I’ve been in a 50th state state of mind this week. On Monday, Malcolm had to bring in an authentic Hawaiian dessert to share with his 6th grade Visa (world cultures) class, currently reading about Pearl Harbor. I’ll spare you details of the 3 grocery trips and endless stirring over low heat to make a coconut milk pudding. I wonder if any of the kids detected my secret thickening agent, Jello Instant vanilla mix? Hey, when the stuff hadn’t gelled by Monday morning, desperate measures were required. Plus, it tasted great!

The Hawaii theme continued last night, when it was all about Shane Victorino, the Flyin’ Hawaiian, who was key in getting the Phillies to the World Series (Wave those rally towels!)…and Barack Obama, who will be key in getting America back into World Class shape (Wave that voter registration card!).

Flipping channels between The Game and The Debate, I did have some questions. Why can’t Manny stop fidgeting? And isn’t there a more flattering hairstyle for him? Why can’t McCain stop blinking? And doesn’t he know that’s a sign of lying? Maybe he’s never played poker. Why couldn’t Obama have smiled less when McCain was talking? And doesn’t he know that looks smug? Why wasn’t McCain wearing a flag pin? And is anyone going to make a huge deal out of that little omission?

Best malapropism of the evening: McCain saying Palin was a “Freth of bresh air.”

I’ll sign off with this amazingly inspired treatment of McCain & Palin as a famous cartoon couple. As caricatures go, it’s absolute perfection. Kudos to the Gallery of the Absurd – but careful, you could lost here.

http://galleryoftheabsurd.typepad.com/14/2008/09/john-mccain-sar.html

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas

The other day, the boys and I were taking the dog for a walk at the local park. We always take the same route which begins with a massively steep hill, down which the brothers love to sprint. Mark, set, go!

See Noah run down the hill. Noah runs fast. Run, Noah, run.

See Chase run down the hill. Chase runs fast. Run. Run. Run.

See dog run after brothers. Dog is on a leash attached to mother.

See little dog pull mother down the hill. Stop, dog, stop!

See mother fall on her ass and slide down the hill.

Poor, poor mother.

As some of you know, I am not talking about a giant black lab or golden retriever pulling me down this hill. We have a Pug dog that is maybe pushing 13 pounds. I think it is time I have a little come to Jesus with myself. I am not the girl I used to be.

You see in my head, I can still do handsprings on the front lawn. I can climb trees without getting stuck, cross creeks without getting wet and jump fences without impaling myself. I can sprint the fifty yard dash in 7 seconds and still hold the school record for the most sit-ups in one minute. But in reality, cartwheels make me dizzy, my tummy jiggles when I run, and my tiny dog can pull me down a hill.

In exactly 40 days, I will turn 40 years old. And physically I feel myself at a crossroads. Down one road is the Land of Apathy. And it’s a smooooooth ride – all downhill except when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror or some poor sap asks me when my baby is due. The other road is clearly uphill, littered with tons of excuses to try hard to avoid. But the top of that road is where I want to be in my 40^th year.

One of my favorite websites is call Zen Habits. Lots of ways to simplify, motivate, and achieve on these pages. I highly recommend it to all you ponderers out there. One of the suggestions the author Leo Babauta offers again and again when you want to accomplish something is to make a BIG public commitment. Announce to the world that you are going to achieve a certain goal by a certain date. So here goes:

In 40 days I will:

• Have lost 10 pounds
• Be working out vigorously at least 4 times a week
• Have changed my eating habits substantially so that I no longer crave crap

I truly think that I am dreading the big 4-0 because I’m feeling it physically and it scares me. If I felt 25 again, I wouldn’t care.

I promise not to prattle endlessly to you about my diet or workouts but I will provide occasional updates, rants, and musings on the process. And come my 40^th, I’ll come clean as to how I did. Anyone want to join me? There is plenty of room on these pages to make a promise to yourself.

Mark. Set. Go.

If you guessed Country Home, you’re correct. Although I also love MAD.

Today I’m going to confess that while I haven’t fallen into the TV-home-show trap, I have subscribed to my share of decorating magazines over the years. As a result, I have a 3-G pet peeve. Good bones, Granville, and gay guys.

1. Good bones. In every interview in every decorating magazine, you can count on the homeowner to say “I bought this house because it had good bones.” Or, “The 1970′s layout was a disaster, but I could see the house had good bones.” Apparently this means it was structurally sound. It would be so incredibly refreshing if someone said “I bought this house because it was structurally sound.” Alas, mine is an impossible dream.

2. Granville, Ohio. Granville is a small burg 30 miles from Columbus. It is quaint, it is charming, and it has a tiny population. Yet its gorgeous homes are featured in almost every single issue of Country Living magazine, and because these home-interior features are syndicated (and because magazines slavishly copy each other), they’re starting to show up in other magazines as well. At first this seemed refreshing – “Wow, a house that’s not in Maine or California or the Hamptons, but in OHIO!” – but then it started to get really redundant and predictable, and then it started to get tremendously annoying and suspicious. Why, exactly, is Granville, Ohio now the darling of decorating magazine art directors? How do these people even KNOW about the tiny ville of Gran? Most likely, it has everything to do with the fact that decor diva and textile designer Amy Butler has set up shop in Granville. Everyone who works for Amy, presumably, has a perfectly-honed design aesthetic – and because of Amy, they have a pipeline to decorating magazines. Ergo, every year readers see incredibly young, stylish, cool Ohioans throwing picture-perfect Halloween parties, stunning Christmas caroling fests, Hollywood-worthy Easter Egg hunts, and meticulously-art-directed yard sales, containing no stained Tupperware, used breast pumps or faded Kliban sheets but rather epic displays of shiny vintage bikes, coordinating mint-condition quilts, and matte green McCoy pottery. I’m just happy that when I spent my four years in Granville it had not yet been discovered and glamourized. My mom and I would go to church sales and fall fests and buy Depression-era treasures for pennies (colored nesting bowls and a first edition of The Boxcar Children, for example). With Granville now swarming with people who all have the same beautiful taste, all hunting for the same antiques, those glory days are clearly over. It’s a decorator’s DisneyWorld. My message to magazine editors: Find a new town. Show a little initiative. I’m sure you can unearth a few charming houses is one of the thousands of other towns filling up the American map! Because even you have to admit: Granville’s been done to death.

3. Gay guys. My sister-in-law Wendy, a talented decorator and avid fan of house-magazines, pointed out to me years ago that you never see the homes of lesbians in decorating magazines. OMG, she’s right! Ever since Wendy said that, I’ve seen a million homes owned by gay men, while I think I’ve seen exactly one lesbian-owned house in a magazine. Why is that? Is there really a gay/lesbian decorating difference? Are gay men that much more obsessive about decorating? Do magazine editors only have gay male friends? Or do the mostly women readers of these magazines just accept gayness in men more willingly than in women?

I await the unholy trinity. Gay guys finding a house with good bones in Granville.

I have to admit I was loathe to let Chasey join Cub Scouts last year, primarily because I don’t subscribe to certain policies the Boy Scouts of America have embraced over time. But he was personally invited by a group of little boys in his class to join so I gave in. After all, Dave almost made Eagle Scout when he was a kid and it would be a great opportunity for Chase to learn some survival skills.

Well, my friends, my boy was faced with the ultimate survival test this weekend. Armed only with a close buddy, two reluctant parents, and a small amount of petty cash, they were set loose in the unforgiving nether regions of suburbia (a.k.a. outside Trader Joe’s). Their mission: Sell popcorn. Lots of popcorn.

The climate, I must say, was rough. It was the perfect storm working against these tough little do-gooders. Not only are we are in the middle of the country’s worst financial crisis since the Great Depression but the popcorn with which they were tasked to sell was priced at three convenient levels: 1) expensive 2) costly and 3) obscene.

“Maybe we should cut the price in half? I bet we would sell more,” Chase offered.

He was right but as I explained to him we weren’t exactly authorized by corporate to liquidate inventory.

Consequently, sales were slow. But there were enough folks who weren’t totally freaked that their financial portfolios had lost half their value in the last week had it in their hearts to fork over $16 for a tin of chocolate caramel popcorn – or offer a nominal donation to make our guys feel mildly successful.

It was a gentle induction into the real world of capitalism as the negativity was largely held at bay. They got a lot of “no thank yous”, a good amount of “I bought some yesterdays” and even one “I’m totally broke little dudes.” One patron astutely noted that the Girl Scouts have it easier. No kidding.

But surprisingly, these Cub Scouts learned a valuable lesson they would never have picked up on any outward bound excursion. They learned about rejection, which is a really hard concept to teach little guys without harming their tiny, fragile souls.

“That was fun,” Chase mused as I tucked him in last night. “Can we do it again?”

I wanted to respond by telling him that starting fire from wet rocks or tying a hundred knots in an hour would probably be easier but just smiled and kissed his head and said, “We’ll see”.

That was the text of a hand-lettered sign Chris found on the fence of our first-born’s nursery school at pick-up time one winter afternoon. There had been wild rumors of a giant cat roaming the general area, flames fanned by every TV station, and the nursery school wasn’t taking any chances with its defenseless tiny tender vittles chubby little charges.

Yesterday Ian and I did another college visit, this time to the University of Pittsburgh. Lovely campus – check. Nice student-teacher ratio – check. Home plate from 1960 World Series preserved in plexiglass on floor of new building built atop old Forbes Field – check.

Then, from our perky little undergrad guide, came the chilling part. “Here are the emergency call boxes – an operator will answer in one to two seconds. A campus policeman will be by your student’s side within two minutes. From every call box, you can see another one – that’s how abundant they are. We have a SWAT team on campus. These are all real police officers, not rent-a-cops, for lack of a better word. You can sign up to receive a text message from the university in the event of an emergency situation and stay informed until it is resolved. This is all done in light of the recent unfortunate events on other campuses throughout the country…any questions?”

Wow. No.

We understood all too well.

Today is Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish religion. For the uninitiated, some talking points:

• Today you ask God to forgive you and he/she always does – even if you are begging forgiveness for the exact same list of sins you offered up last year. (At least that’s what I’m betting on).
• You fast on this day to mark the solemn nature of the occasion. Typically you gorge yourself the night before which never helps; no matter how much brisket you eat, you’re still STARVING at 8:30 a.m. the next morning.
• We end the holiday with a meal called “Break Fast” (not “breakfast” — say it like two words) which requires convening at the normal dinner hour of uh… 4:00 p.m. to enjoy a host of yummy dairy and fish items: bagels, cream cheese, blintzes, lox, whitefish and of course…. Kugel.

For a Jew, Kugel is a lot like pornography. You can’t exactly define it but you know it when you see it. And it doesn’t help that there are countless types of kugel – usually associated with the person who always made it, which brings me to my story.

To celebrate Break Fast, my family is assembling at my father’s house. He is, of course, getting “a tray” of the fishes, bagels and spreads above. I offered to bake a kugel. It is one of the more labor intensive contributions so nobody fought me for it. So I planned on making my “Mom’s kugel” which is actually a HUGE family favorite because it tastes like cheesecake. Cheese cake for dinner? Enough said.

But my Dad and I were discussing the kugel earlier this week and he flat out asked subtly hinted that he wanted me to make “Mom-Mom Mabel’s kugel” (“you know with the apples and raisins”). This, my friends, is an entirely different kugel to which I do not have the recipe. I believe it could have been buried with Mom-Mom in 2006. Sure -I could have said no to Dad – but I didn’t for two reasons:

1) I miss Mom-Mom-Mabel and what a fitting tribute it would be to totally mangle her kugel for my entire family.

2) I have something to prove. You see, several years ago, I offered to bring the kugel and chose to make Mom’s recipe. But because I have “other gifts”, I forgot to add the sugar, which it turns out is kind of important if you don’t want the kugel to taste like a cheesecake for diabetics. “Kugelgate” as it is now known will live in my family’s hearts and minds forever unless I can redeem myself.

So last night after we cleaned up from dinner, I embarked upon the triple lindy of Jewish culinary acrobatics. I simultaneously made two kugels at once – Mom’s and Mom-Mom Mabel’s.

“Daddy, what is Mommy doing in the kitchen..with ingredients…and electricity?”

I had called my sister-in-law Beth for a recipe that could pass for Mom-Mom Mabel’s kugel. This was fortunate in two ways. First, she had a recipe that did not include verbs I did not understand. And two, she quipped about a friend of hers who accidentally called a “kugel” a “kegel” to which she dead panned, “Yeah, not exactly the same thing”. This threw me into hysterics for the rest of the evening, almost rendering me unfit to cook. Fun!

So how does it end? I baked two kick-ass kugels while doing kegels (not really but I couldn’t resist). I know the kugel my dad is getting won’t be exactly like his Mom’s. (I know this because for years we kids suspected that Mom-Mom Mabel sprinkled untraceable amounts of Metamucil in everything she cooked, sending us all running to the bathroom within 30 minutes after eating. And I didn’t do that.) But I hope everyone likes it.

And, if I’m lucky, maybe some day my boys will ask their children to make Grandmom Emmy’s kugel for them (“you know, the one that tastes like diabetic cheesecake?”).

Mom-Mom Mabel Kugel (left); Mom Kugel (right)

Last night, when homework and showers were done, the boys were dispersed through the house. Hugh and I were in the kitchen, watching the debate. He headed to the freezer to get one of the cartons of ice cream we had purchased at the grocery store last night (“only” $3 for each 1.5 quart container, far more expensive than gasoline). Now that the boys are teenagers, ice cream is a rare treat in our house. That’s one way this American family has tightened its belt.

So I was both disappointed and relieved when the boys chose flavors that leave me, shall we say, cold, and therefore I wasn’t tempted to dig in. (Let the Congressional Record show that they selected Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, and Peanut Butter Swirl, and not the Neopolitan that I favor.)

Hugh, pulling out the carton and feeling its suspicious lightness:

“Hey, we just bought this yesterday! Mom, did you have any?”

“No, Hugh, I actually haven’t had any. I don’t know about Dad, and he’s out at a church meeting right now so don’t call him to interrogate him.”

Hugh then polled his two brothers, and ascertained that they had each had a bowl last night, plus one tonight. He was, unhappily, the last one at the trough.

Riffing on what he was hearing from the debates, Hugh chastised his brothers. “We need to cut back on our ice cream consumption, my friends! In the past two days, our consumption has skyrocketed!”

Malcolm: “Well Hugh, we haven’t had it in the freezer for weeks. It’s a special treat!” Clearly, scarcity has led to gorging.

Hugh: “You still should take a modest bowl!”

By now, Malcolm – sated on ice cream – had moved on to snacking on quiche. Competition for this treat is light, and he knows he’ll get the lion’s share.

Last night, it was all about abundance and scarcity, supply and demand, on the micro level as well as the macro. When it comes to ice cream, poor Hugh will never again be so naive – or to quote my favorite debate malapropism, “green behind the ears.” (sounds like mold – ewww!)

Never rely on the glory of the morning nor the smiles of your mother-in-law.

–Japanese proverb

I often wonder how broadly the bad rap given to mother-in-laws really applies. It would be an interesting anthropological study to undertake, yes? Would an experiment prove that 50 percent of all mothers-in-law were unbearable? 75 percent? 95 percent? And which mothers-in-law have the worst reputations – ones with sons-in-law or daughters-in-law? Someday, if indeed Noah and Chase walk the straight and predictable societal path, I will become such a creature and I will get me a daughter-in law or two. Incidentally, I already have at least one picked out.

Meet J. She is very cute and very smart, she climbed this swingset as fast as Noah, and she can hold a conversation with an adult way longer than any 10 year should be able. And I just have a feeling that her Mom and I wouldn’t fight with each other about who would wear what to the wedding. But I digress.

My point is this: In-Laws get a bad rap. In fact, if you can claim just one of the following fun facts about your in-laws, then you are pretty darn lucky:

1. They can’t wait to see their grandchildren, even if they just saw them the day before.
2. They always take your side in a disagreement, rather than the side of their own flesh and blood.
3. Your mother-in-law asks you to go shopping and you think that sounds like fun.
4. They love your dog more than as much as they love you.
5. They’re not afraid to play Monopoly with the grandkids – and whip their little butts into bankruptcy.
6. They don’t criticize your cooking or the fact that you, um, don’t really cook.
7. They create their own traditions without even trying – like Papa hugs, lobster dinners, and dominos.
8. They don’t take offense when you can’t (no matter how hard you try), stomach the family’s famous cucumber soup.
9. They’re hip enough that you can drop f-bombs around them, cool enough to withstand the boys’ bathroom humor, and good humored enough to crack their own jokes on a regular basis.
10. Your kids can’t wait to see them, even if they just saw them the day before.

So, I promise you J (or whoever the lucky girl or girls are to marry my guys in uh…20 years or so), that I will strive for all this and more. Because no matter what they tell you, you really do marry “the family”. So if any of these qualifications match your in-laws, send them this post and tell them you love them. As for me, I’ll add just one more sign of great in-laws: They read your blog.