The M Word

Ahem.

[Screeeeeeeech]

Is this thing on?

Now, where was I?


A couple of weeks ago, as I was cleaning the kitchen, my son sat at his father's laptop playing educational flash games at an excellent, if somewhat goofy, phonics/reading site called Starfall.com (mad props to the mother of Bub and Pie for mentioning it briefly on her blog months ago). He came across a section of the site that focused on practicing the proper pronunciation of vowel pairs, such as "ai."

I listened to him surreptitiously as he read each practice word as it popped on the screen. Every time he would read a word, he would add a little commentary about it. something I've noticed him doing often as he learns to read-- I suspect it helps him remember new words.

"Snail. I like snails. They have shells."
"Pail. You can put water in a pail."

So, here I was, smiling proudly to myself as my three-year-old boy read real words, all by himself, when suddenly, I heard him say,

"Maid. Mommy is a maid!"


Now, why was I so appalled when I heard those words innocently escape his mouth?

I mean, it is rather understandable that he would draw such a conclusion. After all, my son sees me wiping counters, sweeping floors, scrubbing toilets, vacuuming rugs, dusting bookcases, folding laundry, loading the dishwasher, watering plants, etcetera, etcetera, day in and day out, every single day. A woman cleaning the house, according to the cartoon picture I assume must have accompanied the word, is called a maid. Mommy cleans the house, so Mommy must be a maid. It was a perfectly logical assumption for a three-year-old to make.

I laughed nervously, and called out cheerfully, "Isaac, mommy isn't a m-a-i-d, maid, because mommy doesn't get p-a-i-d, paid for cleaning the house!"

But inside my head, gears were grinding.

There's nothing wrong with housecleaning, of course. We all have to do it, or pay someone else to have it done. And, despite the stigma historically attached to it by our society, I believe strongly that the maintenance of a household is honorable, honest, important work, especially when associated with the care of children.

And wasn't that belief of mine part of the reason I decided to stay home with my son in the first place? Didn't I make this choice, in part, because if if I had gone back to my low-paying outside-the-home job, I would not have had the wherewithal to pay someone what I considered to be a fair wage to do the important work of keeping my home and caring for my son?

It wasn't the idea that my son might see me primarily as a housekeeper that bothered me, I decided. It was my fear that that might be all he saw me as.

After all how could he know-- how could he possibly know, at such a young age, all the other things I have been? All the things I have wanted to be?

How could he know, for instance, that in high school I ran long distance races, or that in college, I wrote high-minded papers analyzing literature and film in multiple languages, that I once spoke Spanish and Hindi well enough to write essays? How could he that I once won awards for my amateur photography? That I once built sets and hung lights in a theatre, where I met traveling performers from all over the world? How would he know that I used to have picnics in parks in at midnight? That, before I met his father, an adamant non-dancer, I used to go out regularly at night to dance swing or salsa late into the early morning?

How would he know that I have at least ten novels in my head that have never been written, let alone published? That sometimes I wish I could go back to school and get a second bachelor's degree in botany, just for the heck of it?

How would he know any of this, when, day in and day out, I get up in the morning, and clean, and cook, and tend the garden, and read my son a few books from the library, and help him practice learning to hold a pencil properly according to the instructions of his occupational therapist, and clean some more, and build a few towers with Duplos, and cook and clean again, and perhaps spend a few hours writing descriptions of dressers or something, or watch tv and read depressing news articles on the internet until I feel like a zombie, and then go to straight to bed?

I feel strongly that I am where I need to be right now, caring for a person that I love in the best way I know how, and yet, I can't help but fear on certain days that I'm losing my identity in such a way that, one day, when my son needs less of my time, it may be very difficult to find myself again.

How do you, the rest of you, find the balance between being a good parent, and being true to yourself?



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Update: Lisa at Midwestern Mommy has nominated this a Perfect Post. Thanks, Lisa!

Jaelithe's Tricks for Tricking Picky Eaters

Since I started this blog, I have had a number of other mothers, and fathers, leave comments or send me emails telling me that their children are picky eaters, too, and wondering if I had any good advice.

I'm not sure I do have good advice, but I can give advice based things that have worked for me, with my child, in my home.

Since I know very well how stressful and upsetting it can be for a parent when your child won't eat, I have decided to provide the internet with a few of my strategies.

Note of course that I am not a nutritionist, or a child psychologist, or an occupational therapist, or a news channel talking head. I'm just a mom with an underweight, exceedingly picky kid, and I have seen and talked to a lot of experts and tried a lot of different strategies in the course of my ongoing quest to help my son become a better eater.

So, without further ado:

Jaelithe's Tricks for Tricking Picky Eaters

Let your child play with his food. And I don't mean just at dinner time. Let her help you get it down from the shelf and put in the cart at the grocery store. Let him help you prepare the food in the kitchen. If you have an older child, you might want to talk about where your food comes from. Say, "Apples grow on apple trees," or, "Pasta is made from flour, which comes from a kind of grass, called wheat." Let your child help pick berries at a farm, or grow a backyard vegetable garden. Get your child interested in food outside of the context of eating it.

At play time, let your child paint pictures with chocolate pudding or applesauce—it's really not any messier than finger paint, is it?— or build towers with banana slices. If your child is reluctant to play with certain kinds of food because of an aversion to the food's color, scent or texture, start playing with it yourself and allow your child to join in at his leisure.

Roleplay cooking, serving and eating food with toy food, a toy stove and toy utensils.

And, yes, assuming you don't eat out every night at a five star restaurant, let your child touch her food and get it all over her fingers if she wants to at the dinner table.

Picky eaters are afraid of the unfamiliar, and so, the more familiar a certain type of food becomes, the more likely it is that the child will eventually become willing to try it.

Don't let your child's reluctance to touch a food get in the way of her eating it. If your child really dislikes getting sticky fingers while eating fresh fruit, cut an apple or a pear into small pieces and let him eat it with a fork. Make sure there are plenty of napkins around within your child's reach so that if he does drip some food on himself, he can clean it off quickly before it starts to bother him. And let him use the napkin himself—don't do it for him unless he's utterly distraught. Learning that he can take care of uncomfortable sensations himself will help him feel more in control of the situation.

Or, if your child won't eat the food with utensils, she may allow you to feed her the food yourself (but don't force it into her mouth—ask if she would like you to put a piece of the food in her mouth for her, and then do so slowly and gently.)

Now of course, your ultimate goal should be to get your child feeding himself at all times, and accepting the same food in many different forms (i.e., you don't want a 13-year-old insisting that all apples must be cut into bite-sized pieces and eaten with a fork, preferably a fork wielded by her mother). But, I have found that after a texture-averse child has been assisted with a certain food multiple times, she will eventually become more comfortable about touching the food with her hands, feeding herself, and accepting the same type of food in a different preparation.

Go ahead and bribe the kid already. I know that some nutritionists will take issue with my saying this, because our nation's bad eating habits have led to a childhood obesity epidemic, and everything you do to influence the way your child views food when he is three will influence his entire future including whether he gets to be world president, or winds up scrubbing toilets at McDonald's, etcetera, yada, yada, yada.

But, listen, in my completely unprofessional, from-the-trenches opinion, if you're like me, trying to feed an extremely picky, extremely underweight child, who NEEDS to gain weight RIGHT NOW, in order to maintain proper health and growth, the last thing you need is to be worrying about on top of your other worries is whether bribing your super-skinny child to finish her meal by offering her one chocolate chip cookie for dessert today will somehow find her sobbing at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting twenty years from now.

Of course it's important to model good eating habits for your children, but, I believe that developing a healthy relationship to food is an ongoing process, and I don't believe the occasional offering of a bite of dessert in exchange for a bite of broccoli will necessarily permanently destroy your child's future with food.

But, the good news is, you don't even necessarily have to use unhealthy food as a bribe.

Many picky kids have at least one healthy food that they like. For example, I often bribe my own son with dried coconut or dried fruit. Think about the healthy, or at least not-unhealthy, foods that your own child likes. (And remember also that unhealthy for adults is not the same as unhealthy for children, especially underweight children. Children need a good deal more fat in their diets than adults do, for brain development. So, fatty foods like coconut, avocado, nut butters, cheese and whole milk can actually be good for kids who aren't overweight.)

I generally find that the best way to bribe a child into trying a new food, or eating a familiar food the child will only occasionally tolerate, is to offer a small amount of a food the child likes in exchange for each bite of the new or underappreciated food. For example, don't say, "If you just try this spinach once, you can have a whole apple pie!" Just say, "If you try one bite of this pasta, you can have one chocolate chip."

Use reverse psychology. I suspect this works especially well if your child is in the two-to-three-year-old age range, but it will probably work to a certain extent with older children, too.

If your child refuses to eat the food on his plate, very casually say, "Oh, you don't want that food? Well, can I eat it, then?"

This will often trigger an immediate change of attitude toward the food. What once was just a stupid plate of weird overly mushy mashed potatoes is suddenly MY plate of mashed potatoes, that Mommy or Daddy wants to TAKE AWAY FROM ME! If the food on the plate is something you have had some success in getting your child to eat before, this will often work on the first try.

However, if your child says "Yes, please eat it!" don’t give up. Start eating small bites of your child's food, right in front of your child. Your actually eating the food will sometimes cause the child to demand that you give the plate back to her if simply asking for it won't. As you eat the food, try saying things like, "It's too bad Janey didn't want this muffin. It tastes really good. I guess she just doesn't like muffins." But don’t overact or make a huge deal out of it—with picky kids, it's always best to try to keep dinnertime drama to a minimum.

Now, obviously reverse psychology doesn't work every time. It all depends on whether your child's territorial instincts (and general desire to prove his parents wrong) are strong enough to override his aversion to the particular food you are offering.

(By the way, if you have a two or three-year-old, reverse psychology also works pretty well when you want your kid to dress herself, or put away her toys. "Oh? You won't help me with this? All right. I'll just do it myself then. I guess maybe you're not old enough to help me yet.")

Seek out new nutritious foods that are similar in form and texture to food your child already eats. Did you know that Whole Foods Market carries vegetable chips made from real whole sliced vegetables? If you have a potato chip lover, try sneaking some veggie chips in instead. If your child won't eat fresh fruit, but loves raisins, have you tried offering him dried blueberries, dried cherries, or dried apples? If she'll eat bread all day long, will she eat banana bread? Zucchini bread? Pumpkin bread? Have you tried it?

Be as understanding and patient as you can manage. Remember that your child most likely really is afraid of trying new foods, and really isn't refusing to eat just to be ornery.

Watching your child refuse to eat perfectly tasty, nutritious food that you purchased and prepared for him yourself can be an incredibly frustrating experience, especially if it happens several times each day, and even more especially if your child's poor eating habits are leading you to be concerned about her health. Providing food for your child is one of your most fundamental duties as a parent, and it can be absolutely maddening when you feel as though you are doing everything right to provide your child with a nutritious diet, but your child is still refusing to cooperate.

It's okay to get frustrated. It's okay to get mad. It's okay to excuse yourself from the room and go cry and punch a pillow, if you have to. But try to keep your cool in front of your child at mealtimes, and try to remember that your child is refusing the food—not your love.

Everyone tastes foods differently, and we all have certain foods we don't like. When your child makes a face after trying a new food, try to imagine how you would feel if someone were trying to force your least favorite food on you.

We also all have irrational fears. Are you scared of heights? Leery of elevators? Nervous about driving? Terrified of harmless bugs that can't even sting you? Imagine the way you felt the last time you had to face one of your irrational fears, and remember that that may very well be how your child is feeling about eating, every day.

Making your child's fear of certain foods real in your mind can help you become more attuned to his feelings while he is eating, and being more attuned to your child's feelings can help you judge whether a particular moment is a good moment to push your child to take another step in overcoming his fear, or if it would be better just let things slide and try again next time.

Above all, remember that this situation is not your fault. It's not your child's fault. It's just an obstacle the two of you are faced with to surmount, together.

Food

This morning while tending my vegetable garden I noticed the first bell pepper fattening on the vine, its waxy green skin glimmering new and unblemished under an umbrella of broad leaves. As I left, thinking of the taste of a fresh roasted golden yellow pepper a month from now, I double-checked my garden's chicken wire fence to make certain there weren't any gaps that would let a rabbit in to steal my prize.

Back inside the house, I brought out my good heavy mixing bowl and started gathering the ingredients to make biscuits for the strawberry shortcake I had planned for tonight's dessert after dinner. We had Bisquick in the pantry, but I skipped it, opting instead to make the biscuits from scratch: flour, salt, sugar, cream, butter, baking powder.

When the dough came together, I rolled it out and cut it into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.

While the biscuits baked, I took out a box of ripe strawberries and selected the nicest ones and rinsed them. The strawberries were too red and juicy for me to resist eating a couple. I sliced the rest, and put them in a bowl with some sugar. Then I put the sugared strawberries and fresh-baked biscuits in the refrigerator to chill.

When the neighbor girl came over around midday to play with my son, I made a point of showing her the first pepper. She had helped me plant some of the herbs in my herb garden, and I thought she'd want to see how quickly the vegetable plants across from the herbs had grown. She was excited about the pepper, but impatiently disappointed to see the tomato plants I planted just a few weeks ago covered in yellow blossoms, but no fruit.

Later this afternoon, while running errands, I stopped at the hardware store and found that the herbs were on sale. I picked up a peppermint plant and a chamomile plant to put in pots on my patio. Between those two and the spearmint I already had growing, I thought, I'd be set for the rest of the summer for fresh herbal tea.

At dinnertime, despite the rain outside, my husband fired up our new grill for the first time, grilling hamburgers and veggie burgers and ears of corn over charcoal and soaked hickory chips under the shelter of the carport. The new grill made a quick, clean fire and the burgers came out tender with crisp edges.

When we'd finished our barbeque, I brought out some heavy whipping cream, mixed in sugar and vanilla, and whipped it into a rich whipped cream. I spread this over the biscuits I'd baked earlier, and added the sugared strawberries.

As I bit into a crumbly, strawberry-juice-soaked, cream-topped biscuit, feeling utterly decadent, I considered that the simple recipe I'd used for my strawberry shortcake was probably not all that different from the recipes used by women fifty or even a hundred years ago. Only, I imagined that the whipped cream would have tasted much better a hundred years ago, if it had been skimmed earlier that same day from milk milked that very dawn from one's own personal cow.

Still and all, I decided, this strawberry shortcake was pretty damned good.

But my son wouldn't eat the strawberries, or the shortcake, or the cream.

He didn't care for the barbeque sauce on his burger, either, come to talk of it, and he didn't even want the grilled corn touching his plate.

The chamomile plant and the mint plant I bought earlier today? They will both make great tea to soothe upset stomachs the next time one of us gets sick. But I know my son won't tolerate even a drop of warm tea on his tongue. Not even with sugar in it. I've offered it to him when he's been sick before, many times.

The fresh peppers and tomatoes and beans I'm growing in my garden? The basil, parsley, oregano, and sage? Chances are, he won't willingly take a single bite of any of these things when they're ready to be eaten.

Because none of these things are on his list: the list of things he is willing to eat. That list that has grown so much over the past year, after so much work, into something that, finally, sort of resembles a sustainable balanced diet. That list that has grown so much, yet sometimes still seems so terribly short to me.

For as long as I can remember, since I was a very little girl, toddling after my mother in the kitchen or my grandmother in the garden, growing and cooking and eating good food has always been such a pleasure for me. Despite the issues all sorts of people, including me seem to have with food these days-- worrying about this or that food making us too fat, or causing cancer, or heart disease; worrying about where our food comes from, and whether making that food harmed the planet or caused other people suffering, etcetera-- despite all that, food has so often been a source of so much wonder and joy for me.

And the fact that my only child doesn't seem to enjoy food much as all is so devastating to me when I think about it in the context of the joy I have experienced in connection with food. It's the same to me as if a person could, somehow, hear, but not hear music; the same as if a person could walk, but could not dance.

And my sadness over the world of happy experience I imagine my son is missing out on now haunts every happy moment I experience watering a tomato plant (and breathing in the sultry tomato scent the plants give off each time they are watered), or kneading bread dough (and feeling the elasticity grow beneath my hands, and imagining the fine texture it will produce in the finished loaf), or biting into a tart new apple or a slice of fresh-baked cake.

Hot Blogger Secrets Revealed!

Dana doesn't like nuts in her chocolate.
Lisa prefers Raspberry Vinaigrette to Balsamic.
Reba orders the EXACT SAME THING I DO, LIKE, EVERY TIME. Poser :P

Oh, and we all hate Bratz dolls. But I don't think that was a secret.

Lisa told me I should digitally enhance this photo, but, as you see, it wasn't necessary.

I told Dana her camera was geeky, but only because I am jealous of it. My martini glass was the empty one. You can see that everyone else's was still half full.

Appropriately blurry photo of my dessert.

I had to leave early, so I don't know what wanton debauchery might have followed dessert, but, I imagine you, dear reader, are also sad you missed it, no?

Thanks to all the lovely ladies for letting me hang with the cool kids, even though I've been a total slacker lately on my own blog. And thanks especially to Lisa for organizing a SECOND St. Louis blogger meetup. Considering that half the time lately I can't even seem to organize a trip to the grocery store, I really appreciate her take-chargery.

I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

Last week, my son turned three. My husband turned . . . twenty-something (I'll never tell). My sister graduated from college. Some in-laws we haven't seen in several months came into town from Kansas. And I had my third Mother's Day. (Did I mention I spent my first Mother's Day giving birth?) And I had an existential crisis about what I want to do with my life, including whether I ought to be getting to making another baby right now, or trying to finally get back on the fast track with my currently mommy-tracked career. (Which is? What is that I wanted to be when I grew up again, exactly?)

I have meaningful things to write about all of these events. But, today, my frazzled brain has chosen to gift you instead with the lyrics of the song that Isaac spontaneously composed this evening while getting ready for his bath:

You wanna see something, little girl?
I'm gonna make a game.
You can't see me anywhere--
you can only see the rain.

Heavens. Am I raising the next Burt Bacharach?

Back to Scare Your Pants Off

Today, when I woke up, I could breathe. This was a remarkable experience after after two weeks of nearly hacking up a lung every twenty minutes (because, apparently, I can't just come down with a case of the blahs-- oh no-- I have to come down with a case of the cold from hell, too, or, shoot, maybe it was whooping cough or pneumonia something; I don't know, but the boy didn't catch it, which is good, considering that for the past several days my husband has been gone on an extended business trip! Hooray!)

Since I was feeling quasi-normal I decided that today might be a good day to FINALLY get some work done on my new herb garden. This despite the fact that after two weeks of illness I had laundry on the bedroom floor, dishes in the sink, and a Matchbox car obstacle course in my office.

You see, I've been planning to dig a plot for the garden and lay out a cement brick border for weeks; I'd already purchased a couple of plants and they have been getting quite literally sick of living in tiny plastic containers on a windowsill under crappy fluorescent lighting. If I wait much longer to plant these poor creatures, they'll croak.

Isaac was itching to get outside anyway after days of being cooped up with a loony sick woman who sounds like a broken robot when she speaks.

So, when we got a break in the rain this afternoon, I went out to dig.

After marking out two small garden beds next to my patio, I started digging up the grass. Isaac pretended to help me with his little trowel, and insisted that I rescue every worm we came across. Things were going pretty well, albeit slowly. Every ten minutes or so, I had to stop to catch my breath; my lungs were still pretty unhappy after two weeks of coughing.

I had gotten about half of one bed dug when I realized it was almost dinner time. I decided to cut a sharp edge with my trowel, lay the cement bricks in one one side of one bed, and then go back inside.

As I dug, my trowel struck something that was decidedly un-dirt-like. I pushed back the dirt with my gloved hands, and discovered a piece of coarse, dirt-encrusted fabric. I could see a seam down the middle of the exposed piece.

Could it be a bag, I wondered? A few weeks ago, while planting fruit trees, my husband had dug up an old-fashioned, dented silver serving spoon. We'd wondered whether it had been buried by a child playing with some old worn-out silverware, or an adult who had some sort of poverty paranoia who had decided to hide silver trinkets throughout the yard.

When I hit the cloth, I thought that perhaps it was a bag full of coins, or more silverware, buried by the same silver-hoarder.

I dug more carefully, with my hands, gently exposing the fabric.

It wasn't a bag.


It was a pair of jeans.


There wasn't a body inside them.


(Phew!)


I may or may not have googled, "What should I do when I find clothes buried in my backyard?" this evening . . .


(Being married to a former Catholic has its advantages. When your husband has a family roughly the size of a small town, he's bound to be related to someone in just about every profession. So I already called the police-officer-in-law tonight. His thought is that maybe the rehabber who owned the house briefly several years ago, just before the people we bought the house from moved in, may have buried a bunch of junk that had been left in the house in the yard before sodding over it, because it was easier than taking it to the dump. What's your theory?)

The Blahs

See the title of my blog?

I've been feeling especially discontented lately.

I'm sorry I haven't been around much. I hope I'll be back soon.

Notice from the Management*

I am not a ten dollar back-alley writing ho.

I am AT LEAST a writing escort service.

At the very least.

So if you cannot muster the courtesy to treat me like a lady when soliciting my writing services, you will be denied access to my specialized skills.


Thank You,

The Management


*Management idea totally borrowed from Dana's closet without asking. But, I needed something new to wear to the club tonight! And it fit me so well!

Echooo (Echooo, Echooo, Echooo)

Boy, it's been, empty, around here, lately, hasn't it?

Sorry. For some reason, I've just been missing my blog mojo lately.

(If anyone saw Dr. Evil in my neighborhood recently, let me know. Especially if he starts writing blog posts about his son's funny foibles and all the crazy mishaps that have happened lately during renovations in his Evil lab. Then I'll totally be on to him.)

The lovely Andrea has kindly volunteered (okay, I begged her) to tag me with an interview meme in an attempt to revive my dismally flagging initiative. So, without further adieu, an interview:

1. What's the best advice you've ever received?

"You should be a professional writer someday." -Mother

"You should be a professional writer someday." -Fourth Grade Teacher

"You should be a professional writer someday." -Sixth Grade English Teacher

"You should be a professional writer someday." -High School English Teacher

"You should be a professional writer someday." -College Dramatic Criticism Professor

"You should be a professional writer someday." -College Screenwriting Professor

"You should be a professional writer someday." -College Exposition Professor.

At around the 200th time someone said this to me, it finally sunk in that perhaps I should be a professional writer, and not a biologist, when I grew up. Because I suck at math. And I'm not too good with a micro-pipette. And I really hate dissecting cats. (Did you know you have to dissect cats to get a biology degree? You do.)

2. If you could be a character in a book or movie, who would you be and why?

I would be Elizabeth Bennet from that book Andrea says she can't get through, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I share a lot of her flaws (like, for instance, having a tendency to push away people I ought instead to try to attract, or, for example, occasionally being too convinced of my own intellectual superiority for my own good), so I think I'd be comfortable. And, believe it or not, the Bennet family is way saner than mine, so I could totally put up with them.

Not to mention the fact that Mr. Darcy is HAWT.

A close second, of course, would be Hermione from the Harry Potter series. Because what geeky former know-it-all schoolgirl doesn't want to be Hermione?

3. How did you and your lovely husband meet?

We met in the food court in the St. Louis Galleria shopping mall. No joke. How's that for romantic?

He was wearing geeky glasses, and reading a C++ programming book the size of an infant elephant. I thought to myself, "Hmm, that guy looks really cute in a nerdy sort of way, just like all those nerdy guys I used to have crushes on back when I was in high school. But I am so over that nerdy guy phase."

(I was wrong.)

4. What issue concerning your country do you think needs the most attention given the impending campaigns gearing up for next year's leadership change?

This is a tough question to answer, because the current administration has done a lot of things to make me unhappy, and in some cases, very angry, and it's hard for me to decide where a new government ought to start undoing the damage.

I suppose there is one issue underlying nearly all of my issues with the current group in power, though, and that issue would be: trust.

I want to be able to trust my elected officials to honor my country's constitution. I don't want the government reading my mail or tapping my phone without a warrant; that's against the Constitution. I don't want the executive branch trying to take over the judicial branch and silence the Congress; that's also against the Constitution.

I want to be able to trust my elected officials to put the beliefs and needs of their constituents first, not their own lust for personal glory or money or power.

I want to be able to trust my government to react swiftly, deliberately, efficiently and appropriately in times of national crisis when the lives and livelihoods of many citizens of my country are at stake. I know a lot of people say that one oughtn't to rely on one's government to help one out of every single bad situation-- that people ought to practice more self-sufficiency, and be more prepared in case of a disaster-- and I agree with that sentiment to a degree, but, at the same time, I believe the primary purpose of a government is to protect and serve its people. We can argue all we want about to what extent we want our government to protect and serve us, but that doesn't change the fact that to protect and serve its citizens, to whatever degree the majority of those citizens agree they need service and protection, is the primary purpose of a democratic government.

If we have a Central Intelligence Agency that can't keep track of intelligence on dangerous terrorists, well, then, why do we have a Central Intelligence Agency at all? If we have a Federal Emergency Management Agency that can't manage emergencies, what is the point to its even existing? I really don't think there is any excuse for the repeated recent failures of nearly every major government agency to perform even marginally in its supposed role. I feel like the majority of people working in government today have entirely forgotten that the taxpayers pay their salaries, and the people are their ultimate boss.

I also want other countries to be able to trust that the government of my country will deal honestly and fairly with other countries, and will always try to work for peace. I don't believe in covert support of coups or rebellions in other countries (that sort of thing is what got Osama Bin Laden trained by the CIA, after all), and I don't believe in preemptive war.

I know I'm quite an idealist, to even suggest that such a thing exists as one trustworthy politician, let alone enough of them to fill an entire executive branch. But I refuse to give up hope. I think I had, at one point, given up hope in progress and faith in the good of humanity, but motherhood has renewed my sense of optimism in that regard. A powerful paradigm shift takes place when you are suddenly offered the opportunity to imagine every single person on the planet as a person who was once an innocent child.

5. I know you're a vegetarian, and I know you like to cook as well. So what is your favorite dish to cook and eat and will you share the recipe?

Okay, I have a TON of favorite dishes. I am not at all a picky eater, aside from that little not eating dead animals issue I have. It was very hard for me to choose, but this particular dish is easy to make; enticingly exotic, I think, with its interesting combination of East Indian spices and a decidedly American vegetable; and, it has received rave reviews from my husband, who IS a picky eater:

This is modified from a recipe in The Vegetable Book, by Colin Spencer, which is an excellent book that everyone who ever cooks vegetables should own:

Curried Sweet Potatoes

three medium or two large sweet potatoes

one-two tablespoons peanut oil

1 tablespoon black mustard seeds (you can get these at an Indian grocery store)

1 1/2 tbsp garam masala (you SHOULD get this at the Indian grocery store, because the big generic grocery store will hose you on the price)

pinch chili powder (to taste)

pinch salt

2 tbsp chopped fresh cilantro

Boil the sweet potatoes in their skins for 15 minutes. They should be just cooked through, but not mushy. Drain them and let them cool. I mean, really, let them cool. You do not want to try to peel these when they are hot. Trust me on this one.

Once the potatoes have cooled, peel them. You should be able to just pull the skin off with your fingers. Slice the peeled potatoes into disks about 1/4 inch thick.

Heat the peanut oil in a non-stick pan. Add the mustard seeds. Swish them around with a spatula to coat them thoroughly with oil. When the mustard seeds start hopping in the pan, add the chili powder and the sweet potatoes. Lower to medium heat, and fry until the underside of the potatoes start to acquire spots of golden brown.

Sprinkle the garam masala evenly over the potatoes; flip them to make sure they get coated on all sides. Add the cilantro, and fry for a minute or three more until the cilantro has just wilted and it all looks crispy.

Serve with jasmine rice.

Bonus question: What is your favorite kind of cheese?

Lorraine swiss.

********

Now, who wants to be interviewed by me?

Definitive Proof He Was Not Switched at Birth

Because I am really, really tired of strangers at the playground, the grocery store, and the gas station asking me, suspiciously, "Where did that boy get his red hair?" I would like to present the internets with the following old, dirty, grainy photo of myself in 1982, looking more excited about having acquired a little sister than I would again for the next decade (Word to my sis):

Me, age 23 months, with sister, three days old.

And while I was restoring this photo as part of my ongoing Scan the Family Album Before It Disintegrates Project, I realized it reminded me a whole lot of another photo, from 2006:

Isaac, age 24 months, unfortunately lacking a little sister for his birthday, but really excited about the DVD he got instead.

Thinking

So, Debbie of I Obsess awarded me one of them there fancy shiny Thinking Blogger Awards!



(Like, a whole week ago.

I am bad.)

I would like to thank Miss Little Debbie Snack kindly, and hereby pass the Thinking Blogger baton to:

Alanna at A Veggie Venture, because she thinks a lot about vegetables. Like, so that the rest of us can steal her ideas for new and exciting ways to cook vegetables. And I LOVES me some vegetables.

Dwight at Ruminations of a Misspent Youth. Because he not only recently finished a novel, which requires a good deal of thought, but he spends hours writing posts that encourage other people to finish novels. Even horrible, terrible people like me who promise to meet him sometime for a critique and then get too busy with moving and fixing up a new house and disappear. And also because I think he has one of the cleverest blog titles EVAH.

Benticore at Epic Black Villainy, because he can make a critique of a comic book character's story arc sound like a treatise on 18th century literature, in a GOOD way.

Melissa at Sugared Harpy, because sometimes she sneaks in an art history lesson on her blog and no one in her virtual class falls asleep.

And Slackermommy, because in a world where it seems mothers are constantly judged over the pettiest things, she reminds us to focus on the truly important aspects of parenting, and forget the crumbs on the floor.

Mama's Still Got It

Yesterday, as I stepped out onto the front porch with Isaac to enjoy the lovely weather, a gaggle of pre-teen neighbor girls gathered in my front yard to ogle Isaac, offer small presents of leaves and rocks to Isaac, and ask whether they could pick Isaac up. His red hair has been quite a hit amongst the little girls of the neighborhood ever since we moved in.

One of them, who I hadn't met before, asked whether I was Isaac's babysitter.

"I'm the mom," I responded. "I'm 26."

She looked me up and down, eyes wide, and shook her head. "No. Way."

I'd like to thank Olay Daily Facials, jeans with added spandex, my sense of humor, and the fact that gray hairs blend when you're a dishwater blonde.

Fixer-Upper

The best thing about your circa 1962 bathroom faucet kicking the bucket,



forcing you to the realization that you HAVE to buy yourself a new bathroom faucet, whether or not you just spent the annual GDP of some smaller third world country, or, to put it another way, your entire income tax return, getting a dangerous tree removed from your backyard,



is that if you're going to buy a new faucet you can't afford, damn it, then you might as well buy a SEXY new faucet. Maybe even one that, despite LOOKING circa 1940, actually ACTS like it was made in the 21st century.

So there.

(It helps if the new faucet is on sale.)

Blah

I haven't disappeared.

I was in the hospital over the weekend with a sudden, serious infection.

I am not dying, so don't get your knickers in a knot. And I am feeling much better now.

However, hospitals suck.

I intend to write about just how much my latest visit sucked, later, when it doesn't pain me to relive the experience.

My bathroom faucet broke. Now the old faucet and a new faucet are both in pieces in my bathroom, but there is still no faucet attached to my sink, because apparently we need some obscure sort of nut type thing to connect the new faucet to our decidedly not-new pipes.



Isaac ate a whole banana last week. A whole, fresh banana. He wouldn't touch the edible part of the banana directly with his fingers, but he ate the whole thing. With a smile on his face.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

I Think I Watched Too Many Bad Trading Spaces Episodes When I Was Pregnant

"Isaac, are you happy that we will be painting your room tomorrow?"

"No!"

"But isn't this such a pretty color blue? Don't you like it? Don't you remember when we picked it out at the store?"

"I not like blue. I want to paint my room ORANGE!"



(Not. Bloody. Likely.)

Words I Have Waited Nearly Three Years to Hear:

"I love this food, Mommy!"

Hypocrisy

As a mixed-race person, with significant Cherokee ancestry, the fact that this has come up for a vote makes me absolutely furious with the current leadership of the Cherokee nation.

When are people going to learn that people like me cannot, and will not, be cut into halves or quarters, that we cannot be defined solely by some particular aspect of our physical appearance, that some portion of our ancestry cannot simply be erased just for the sake of convenience? I will always be German. I will always be English. I will always be Cherokee.

The freedmen will always be both black and Cherokee.

When your culture is in danger of dying out, the LAST THING you should do is allow superficial divisions of this sort to further fragment the scattered remains of your society.

Unfortunately, since I am not a registered member of the nation, I can't participate in this vote.

Criminal Intent

Things I thought of saying to the young man next door, who, for the third day in a row, is out washing one of the family's five (billion) cars (which they can never seem to park in front of their own house, but frequently tend to park in front of mine) with the car stereo turned up so loud that the base from his bad pop music is shaking glassware in my kitchen:

1.) "Turn off that goddamn noise this minute! And stay the hell off my lawn! Oh, and, it's Monday! Why aren't you in school?"

2.) "Naw, I didn't call the cops on you, for disturbing the peace, dude. Are you kidding? Look at me. I'm 26. Must have been the old guy across the street."

3.) "Take this, Philistine!" (Shouted while blasting Mozart out of an open window loudly enough to shake HIS house).

4.) "Oops. Did I just smash your car window with a hammer? And did I accidentally beat your stereo to tiny bits, just after that? Well, I'm sorry. I'm so clumsy! I really meant to hit you instead of the car. You spent so much time washing those windows, after all."

What I have actually said so far:

Nothing.

(Yet.)

Because I am trying to tell myself that a teenager who has spent the better part of the last three days washing his entire family's set of cars must either be an exceptionally helpful sort of kid, or he must be under some sort of extreme punishment, and either way, the music is probably helping him get the job done . . .

But if he hasn't finished cleaning out that trunk an hour from now, when my son should be going down for his nap, I am totally cranking up my Mozart, bitches.


Now, as requested, an update on the floor (or, why Jaelithe has once again temporarily become a misanthropist):

Extreme Hardwoods sent over a supposedly "impartial third-party observer" from another company to look at the damage to the floor, walls, and window treatments, and the shoddy polyurethane job. As noted before, we were told that apparently this "impartial third-party observer" was only available to come at 7:30 in the morning, because, of course, Jeff at Extreme Hardwoods actually would prefer that we drop the little matter of this amazingly botched rush job altogether, but still, for some reason I can't quite grasp, wants to pretend to us that he is an honest, honorable business owner and we are just horrible, picky, petty, selfish, vicious, evil customers, so, he is pretending to negotiate with us, and then making the negotiations as difficult as possible, so that, if we refuse to cooperate with his bizarre requests, he can try to blame us for this entire situation.

(Recall his earlier "offer" to pull out of the half-finished job and refund my deposit-- an offer he knew I was likely to refuse since it would leave me stranded with a basically un-useable floor in half of my house. Recall also his statement that WE were somehow responsible for the further delay caused by the issues with the contract, even though he was the one who failed to provide us with the contract on two separate occasions).

Suffice to say that the "impartial third-party observer" was neither impartial, nor observant. He repeated to us Jeff's story that the long scratch in the floor must have been there before the work began. When I confronted him with the fact that I had taken photos of the floor, just before the crew's arrival, after we had removed our furniture, that prove there was no such scratch in the floor, he launched into a convoluted explanation about how sometimes "invisible bruises" appear in hardwood floors, dents created by people moving furniture over the floor, that cannot be seen until after the floor is refinished. When I told him that Jeff had, on numerous occasions, described the blemish as "a cut in the floor," the observer informed me that I knew too little about wood to understand his explanation.

Whatever. To me, that "bruise" sure looks an awful lot like the type of scratch shown on this professional floor refinishing company's page, caused by grit caught in a sander. This can happen when the person sanding the floor fails to clean the floor thoroughly between sanding passes.

He also told me that the swirl marks left by the sander in my floor, which he outright refused to take a close look at, were "perfectly normal" and happen "every time" a floor is sanded.

The site above, as well as these sites, which I looked up while researching how to do the work myself, before deciding to hire a professional, all beg to differ. They actually warn against such marks as a potential problem to watch out for as an amateur, and explain how to avoid making them.

Anyway, the guy left that he would contact us later in the afternoon to let us know Jeff's response to our observations.

And then, surprise! He didn't.

And he didn't call the next day, either.

So, my husband called Jeff at the end of the day on Friday, to ask why the "impartial third-party observer" (whose phone number we were never offered) had not called, and Jeff told my husband he had told the "impartial third-party observer" not to call us.

My husband then informed Jeff that we had made a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

And then Jeff proceeded to blast an incoherent tirade in my husband's general direction, ranting about how we wanted to run his business into the ground, ruin an honest man, and destroy his ability to feed his children, etcetera, and threatening to call an attorney. During this, conversation, if it can be called such, Jeff made, and then invariably almost immediately retracted, various offers, including giving us $80 to purchase curtains, but only if we allowed him to come to our house immediately and take the damaged curtains off the window himself; letting the "impartial third-party observer," whom he had suddenly, inexplicably started referring to as "my friend" (thanks, we figured that out, actually) fix the polyurethane puddles for free, but only at his leisure (i.e., whenever he got around to it), etcetera . . .

Finally Jeff ended the conversation by saying that he was not going to give us any refunds, but, if we wanted to put a stop on the second check we had given him, we could "go right ahead."

Of course, when my husband returned home, I advised him not to do so, as I am fairly certain that:

1.) Given Jeff's previous actions, that we are dealing with a lunatic who will probably try to sue us if we take any action to get our money back that has not been officially sanctioned by some sort of governing agency, and,

2.) That check has almost surely been cashed, and the money is probably already spent.

For now, I am just waiting to hear back from a Better Business Bureau arbitrator, and living with my poor, repeatedly abused floor as-is.

I made a nifty temporary runner for the hallway by tying together five cheap chindi throw rugs from Target. Take that, polyurethane puddles and undisguised urine stains!

(Hey, that boy finally turned off his music. The day is looking up.)

Extreme Pain in the Ass, Part II

Start with Part I below if you haven't already.

******

I called the Extreme Hardwoods business phone early the next morning from my sister's house-- too early to expect Jeff to be in the office to answer, but the men were supposedly scheduled to return to my house at 8:00 in the morning (which at this point I was pretty much taking to mean noon, but one couldn't be sure). I left a message on the voicemail which went pretty much like this (I am paraphrasing, of course, because I don't record my phone calls, though after all of the problems I've had lately with deceptive business people, I'm beginning to think I always should):

"After showing up several hours late yesterday without proper notice, your crew did not finish sanding the floor. There are still several areas near doorways that have not been sanded. They also did not clean up after themselves. They did not vacuum up the sawdust left from sanding, and they did not put dust cloths in the doorways, even though during my previous conversations with you, you insisted your company would make every effort to contain the dust. I specifically hired a professional to do a job I could have done myself in part because I have a small child and a husband with severe allergies in my home, and I did not want them to be exposed to the dust from the floor sanding. There is now dust on every single flat surface in my kitchen and dining room. None of the finish swatches you put down on the floor are dark enough to cover the stains that remain there after sanding, and there are still several dark stains on the floor, despite the fact that you insisted you were certain that most of the stains would sand up.

I am extremely dissatisfied with your service at this point in time. I understand the bad weather contributed to the delay in starting the job, but it does not excuse poor workmanship after your crew arrived. I hope we can come to an amiable solution in this situation, but if you do not make an immediate effort to increase my level of satisfaction with your service, I will do my very best to make certain that every man, woman and child in the St. Louis metropolitan area has the opportunity to know just how dissatisfied I am."

What can I say? I get really wordy when people piss me off.

Jeff called me back almost immediately to tell me that he was already awake because he had just found out his aunt died.

I have no idea whether this story was actually true. On Wednesday, when I asked him why the crew had showed up so late and no one had called me, he had told me, over the phone, variously:

1.) That the reason the crew showed up so late on Wednesday was because they were stuck in traffic the likes of which he had never seen in the St. Louis area in his entire life,
2.) That the reason the crew showed up so late on Wednesday was because one of the crew members had been in a car accident on the way to work,
3.) That the reason the crew showed up so late on Wednesday was because the occupants of the house they had been working at before mine had thrown away some of the crew's sanding equipment, and the crew had to go dig the sanding equipment out of the trash.

Then there was also the bit, previously mentioned, where he told me over the phone the crew was already on my street when, in fact, I could see my entire street from my front window and there was no floor sanding crew on it, and then he told me they must be mysteriously lost. On my street. Which I could see from my window.


Seems like an awful lot of calamities to happen to one business in one week, I thought.

Then again, I can personally attest to the fact that when Calamity rains on a person, it generally pours. And, where dead relatives are concerned, I always like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

So, I offered my condolences, and apologized for calling at such an early hour, explaining that I would shortly be on my way to meeting the men at the house, and I wanted to discuss the fact that they had not finished the sanding and had not brought the right color finish before they arrived, so that they would not show up without the proper equipment.

And then he started YELLING at me that he thought it was absurd that we had already had six phone conversations about a "small three-day job," and said, "If I had known the deal would go south like this, I would have backed out right at the beginning." He then proceeded to tell me that the men had "worked late" (I suppose working for two entire hours, and then cutting out of work before 4 p.m., is working late?!?!?) because "You and your husband had a problem with the contract." By which he meant our refusal to let two men we had never met before start major construction work alone in our house without finding out when we could actually read and sign a supposedly required contract for the work-- the contract that Jeff failed, on two separate scheduled occasions, to provide. Nevermind the fact that the contract issue added a whole other half hour or so on to the nearly FIVE HOUR delay before the crew EVEN SHOWED UP to my house.

Then he told me that he was of a mind to pull out of the contract entirely, and he would send his men to pick up their equipment from my house and then tell them to leave. He claimed that after they got the equipment back, he would send back the 50% deposit we had given him in the mail.

Now, at this point, I probably should have taken him up on the offer, despite the fact that I was pretty sure I'd never see that check again without taking him to small claims court.

Problem was, at this point, I had AN ENTIRELY BARE, incompletely sanded wooden floor in HALF OF MY HOUSE. Including in the hallway you have to walk down to get to the bedrooms and bathrooms, and right in front of the front door. In the middle of winter, with snow on the ground, so that no one could walk into my house without tracking water in. Bare, unprotected wood boards, that any sort of spill of liquid could possibly ruin. And I had possibly toxic wood-and-floor-finish dust everywhere. I still had a small child, with no relatives nearby who had time to watch him while I worked, a husband who is allergic to everything in the air anyone could possibly be allergic to, and a big from-home project to finish, the combination of which would pretty much prohibit my finishing the job myself in any sort of timely fashion. And if I hired another contractor to finish the job-- if I could even find one who would be willing to finish a half-done job-- and if I could afford to pay them on top of what I had already paid -- who knew WHEN they could come? I might unable to use my living room or hallway for weeks!

Plus, there was the dead aunt story. If it was true, it could sort of explain why he was being an such an asshat on the phone.

So, I told Jeff from Extreme Hardwoods that he was most certainly not going to pull out of the job-- he was going to finish the job, in a timely fashion, to my satisfaction. His crew was going to use proper dust containment procedures from that point out, and they would make every effort to clean up the mess they had already made. And if he fixed all the problems, and finished the job quickly, I would pay him in full, and we would be square.

Well, so, that was a really dumb idea on my part.

This story is already getting really long, so I'll try to list the ways Extreme Hardwoods screwed up their job in a short a way as possible:

1.) They used a wood stain that was too light to conceal the pet stains, even after I told them AGAIN that I wanted a darker finish.

2.) They scratched a very long scratch in the floor, across nine floor boards, which was too deep to sand out, and is now very visible due to the fact that they used a penetrating wood stain on a fresh cut. When we asked them about it, they tried to blame the scratch on us, claiming it was a knife cut we had made when we tore up the carpet. When I told them I had taken extensive photographs of the floor before they started their work, in case of just such a scenario, that proved the scratch was not there beforehand (entirely true), THEY STILL STUCK TO THE SAME STORY that the scratch had been there before.




3.) They did not buff/screen/finely sand/whatever it is you're supposed to do to the floor properly after the initial sanding, and therefore they left spiral marks from the sander all over the floor. Marks which are now quite visible, because, again, the penetrating stain settled into the scratches. Marks which I am not sure I will ever be able to get removed, because I am not sure I can ever get my floor sanded again, because they sanded the floor quite deeply, I suppose because they were trying to sand out the cat piss stains, and you can only sand a wood floor so many times before there is no wood left to sand.



4.) They left pools of polyurethane in multiple spots on the floor that left visible ridges and ripples as they dried.



5.) They left wood stain handprints on my walls.




(And no, that's not right next to the floor-- that's halfway up the wall. Good thing I have yet to paint that wall the color I want to paint it. But they didn't know that).

6.) They splashed wood stain all over my MONTH-OLD CURTAINS, THE CURTAINS THAT MATCH MY SOFA ACCENT PILLOWS PERFECTLY THAT I HAD TO GO TO THREE DIFFERENT STORES TO FIND, which, by the way, it would have taken them approximately TEN SECONDS to pull up over the rod so they would not be in the way (they did this on the first day, but not on subsequent days).




7.) They did not clean up any of the dust in the rooms outside the living room, and they did not bother to use dust cloths on the second day despite my complaint (although I am not sure how much sanding they actually even did on the second day-- see sander marks above).

It took two people cleaning for six hours, an entire roll of paper towels, an entire canister of Clorox wipes, and lots and lots of dish soap and special floor cleaner to clean up the mess, and I STILL smell burning dust when I turn on my toaster.


Thus far, all Extreme Hardwoods has offered us is a $50 refund toward the dust cleanup, and a free spot-refinishing of the areas of the floor that have polyurethane ripples on them, the latter of which we have yet to take them up on, BECAUSE OH MY GOD WE DO NOT WANT THESE PEOPLE TO COME BACK INTO OUR HOUSE.

Forget the fact that they might damage something.

I might damage THEM.

I don't know how this is the same company that came with such a glowing recommendation from my husband's coworker. I guess she got lucky. Really, really lucky. In the sort of way I never seem to get lucky, ever. Well, except for that one time I met my (then) future husband in the food court at the Galleria.

Now, Extreme Hardwoods apparently needs to send an "impartial third party" (i.e., as far as I can tell, some buddy of Jeff's) out to look at the damage tomorrow.

At 7:30 in the morning.

*roll*

Not like it matters, since I'm sure they won't be here until 10:00.

Extreme Pain in the Ass, Part I

After discussing the issue with various intelligent people (including some of my readers), and researching various options thoroughly on the internet, I finally came to a decision about what to do the damaged hardwood floors I uncovered when my husband and I pulled up the dirty, worn carpet in the living room and hallway of our recently purchased home.

Carefully considering that:

1.) Rental drum sanders are heavy and difficult for a novice to operate,

2.) Being that my husband is allergic to EVERY airborne particle known to humanity, including wood dust, the main person in charge of any DIY sanding project would probably be little ol' (I swear I'm still, really) 130 (give or take) pound me,

3.) Floor finish in homes built before the 1960s, like mine, often contain toxic materials, including lead, that can be harmful to small children if inhaled in dust form,

4.) Dana from Mamalogues was going to spank me or something if I covered the hardwood with laminate,

5.) Painting a hardwood floor would just be dumb,

I decided it would be well worth the money to hire a professional to sand and refinish my hardwood floors; if the extensive animal urine stains could not be removed by sanding, I thought, I would ask the professional floor refinisher to put a dark stain on the floor that would mostly conceal them.

I didn't want to let just anyone into my home; I've heard so many stories about shady contractors that I certainly wasn't about to pick the first name I found searching for local floor refinishers on Google. Aside from the obvious worries every homeowner has about whether a hired contractor will treat the homeowner's living space with respect and provide quality work for fair prices, the fact that I have a small child in the house, and the fact that I work from home both made it especially important in my mind to find someone who would give me a realistic estimate of how long the project would take, would show up on time, and would stick to whatever schedule we worked out.

Because of my son's age, and my husband's allergy issues, it was also extremely important to me to find someone who would be meticulous about containing the dust from the sander and cleaning up properly afterward.

My husband asked his friends at work if any of them had hired a floor refinishing company in the recent past. One coworker recommended a company called Extreme Hardwoods, a small business, based St. Louis, with its office in North County, not far from my house. She said they had refinished the hardwood floor in her daughter's bedroom not long ago, and they had done an excellent job. And, apparently, she herself had been referred to Extreme Hardwoods by friends of hers who had hired them to refinish floors at their house, where they had done a great job.

So, I called the company to schedule an estimate. I gave the business owner, Jeff, the square footage and a brief description of the extent of the damage over the phone, and he told me that, assuming none of the floor boards needed replacement, we would most likely qualify for their minimum job fee, which is $500. We scheduled an estimate for later that week.

He showed up on time, and seemed knowledgeable about the wood.

But when I asked him about the possibility of using a very dark finish, expressing my worry that the stains would not come out. He insisted he'd seen much worse stains, and that he was fairly certain the majority of the stains, would sand out. He said he thought that many of the stains I thought were urine stains were merely water stains caused by frequent foot traffic from the front door and the bathroom off the hallway.

I disagreed with that assessment, explaining that when I had pulled back the carpet myself earlier in the month, the stench alone was enough to convince me that animals had been, ahem, marking that section of the floor repeatedly for a very long time.

He blew me off.

(I probably should have recognized this as a red flag. However, during my several-year career as a young blonde woman I have become quite accustomed to men who work in professions such as construction, landscaping, car repair, car sales, clothing sales, grocery sales, science, medicine, and politics responding to my concerns and opinions on anything remotely related to their chosen field of work by completely blowing them off.

If I made a regular practice of excluding hired professionals on the basis of sexism, ageism, or blonde-ism, I'd pretty much have to do everything myself.)

I repeated myself until he finally agreed that, in the event the stains did not sand out even under the force of his amazing "super-powered" sander, he would be happy to stain the floor a dark enough color that whatever remained of the stains would mostly blend right in.

I asked him about dust containment, and he assured me that they would use a high-quality dustless sander that sucked up dust as it sanded the floor, that they would hang plastic tarps across every doorway to every area of the house that was not being sanded, and that they would use a heavy-duty shop vac to thoroughly clean all of the dust off of the sanded floors.

He said he could come to do the floors the very next week if I liked, and then he left. And I thought about it over the weekend. I checked around for price estimates at a few other places. I called my stepfather, who owns a saw mill, and asked his advice. I called my sister to see whether I could scare up a place to stay for a couple of days while possibly-toxic dust swirled through my home. I considered how I might rearrange my work schedule, and whether I would be able to do some work at my sister's house.

Finally, I called Extreme Hardwoods on Monday and scheduled the floor refinishing to start on Wednesday. Jeff told me that he would send a crew out at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday. I would move all of my furniture out of the way before the came, and the crew would start sanding the floors immediately. They would rough-sand a few patches in some of the worst stained areas right away to see whether the stains were coming up or not, and then they would paint three different finish swatches on the sanded spot of floor so that my husband and I could decide which finish to use. Then, we would leave. The crew would finish the sanding completely and put a coat of finish on the floor that day; then, if the finish had time to dry, they would come back in the early evening and apply one coat of polyurethane. In the morning, they would come back and apply a second coat of polyurethane. If everything went as planned, my floors would be completely finished in two days, and on the third day, after the top poly coat cured, I could move my furniture back into the room.

Jeff also said he would send someone over to my house with a contract on Tuesday, describing the work to be done, explaining liability policies, and confirming the $500 price. He said he would call me first thing in the morning on Tuesday to tell me when someone would be coming by with the paperwork.

During this scheduling call, we discussed the fact that snow was predicted in the area for Monday night and Tuesday morning. I worried that perhaps if too much ice fell, my electricity would go out, as it did in the last two major ice storms. He assured me that if the storm caused any delays on his end, he would call me as soon as possible to draw up a new schedule.

Snow came Tuesday morning, without ice, and my electricity stayed on. The roads in my neighborhood were plowed quickly. Relieved, I waited for someone from Extreme Hardwoods to call and tell me when they might be by with the contract. I imagined they would still be able to drop it by despite the storm, considering that their business address was so close to my house.

I waited for the call, and waited, and waited, until 3:00 in the afternoon, when Jeff called and said that because of the weather, no one would be able to come by with a contract on Tuesday.

In addition, he said, the weather had delayed work on another job, so the crew would no longer be able to come to my house at 8:30 as scheduled. They would now have to go back to the house they were currently working on first thing in the morning to put the final coat on the floor, and then come to my house at 10:30, but, he told me, he was certain they would still be able to finish the sanding and finishing part of the job by the end of the day; with luck, they might even still be able to apply the first polyurethane coat, as long as I did not mind them working late in my house. He would send the contract over with the crew.

I was a bit worried about not seeing the contract I was supposed to sign until the work crew was actually at my house for the job, but, I certainly understood that the weather might have caused delays. After all, my neighborhood hadn't been too badly hit by the storm, but I was sure the crew did work all over town, and they may have been working in an area where the roads were quite dangerous. I agreed to this new schedule, and rearranged the plans I'd made with my sister to meet her at her house after the crew set up. My husband arranged to work from home for the first half of day so that he could be around to look at the contract and help make a decision about the finish.

Early the next morning, we got up and moved all of our living room furniture into the dining room and our bedroom. We thoroughly swept the living room floor. Then we sat in the empty room, and waited for the crew to arrive. My husband fielded IM questions from work on his laptop. My son paced around nervously, asking whether we were moving again, but we assured him we were not. I took the opportunity to thoroughly clean the emptied shelves of my entertainment center.

At 9:30 a.m., Jeff called to say the men had been delayed by heavy traffic, and were only just now arriving at the house they had to finish up at before mine. However, he insisted they would arrive at my house by 11:30.

My husband told his supervisor he'd be later than he had expected. I tried to call my sister, but could not get in touch with her.

By 12:30, the crew was still not at my house.

I called Jeff on his business cell phone. Someone picked up the phone, and then it clicked off. I couldn't tell whether I'd just been hung up on, or the cell phone had lost the connection. Thinking that he might be driving through an area with poor reception, I decided to wait ten minutes to see whether Jeff would call me back.

He didn't.

So I called again.

This time he answered the phone, and before I could say much of anything at all, he said, "They're on your street."

"Really?" I asked. I happened at the time to be looking out of my front window. From which I can see pretty much all of my very short street. There was no one driving on the street. There were no commercial trucks or vans parked anywhere. "I can see my entire street right now," I said, "And I don't see your crew anywhere."

"Oh, well, maybe they're lost," he said.

Finally, at 1:15 p.m.-- that's one hour and forty-five minutes past 11:30, two hours and forty-five minutes past 10:30, and a full four hours and forty-five minutes past the originally scheduled time of 8:30 in the morning, a man carrying a beat-up, dusty old drum sander knocked on my door. The crew of two came in and started setting up their equipment. Slightly miffed that they were so late, but relieved they had finally shown, I asked them whether they had brought the contract Jeff had told me we needed to sign before the work began.

They had not.

I asked if someone could be sent over from the office with it.

One of the men called Jeff on his cell phone. After they talked for a while, Jeff asked to talk to me. He told me the men could go ahead and start the job without the contract. I told him I didn't want to start the job without seeing what was in the contract first. I asked if my husband could go pick up a copy of the contract, but Jeff said he had the only copy in the car with him on the road. He told me that if I let the men start working, he would come by the house as soon as he was finished with some business downtown to give us the contract.

I explained that once the men started working, we had had to leave. My husband had already spent half a day working from home and needed to go in to the office right away, and I needed to take my son to my sister's house; I couldn't have him in the house once the sanders were going full blast, because the dust would be everywhere, and anyway (given his medical condition, which I did not take the time to explain) he would be terrified by the noise. I asked if he could bring the contract by my husband's office instead. He didn't answer. Then the phone cut out. When I tried to call him back, it said the number was unavailable.

The crew and I waited for several more minutes before finally receiving a call from Jeff saying he would bring the contract to my husband's office.

It was now almost two in the afternoon. As reluctant as I was to start work without a contract in hand, we had already moved all of our furniture and made arrangements to stay at my sister's house; my husband had already spent half the day out of his office, and I had spent half the day NOT working on a major work project of my own. Not to mention the fact that I was already tired of trying to protect a wood floor missing half of its finish from a two-year-old for the past couple of weeks.

So, I let them finish setting up their equipment. I was worried about my curtains, which I had left hanging so no one would see that the house was unoccupied and under construction and decide to waltz in and take a few things, but the crew just flipped the curtains up over the curtain rod. I asked them to put down the finish swatches Jeff had described to me during the scheduling phone call.

The men looked confused. "We have to sand the entire floor before we put down any finish," they said.

"The entire reason my husband stayed home from work today was so he could read over the contract, and help pick out the finish. And now you are telling me we can't do either one of those things?"

They shook their heads. "No, ma'am, but we can't put the finish down today anyway. It's already two in the afternoon. It won't have time to dry before you come home tonight. We'll have to do it in the morning. So why don't we just put the swatches down after we finish sanding tonight, and then you can tell us in the morning which one you want?"

At this point, I was pretty much furious.

But the men who had shown up to do the work seemed nice enough. They were truly apologetic about the delays. Had it all really been a case of miscommunication between Jeff and the crew, exacerbated by the weather? I didn't know.

All I knew was that I had planned my entire week around getting this work done, and if it didn't get done that day, I might not be able to arrange for it to happen for another month.

So, I went to my sister's house. My husband went to work.

Jeff called my husband at the office and said that he couldn't bring the contract by when we'd planned because instead of coming straight up from downtown, as he'd told us he would, he had driven to O'Fallon.

He finally sent an associate by with a contract a 4:00 p.m.

When my husband called Jeff back with a question about the contract shortly after receiving it, Jeff mentioned that the crew had already finished the sanding and left our house.

Which means they were working at the house for less than two hours.

When we went by the house, I discovered that the crew hadn't even finished the edge sanding around the doorways. There was a clear demarcation between the areas of the floor that had been edge sanded, and the area of the floor that had been sanded with the drum sander, indicating that they had not done the final buffing job on the floor.

The swatches were on the floor, but none of the three colors shown there were dark enough to cover the stains. Which had not sanded out.

And there were piles of wood shavings on the floor, and there was dust EVERYWHERE. They hadn't vacuumed it all up.

And they hadn't hung plastic in the doorways.

Every piece of furniture in my dining room, and every appliance and every flat surface in my kitchen, was covered in 1/16th of an inch to 1/8th of an inch of wood and finish dust.

***Continued next post***

What Lies Beneath

Most of the (fifty-year-old!) hardwood floors in my new house look like this:




(Cue choir of angels).

(Yes, that is a Queen-Anne-style bookcase and a floral rug. No, I am not somebody's grandma. I am just . . . sophisticated . . . for my age. Shut up).

So, though I expected that the hardwood floor beneath the ugly, cheap, smelly carpet in my living room and hallway would probably have a few scuffs and stains, as hardwood floors trapped under cheap carpet generally tend to, given the condition of the floors in the rest of the house, I had hope that the floor beneath the carpet might be, well, passable.





I was wrong.

That is what the hallway looked like AFTER I swept it twice.

That's not glue you're seeing there on the floor. Oh, no.

That's about seven years of dust.

Seven-year-old dust congeals into quite a tenacious sort of paste when mixed with seven years of cat urine.

Oh yes, yes it does.

So, this is what the hallway looked like after I removed the urine-and-dust paste:



And this is what the living room floor looks like, everywhere the previous occupants didn't have furniture:




As you can see, before they put the carpet down, they apparently thought it would be fun to test some white wall paint out on the floor. On the fifty-year-old, still-in-pretty-good-condition, genuine-hardwood-of-a-quality-that-would-cost-a-
frillion-dollars-to-install-throughout-a-house-these-days floor.

Look, even the two-year-old thinks this is such a tragedy he wants to help:



So, I figure I have four options:

1.) Pay someone several hundred dollars to sand the floor and refinish it. In a dark, dried cat urine color to cover up the stains. Only we won't call the color dried cat urine. We'll call it Rich Espresso.

2.) Attempt to sand and refinish the floor myself. With expensive rental equipment that I have never used before. Using chemicals that require ventilation-- i.e., open windows. In the dead of winter.

3.) Cover the hardwood with laminate (sacrilege). Because (see above) I cannot afford to replace the hardwood with hardwood.

4.) Run over it a couple of times with my hand sander, paint the whole floor some unobtrusive color with porch paint (SACRILEGE!), toss around some really big area rugs, and wait five years until I CAN afford to replace the hardwood with hardwood.



Opinions? Suggestions, Internets?



(I know I've been doin' you wrong lately, Internets, by rushing past you with little more than a tip of my hat when I see you on the street, not even bothering to say hello, or ask you how your day has been.

But I know you still love me, Internets.

Right?

Don't you?)