homage to one of my two favorite books in the world, Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson (the other is the Merck Manual Of Diagnoses And Treatment). I have chosen my own topics for my 100 posts, but in looking them over, they are oddly reminiscent of Cheryl’s book. Mine will be my own discoveries, tips, opinions, and tribulations. I intend for it to be inspirational rather than instructive. I am only 31 and have been keeping house for less than ten years. It’s been a steep learning curve, and there is plenty I still don’t know. It is my favorite topic, though, and one of the few about which I could write 100 posts.

So watch this space–I hope these posts start rolling out soon.

Scrapbooking

I find that while I do not particularly like to scrapbook (because my creative brain is already over-crowded with sewing and knitting and gardening and cooking and Mimi, not because I object to scrapbooking per se), I do like to have scrapbooked. Photo albums are lovely things to page through on rainy days, and they give a sense of homeyness and family unity to a house. So I have been assembling photo albums for us.

We already have a wedding album and a honeymoon album, and frankly they ought to be combined into one and free up a 12×12 album for me (what a good idea, it just came to me). Right now I am making this small album for Mimi, filled with her baby pictures

And beginning a big family album for all of us. Right now I’m just putting in the professional portraits from when we were married, Mimi’s baby pictures, and some portraits of me all by our friend Laura. Maybe one day I will order prints of some of my own digital pictures to chronicle vacations and all of that. Maybe.

I’ve become a big fan of a company called Diecuts With A View, or DCWV. Their papers are GORGEOUS, embellished with glitter and flocking and who knows what else, and come in coordinated lines with 8×8 stacks, 12×12 stacks, and 4.5×6.5 mat stacks all in both patterns and solids. Mimi’s little album is done in Mariposa and I am using Linen Closet mats for our big album. This week Hobby Lobby has all scrapbooking paper 50% off, you can bet I’ll be checking them out. The best selection of DCWV paper I have found, though, is Jo-Ann’s. I had been boycotting Jo-Ann’s for over a year because the store was so miserable and the customer service so non-existent, but they have moved to a bigger location and for the time being are making an effort to have dedicated employees for the checkout and cutting counter. Maybe I can start shopping there again.

For a while I was cutting out my own photo corners with this special punch. Then, tired of waiting for glue to dry, I did a little online research and discovered adhesive dots. A-HA! That’s the missing link! With one of these little applicators you can zip-zip-zip your albums together instantly. They come in re-positionable and permanent, and are made by half a dozen different companies. I luvs mine. Go get yourself one.

Garden news, April 2012

Happy mid-April Sunday, everyone. After a long dry spell we got some rain yesterday and are scheduled for more tonight. Sparks has just sowed the easter egg radishes, watermelon radishes, mixed French greens, broccoli raab, and rainbow chard. I helpfully took pictures of flowers blooming in my gardens…

The iris have begun to bloom. I am so happy. I’ve become an iris collector, having ordered half a dozen rhizomes from Schreiner’s last fall and (errrm) a few more cheaper ones this spring. I have blue and white ones out front, and pink and orange ones on order for out back. The new ones are all, well, new though. They won’t bloom this year. Only this established clump from our friend Laura is producing flowers… but it is going to have OH so many. I love iris.

In the herb garden, Sparks sowed our annual parsley, cilantro, dill, and lettuce-leaf basil. The mint, oregano, thyme, and sage have come back strong… and the chives are blooming. Did you know that chive blossoms are edible? They have a mild oniony flavor and make salads oh so pretty.

Out back the geum is blooming. The plants are still quite small. I’m hoping they get bigger and bushier as the years go by.

And the same for the columbines, which are blooming profusely for being such tiny little plants. These pink ones live in the sunny back border and are well ahead of the blue and white ones in the shadier garage bed. Aren’t they nice?

In indoor news, no, nothing is safe from the toddler unless it’s on the dining table, and I’m sure that won’t last long.

Golden afternoon

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. We will all be healthy again (except maybe me. I just can’t get over this cold). One afternoon this week Mimi seemed to be back at 100% and the weather was g*o*r*g*e*o*u*s so I decided to challenge my sniffly, cough-syrup-hungover self to walk Mimi all the way to the park and back. It is a four mile walk that I enjoyed taking the spring before I got pregnant, and was never brave enough to attempt last spring after labor and a c-section.

I had extra motivation to try because the Virginia bells are in bloom right now, and along the way there is a slope that is paved with them. I wanted to see it. So I had to make the walk.

We packed up the baby SUV with snacks and drinks and a blanket, and into the woods we went. My little guide pointed out every squirrel along the way.

Every year certain flowers give a particularly fine showing, and this year it is the phlox. They are everywhere right now.

We also saw this very large fungus. It was about a foot across and right at the edge of the trail. It made me feel glad, because it was so interesting and right there, but no one had destroyed it. Nice.

And we made it to the park! Mimi tore up grass and I laid down and felt glad.

Baby victory over nasty springtime colds! We WILL enjoy our summer!

Keep on keepin’ on

Nothing much is happening here, it seems. The worst of the cold is over, but the dry coughs and morning congestion are neverending. Daffodils and grape hyacinths are over. The iris are forming buds, and also some excitingly mysterious plants in the back border (what WILL they be?) The weather continues unseasonably warm which is lovely. And Mimi is getting more and more dexterous every day… more confident with sitting herself down after standing, with standing while hanging on with only one hand, with cruising around the furniture… I really think my prediction that she will walk at 13 months will be right.