I never managed to take pictures of the garden bathtub we’ve had for the last few months. Ours was no subject of a fancy realtor’s description but was actually a garden bathtub, with three waste baskets full of sprawling potato plants a sweet potato plant in a milk jug and a plastic bin of pea plants. Finally this past weekend, with Spring weather here (and hopefully here to stay for a bit), I moved all of this downstairs, some of it even outside.

The potatoes may be a wash. One potato had begun to stick out of the top of the soil, but there were no more in shallow soil. There may be many potatoes lower in the container, but we decided just to leave them be for now, after adding a little more dirt. If they don’t grow, there’s really not much harm done. We planted the last few potatoes in a batch of Yukon golds that seemed near the end of life anyway, so it was a crap-shoot anyway.

The sweet potato I grew from the end of a potato that had a couple of purple-tipped eyes on it. It started out in a little ramekin on our kitchen counter and ultimately grew well beyond the capacity of a topless gallon milk jug, fanning out its broad green leaves and digging its roots to the bottom of the jug. I planted it in a deep pot on the front porch yesterday. Even if it yields nothing, it’s been fun to watch it grow. Sweet potatoes really are lovely plants, especially early in their lives.

I think the peas too had outgrown their container. They crept throughout the shallow bin, a tangle of delicate stems and leaves, and I finally transplanted them tonight, after giving them some time in the sun yesterday. I also dropped a dozen or so unsprouted seeds in the ground in a new bed along the lattice of our back deck. The bed is a yard deep by maybe 10 or 12 feet long. I’ve now got 8 or 9 pea plants ranging from 6 to 10 inches tall clinging tenderly to the lattice, with the others (with any luck) burgeoning underground. We’ll see how that works out.

My garlic is looking great! I’ve got 8 or 9 plants out under out trees in the back yard that I planted when I first got my garlic bulbs months ago. Then I’ve got maybe 20 plants I had planted more recently that really aren’t lagging that far behind in terms of growth. They’re 10 - 14 inches tall, and it’s hard for me not to go dig one of them up to see how far they’ve come.

I had started a few dozen carrots in egg cartons a month or two ago, and they were moving right along. I was worried about transplanting them because they’re absurdly delicate plants when young. I just knew I’d break them when I tried to remove them from the egg cartons. I was spared the agonizing task, though, as we stuck them outside for a bit a couple of weeks ago when we had company, and we forgot to bring them back in. So I sowed carrots to finish a half-row of garlic and planted a second row in front of them. I may plant a row in front of my peas as well, and we plan to grow some herbs in that bed too.

And finally (on the vegetative front at least), I have tomatoes coming up at last. I had winter sown 7 or 8 varieties in milk jugs and soft drink bottles weeks ago, but had written them off because there was absolutely zero progress. But when I returned this weekend from a week out of town, I checked on them and found that five varieties had sprouted. So I may have some tomatoes after all. The Brandywines, which I was the most excited about, have done nothing as yet. I’m holding out hope for now that they’re just late bloomers and will arise soon.

In digging our new bed, we used a bunch of homemade compost. Our bin had gotten pretty full, but we kept adding to it. A couple or three weeks ago, we decided no to add to it any more, so that what was in there could decompose without further disturbance. So I moved the bin out from around its contents. The dog was really interested in the newly exposed pile of waste, so I built a really ghetto enclosure of chicken wire and 2-foot wooden stakes (three panels hammered end-to-end in a rough circle around the pile) to keep him out. We watered the pile and let it sit for a few days. Then I watered it again before heading out of town for a week. When I got back, it seemed pretty darned close to ready for use. So we folded it into the new bed we made. Here’s hoping it’s not so hot a mix that it kills the plants. It’s mixed with a lot of clay, so I think it’ll be sufficiently diluted that it’ll work out.

Our next-door neighbor has an impeccably-kept lawn. While I go out to mow my lawn as if I’m going to battle, with the blade adjusted as low to the ground as possible and heaving the machine about the yard, almost audibly roaring at times while I do it (I hate the task so), my neighbor trims his lush yard delicately and uses a fancy edging tool and all but whispers sweet botanical nothings to it as he communes with the grass. He chalks the quality of his lawn up to having inherited a sodded yard, but I know it would have gone to pot like mine had he not shown it the loving-kindness he has. Which is fine. But it has always bothered us that he fills 6 or 8 garbage bags per week with clippings that go to the landfill. So Mleeka went begging for grass this week, approaching his wife and telling her that we’d love to have all that grass for our compost and saying what a shame it was that it was going to the landfill (I’m sure her approach was less cumbersome than how I’ve portrayed it). And lo and behold, when we got home from an afternoon engagement on Saturday, we found that he had filled our newly-emptied compost bin with fresh green grass.

We caught him out in the yard later (whispering sweet nothings to it under the guise of trimming his bushes), and he said he had more but didn’t want to overload us. It turns out that bagging the stuff is a real pain for him, so he’s happy to dump it in our bin. Symbiosis achieved! He had several bags more of grass and then a bunch of bags of what would be considered browns in the world of composting, straw-ey, weedy type stuff. Heretofore, we’ve had mostly kitchen scraps and leaves. This season, I get to experiment with high-mass green content (which I’ve wanted because it gets really hot and apparently makes for great compost) and lots of brown content, which is apparently good for providing aeration for the green content. Since we used up our dumped pile in our new garden patch, we’ve now got a cube bin and a ghetto chicken-wire bin full of alternating layers of green and brown matter. I stuck my hand down into a grass layer of one of the bins today and it was good and warm (I’d guess 105 - 110 degrees). Can’t wait to see how it turns out (though I guess I’ll have to). My prediction for the moment is that I’ve got too much brown content right now, that it will provide good aeration for the green but that it won’t break down very well itself.

And there you have it. Two or three months’ worth of gardening packed into one probably very boring blog post. The next few months should be lots of fun. I finally bought a battery charger to replace the camera battery charger I’ve lost, so maybe my next report will include pictures.

The rolls are made, although they’re an unequivocal failure. I just couldn’t get them to rise. They’re hard, brown little things, and most of them will land in my compost pile, which frankly is ok by me.

The turkey is on the counter, covered in cling wrap. A friend assures me that non-factory-produced turkey can be left out overnight because it doesn’t have the bacteria that turkeys raised in stiflingly close quarters have. My turkey’s liver and heart and neck and gizzard have been boiled with aromatics and herbs to make a broth, and those organs (except perhaps for the gizzard, which has a surprising and to my mouth most unpleasant texture) will be incorporated into tomorrow’s gravy.

The herbs I’ll mix with butter and garlic to rub into the turkey tomorrow are painstakingly picked and chopped. I had to buy expensive oregano and thyme from the grocery store to get fresh (”fresh” — probably shipped cross-country three weeks ago). The rosemary I stepped barefoot out into my backyard at 10:00 p.m. to pick. Note to self: I’d like to grow some thyme. Plucking tablespoonsful of little leaves from these plants tonight (the thyme in particular) makes me really appreciate the herbs, which I’ve so often been content to sprinkle from a costly little glass jar. I spent nearly an hour tonight preparing the herbs for the herb butter.

Good food is an investment, and it should be. We comparison shop to find the cheapest food we can without regard to the fact that it’s not just some throwaway thing — it’s our sustenance, one of the very few things without which we cannot actually survive. You are what you eat. This is not to say that expense for its own sake is worthwhile. But to drink milk that separates into cream and not-cream (what is the name for the not-cream?), to eat an animal that was raised in a way that allows that animal to grow more or less as it would in nature — these things are increasingly important to me, and worth more money. If the body is a temple, you shouldn’t fill it with shit.

It’s hard to pay four or five bucks a pound for turkey when Kroger has it for $0.79 a pound. What do I gain from doing this? Well, there’s a sense of eating more ethically. I’m eating a bird that has lived roughly as a bird of its type should (compared to a bird crammed with a dozen others in a tiny cage). I’m also supporting a local economy. I have spoken face-to-face with the person who raised, killed, processed, and sold me this turkey. The people I bought this bird from appreciate my individual contribution. Butterball really could not care less whether I buy their bird or not.

I wish more of my Thanksgiving lunch was created from local food. Much of it is, but I’ll do better next year. I’ll have aromatics and more herbs from my own garden at least. I may not ever raise turkeys, but I’m thinking I might have some chickens in the not-too-distant future. And surely I can grow my own potatoes (we’ve already got some started). In the mean time, I’m thankful to have local farmers to fill in the substantial gaps.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday with a cleaning and some fillings on the docket and a lunch break scheduled between the two procedures. While I considered trying to find some place nearby that had a really leafy, stinky salad to treat my dentist to the remnants of during my fillings, I could find no such place. There was a KFC around the corner, though, and I had recently had a hankering for that anyway.

What a huge disappointment it turned out to be. The biscuit tasted like buttery sweaty socks (I have tasted sweaty ones but not buttery ones, so I’m sort of projecting), the mac and cheese smelled vaguely vomity, and even the mashed potatoes and gravy failed to live up to my memory of them. But worst of all was the chicken. Oh, the breading was tasty enough, but if you got a bite of chicken without any breading, it was dry and basically tasteless.

For reading material, I had brought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I had just begun the section on fast food. It’s possible that reading some of that prior to lunch colored my perceptions, though I think maybe not, as I’m really not all that suggestible. One thing I couldn’t help recalling was the statement by the author of my other big meat book I bought recently that when taking the life of a sentient being in order to eat it, you shouldn’t do so lightly. I can say confidently that the chicken I had for lunch yesterday was not worth taking the life of the animal I ate, pitiful though that life may have been.

This experience puts me one step closer to foregoing any meat but that which seems to have been raised well and fed properly, even if it’s more expensive. There are plenty of vegetarian options I’ll gladly eat to balance out some of the increased cost of meat.

I have bought grassfed meat from three local farms lately. If you’re interested in a pricing breakdown (with Kroger, my usual grocery store, as a — dare I call it a? — touchstone on price), you can see my working copy here. The farms I’ve tried are River Ridge, West Wind, and Laurel Creek. I don’t remember what got me started on this kick, but I’m to the point that I’m considering buying a freezer and paying a bit more for quality meat without the fear of suddenly growing breasts or hulking out and going on a roid rampage thanks to all the hormones and steroids I’m taking in through the animals I eat. Of course, in addition to not wanting to turn into a mutant, there’s the matter of wanting to eat things that don’t taste like cardboard. Of course, you don’t know that what you’ve been eating for 30-plus years tastes like cardboard until you’ve had something that doesn’t taste like cardboard, and it is that taste test that I’m conducting now as I work through how I feel about meat and how I’d like to consume it.

In addition to buying meat, I’ve bought three books about meat. The first and biggest is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, which is basically a 500-page text book that I’m a quarter of the way through. From this book I’ve learned fun things like what mechanically separated meat is, and of course it reinforces some of the things that made me shudder and choke back vomit when reading Fast Food Nation a few years ago. The author makes a pretty weak philosophical case for eating meat (one of the things I’ve long struggled a bit with), but the book generally goes along at a nice clip with some charm and is pretty engaging. One of the most influential things the guy has said — and this touches on some of the ethical problems I currently sidestep while chewing on one of our bovine or porcine friends — is that if you’re going to kill a sentient being and eat it, you should do it a sort of honor and make its murder worth it, or as near worth it as you can. I’m beginning to buy the argument he puts forth that to eat factory farmed, maltreated animals (I suppose that’s redundant) is to devalue the lives they give for your consumption. I can’t escape here the recollection of some old probably racist lore about Indians thanking the animals they killed to eat. I also keep going back to an example that I think I made up: If your plane crashed in the mountains and you were forced to indulge in the last taboo and given the choice of eating a dear friend of known provenance (so to speak) and physical quality or eating a drug-ravaged fellow passenger with emaciated limbs and like pus coming out of his eyes, which would you eat? Hard as it would be to eat a friend, I’m thinking I’d go that route. And if you’re going to eat a friend, you’d better darned well make a big spectacle of honoring him for the death that brought you sustenance.

So I suddenly have visions of asking these farmers for the name of the cow or pig I’m eating so that I can honor its sacrifice, and that feels a little dumb.

The second book, which I’ve just scanned a little is The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook. As I considered buying a half a cow to stock the freezer I’m thinking about buying, it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how to cook most of a cow. I’m a ground beef and grilled steaks and occasional crock-potted roast kind of guy, and before I took the plunge, I wanted to understand a little better what I could do with other cuts (and what the cuts even are) and how grassfed animals in particular might best be presented at my supper table.

And finally, I bought The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It seems I had heard something about this book recently, and I thought reading it might be a good exercise for helping me work through some of the ethical issues that have resurfaced as I’ve devoted as much brain as digestive tract to what I’m eating.

But back to the meat.

So far, I’ve eaten the following things:

• Ground beef from River Ridge, as burgers (disclosure: I make a killer burger by finely chopping red pepper, garlic, and onion and mixing that in with the meat; these were the best burgers I’ve ever made, but maybe I just got the veggie additives perfect this time)
• Ground beef from Laurel Creek, in spaghetti (you could actually taste the beef, rather than just having its texture)
• Ribeye from River Ridge
• Ribeye from West Wind
• T-bone from Laurel Creek
• Pork chops from River Ridge (I seasoned these with a mixture of mustard powder, garlic powder, and salt, and they tasted like steak; best pork chops I’ve ever had; the second batch I managed to undercook, and none of us wound up with trichinosis)

As noted, the River Ridge burgers were great. I’ve got queued up for tomorrow burgers made from West Wind beef. West Wind’s prices are through the effing roof. I paid nearly $20 a pound for ribeyes from them, for example, and the ground beef is literally $2 or more dollars per pound more than what I paid for the ground beef from Laurel Creek, which was perfectly adequate for spaghetti (haven’t tried it in burgers yet, though I will next weekend).

I wonder if West Wind’s prices aren’t high for good reason, though. This weekend, I cooked a bunch of steaks for visiting family. I had four River Ridge ribeyes and two West Wind ribeyes. The River Ridge ones looked a little weird, and I had noticed this when I first bought them but figured maybe it was just the way local, organic, grassfed beef was butchered. They were sort of formless, as if they’d just been hacked out of the cow rather than cut in the usual fashion, with the customary sort of semi-circular crust of fat. Both sets of steaks had adequate marbling, though upon close inspection, the West Wind steaks were prettier and ultimately better marbled. Neither were the technicolor scarlet color of the steaks you see at the grocery store. The RR steaks were much much darker, tending almost to purplish, while the WW ones were more pinkish brownish. Both of them were yummy steaks, though the WW were far more tender (also generally thinner, and perhaps that made a difference). If I were wealthy beyond my wildest dreams and inclined to eat ribeyes often, I’d go with WW over RR. I’m eager to try Laurel Creek, as their pricing is the best, but they haven’t had any available at the farmer’s market the two times I’ve been.

Sometime this week, I aim to cook a Laurel Creek tenderloin. The loins I bought are smaller than what one can find at Kroger, but they also look a bit less fatty, and I can hardly wait to grill one up.

The pork chops from River Ridge were delicious; if the differential between the beef at WW and RR extends to the pork, I’ll be in for a treat indeed when I try a WW pork product.

West Wind is consistently more expensive (sometimes by six or eight dollars per pound), but they also claim to be the only fully organic local(ish) farm. The farmer’s wife (WW is apparently run just by her and her husband) informed me rather brusquely on Friday that they don’t trust Tennessee slaughter houses and so go just into North Carolina to slaughter their animals at a facility that follows a Temple Grandin design. This no doubt accounts for some of the price differential. And the ribeyes did seem to be of better cut and quality than what I’ve had elsewhere (even though I overcooked them).

What I’m left to consider now is how much price means to me. I’m willing to pay more for ethically killed (hah!) animals, but am I willing to pay three dollars per pound more or eight? Fearnley-Whittingstall suggests that it may be better to eat ethical(ish), high-quality meat in lesser quantities than to gorge simply for the sake of eating meat on cheap, bland meat that requires a sea of barbecue sauce to make it palatable, and for the moment, I’m feeling inclined to agree. Tonight, my family of four (ok, two-and-a-half, as two of them are under five years old) split a leftover T-bone, and it was sufficient if not belt-looseningly abundant. Eating less meat (with less guilt) but appreciating it more seems reasonable enough.

With respect to the considerable price differential among local farms, I have yet to figure out how I feel about requiring the full organic chain of events for the meat I eat. There are guidelines, I believe, about how far an animal has to walk prior to its death, how exactly it is killed, whether the grass it eats can have had any ancestral seeds that weren’t raised by hand and whispered to during germination by hippies reeking of patchouli (perhaps I carry this a bit far), and I’m not sure how important these are to me. Once you’ve resolved to carry an animal off to kill it for food, provided you’re fairly kind about it, I’m not sure how much it matters to me whether you let it walk lackadaisically in a circular queue to its death or whether you nudge it a little along the way. This was one of the things the WW farmer cited as a benefit of organic. I’m very much in favor of kindness to animals on their way to oblivion, but ultimately, dead is dead, and a marginal difference in anxiety level within the animals may not be worth five or six bucks per plate to me. Or this is what I think for the moment, at least.

I was poking around at technorati today and discovered that a Wired blogger had written a bit on kites and linked to a 4-year-old blog post of mine about my discomfort around kites. In his words: “being afraid of kites doesn’t make you a huge honking pussy: it makes you smart.” Nifty.

I’ve flown Lennie’s little kite a few times recently, admittedly just in our little street and not higher than 20 feet or so, but it’s a step, yes?

Reading the original entry and the comments (it’s probably the most commented non-techy entry of mine) made me want to give it a little bump. Whether it’s vanity or an inclination toward public service I’m not entirely certain.

This weekend, I conquered my fear of the circular saw. I tried using two different saws to help cut lap joints for a compost bin I started work on. The first is a little battery-powered deal that’s light-weight and easy on the wrist but that loses juice pretty fast and won’t cut very many boards. When it wore out, I decided to try my dad’s old circular saw, which I’ve had for a couple of years now but have never tried using because it’s huge and old and seemed maybe a little dangerous. But I had 32 lap joints to cut and was darned if I was going to do it all the old-fashioned way (which after a couple of hours wrangling various tools I figured out would have been easier anyway, at least for the part I was using the circular saws for). So anyway, as I got my dad’s saw out, I took a minute to think about what I’d do if I happened to chop a finger off. I’ve seen on TV or read that you can transport small amputated appendages to the hospital for reattachment in milk (why milk and not just ice I’m not sure). But this actually represented something of a dilemma for me, as we have two sorts of milk these days, the cheap skim stuff that keeps me from cultivating big floppy man boobs and the 2% creamy organic stuff that we think is probably less likely to make Lennie bear children with extra limbs and radioactive teeth. Which milk should I stick my amputated (and as I pictured it, still twitching) finger in once I picked it up from where it lay partially buried in a drift of sawdust? When I was relating this train of thought to a coworker this afternoon, my dilemma deepened as I realized that breast milk represents a third option in our home, though not one as readily available for amputated appendage transport. I’m happy to report that I didn’t wind up having to make this difficult decision, having kept my fingers intact and having only one close call with the circular saw. Sadly, I’m still not sure which would have been the best option.

Lennie was born on June 24, less than two weeks before July 4. As happens with new parents, we hadn’t been sleeping very well, and though we expected your standard whistley firecrackers in our neighborhood, some neighborhood kids had more in store. Sometime late on the night of the 4th, we began to hear great reverberating booming sounds issuing from the cul-de-sac a few doors down. As in our windows rattled. There was definitely no ignoring these sounds, and as we had finally gotten Lennie to sleep, it was time for us to rest some. I angrily tossed on some clothes and stomped down to the cul-de-sac to see what was going on, and the son of my retired-military neighbor began hastily packing up whatever gear he and his buddy had been using. I confronted them and asked if they were making all the racket, and they denied it, looking rather panicked. I suppose I probably did come off as a little deranged. I glared at them and told them that if I heard the noises again, I’d — I’m a little embarrassed at both the fact and the wording of this statement — “call the law.” Then I stomped back to my house and got back in bed and probably was awakened shortly by my crying child. We later reflected on the incident and giggled over my phrasing and the picture I must have made, all but shaking my fist at the good-for-nothing whippersnappers who had robbed me of my sleep. That, over three years ago, was the first sure sign for me that I was beginning to show some age.

Fast forward to this evening for sign number two. Since before we had Lennie, we’ve done Halloween at our friends Dave and Karen’s neighborhood. The neighborhood we moved into last November has its own big Halloween bash, though, and we wanted to participate in that this year, as we’re trying to do better about letting Lennie out of the basement during daylight hours so that she can interact with neighborhood kids near her age. So our neighborhood has a cookout for Halloween, and everybody runs around with their kids for a while and hands out candy for a while and eats hot dogs at some point, and it’s all very hectic and disorganized, which is fitting for a holiday like this. With two small children and with three mouths to get fed, we had at some point to leave our Halloween candy unattended, which seemed safe enough from where we sat in the dark outside our next-door neighbor’s house. Oh, we figured there’d be some overzealous kids who’d take more than two or three pieces of candy, but the abuse we discovered after dark was really shocking.

At one point, I went over to check our candy level and found some teenagers sifting through the bowl to find the good stuff, which they were taking liberal helpings of. They scattered as I approached. Even after this pilfering, the bowl was nearly full, and full of good stuff (it hadn’t been too long since we had set some more out). Satisfied that we weren’t going to be short-changing the neighborhood kids, I went back over to eat another hot dog. A few minutes later, we packed up to bring Lennie home for bed, and as we approached, I saw a couple more teenagers hovering around our bowl. I could see in silhouette that they were each taking multiple great big handfuls of candy. I made some noise as we approached and they scattered, and I couldn’t help saying something snide to the effect of “try to leave some candy for the little kids” as I passed. Even having witnessed the greed in silhouette, I thought surely there would be some good candy left to hand out to honest trick-or-treaters, but the bowl was empty save for a few cheapo suckers.

Later, I was stewing over this a bit and found myself thinking things like “what could you possibly do with all that candy anyway,” for surely even as a teenager with unfetterable desires, I would have known that double-handfuls of candy times a few dozen houses would be more than I could be up to glutting myself on in any reasonable amount of time. And from this bit of retrospection, I thought about greed generally and supposed to myself that perhaps part of growing up was learning to balance greed vs. what’s reasonable (though I think this is probably flawed, as there are plenty of grown-ups who can’t seem to do this). And from there I got to thinking about it in terms of empathy and how maybe that was the actual defining characteristic of maturation, for while I was a little personally miffed that there weren’t a couple of sleeves of Whoppers and a Reese’s cup or two left over for me to enjoy, what really bothered me was the fact that any more trick-or-treaters I had to face for the evening would get the filler candy because a bunch of teenagers couldn’t see far enough past their own desires to understand that they’d really be as happy with 5 pieces of my candy as with two dozen at no cost to the pleasure of little kids who would come behind them.

There was no shaking of fists, but I can’t help seeing this series of thought processes as sign number two that I’m getting old. In fact, I wonder if becoming introspective about the nature of greed and maturity isn’t itself a sign of maturity into a different phase of adulthood. Surely sleep deprivation had something to do with my previous fist-shaking, but perhaps a certain general hot-headedness was at play as well; I was assuredly more hot-headed about other things when I was a slightly younger adult. Of course, the most famous of fist-shakers are the real old-timers, and if my brief history to date as an old-timer in training is any indication, I’ll be a righteous fist-shaker indeed. This is fitting enough if the old cliche about starting and ending life in similar states of mind and body is true. As I was born and will die incontinent and toothless, it appears that the beginning and end of my adult life may be book-ended by mirrored behaviors as well.

When we visited my parents for the holidays in early December, they told us that some shadows had appeared on a chest X-ray Mom had gotten during a routine physical. It was too early to confirm just yet, but the probable diagnosis was lung cancer. I flew to California from their house after that visit for a week of work there, and during that week, Mom and Dad confirmed inoperable non-small-cell (the “good” kind) cancer in the lungs, around the bronchi. They engaged a world-class oncologist to build a team to fight the disease, but things were still a little up in the air, and more thorough testing needed to be done. The following Thursday (I was back home), Mom and Dad called to let me know that the cancer had spread to her adrenal glands and one of her hips (she had been hobbled by a case of sciatica that it turns out is actually the cancer).

Friday morning at about 11:30, I was on the way home from Home Depot after buying a bunch of stuff to help spiff up our new house over the holiday break when they called again and suggested that I pull over. The cancer had also spread to Mom’s brain, and they were preparing to admit Mom for brain surgery the following morning to remove the tumor. From zero to brain surgery in two weeks is pretty fast accelleration. Mom and Dad have been dealing with this for just a few more weeks than I’ve been in the loop.

Naturally, I dropped everything and went to Charlotte for the weekend. Mom’s surgery was mostly successful, though the surgeon had to leave some cancer intact around a blood vessel he didn’t want to cut near. They’ll attack that with radiation, which was on the agenda anyway. I stayed through Christmas Eve to try to give Dad some support, and I drove back late in time to get home and spend Christmas with my nuclear family (funny how the nucleus of your family shifts when you partner up and have kids). Mom was able to go home Christmas afternoon, and they’ll kick off radiation and chemotherapy starting in the new year.

No need for commiseration or comment of any kind; I deal with this sort of thing in my own quiet, private way. I’m just posting this to capture the timeline for my future reference.

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Dear the movie “Little Miss Sunshine“:

I fell in love with you the first hour and forty-two minutes I saw you. I’ll never forget the moment we met. Well, maybe I will, so I should record it for posterity. It was on the second leg of a three-leg trip home from a business trip to San Francisco. I wasn’t in the mood to read, and the seat next to me was unoccupied. I mention this latter fact only because we might not have met under other circumstances. You see, the headphone jack in my seat was missing, and I had to bogart the jack in the seat next to me. But enough about how we met. Let’s talk about why I’m so drawn to you.

First, there’s all the literary goodness that I know must be lurking just below your surface that I don’t quite get but know I should. Take for example all the Nietzche stuff and all the mentions of Steve Carell’s character as a Proust scholar. I can name a few works by both of these guys, and I know they’re both major literary figures, but that’s about all I can say about them. Nevertheless, I suspect there’s some complex relationship between their general philosophies that the movie itself probably exposes to those in the know, and the fact that I can even name a couple of works by each gentleman makes me feel as if I’m at the margins of some circle of privileged knowledge. Which makes me feel almost as good as not knowing anything else about these guys makes me feel bad. One feels cooler when he can nod and say “yes, I’ve heard of that” than when he can’t.

“Little Miss Sunshine,” you also showed me a different side of Steve Carell. I loved his deadpan work on “The Daily Show,” and I love his work on “The Office,” but a movie’s worth of those characters would be, well, an Adam Sandler or a Will Ferrell movie, which would have driven me screaming from the airplane. But the more understated character Carell plays in you is more palatable (with, however, darker echoes of his character in “The Office” that keep me in a comfort zone without overloading me with absurdity). Carell also happens to look a little bit like Marcel Proust.

Your grandfather character is charmingly irreverent. Your father character isn’t terribly believable, but caricature of a well-meaning but misguided (by which I mean guided more toward appeasing his own insecurities than his children’s well-being) father is forgivable. Your mother character is fine, generally unmemorable. Your teen character is generally believable (much more extreme but I think sort of kin to me as a teenager), and the little girl character is at once absurd and vaguely believable. My own daughter would probably, left to her own devices (as perhaps she should often be), trounce around the desert in an all red outfit with red cowboy boots. (She went to bed the other night wearing pink cowboy boots, at any rate.)

I love your bleating horn. Had my fellow passengers been awake at 3:00 a.m. in whatever timezone I was in when I watched you, they would have heard me stifling cackles. You got this absolutely right.

You made me think of Faulkner, “Little Miss Sunshine.” In particular, you made me think of “As I Lay Dying” and the quest that ensues therein: the self-interested father who behaves as if he’s interested in the proper care of others; the darkly comedic trek with (spoiler) a dead family member’s body. There may be other correspondences. I hope you’ll forgive me for not seeing them. I can blame only my poor inadequate memory and the decade it’s been since I read “As I Lay Dying.” My sense of failure at having such a poor memory is mitigated somewhat, I must confess, by my renewed sense of insider status at being able to bring up another literary name alongside Nietzche and Proust. That you make me want to learn more about these icons and find ways to tie them all together is a big part of why I like you so much.

Finally, dear movie, you conclude positively. You bring a misfit family together while sending up the whole bizarre Jon-Benet-type pageant scene. I like in you what I like about the story arc of “Napoleon Dynamite.” For all your darkness and weirdness, you’re ultimately validating and triumphant while appealing to the crass old codger in me. I can’t think of a better use of an hour and forty-two minutes of my time on a sleeping plane, and I thank you for your company. I’m sure we’ll meet again.

We’re on the home stretch with the sale of our current house and the purchase of a new one. A week from today, I’ll have all my stuff moved out of my house. Some of it will already be in my new house, and some will be in transit on closing day. I’ve had a month to do repairs requested by the purchasers of my house, among them the repair of a toilet (which doesn’t need repairing) and getting the roof evaluated for possible hail damage. I also had the microwave, which was on recall, repaired at no cost, and I tried my hand at applying bondo and caulk to a water damaged back door (with pretty good results, I think). For the toilet and roof repair, I had contacted Mleeka’s uncle — a contractor — to see if he could refer to me anyone who’d do a good job and not bend me over on cost. His plumber keeps saying he’ll show up but never does, and I went ahead over the weekend and officially gave up on the roofer. The toilet thing is a 1-hour job in the right hands, so I’m not really sweating that, but the roof has been a big unknown.

So I called a random roofer over the weekend to see if he could come do an evaluation on Monday. He said he’d be here bright and early, but he never showed up and never called. We did get a surprise snow flurry at midday, and that’s what he blamed his no-show on when I called him, but it wouldn’t have been an issue if he’d made an appearance in the morning as promised. So there I was, halfway through Monday, with two more workdays before the holidays this week, closing on my unrepaired house on Tuesday next week, and worried from some things the absentee roofer had said that I was going to have to replace my whole roof, a very much unanticipated expense.

Here’s how the rest of the day went:

• Call a bunch of other roofers to try to find somebody who could get out to look at my roof asap.
• Finally find one who can come yesterday afternoon. He calls back to reschedule for this morning. Which is fine, because at least he called to let me know he couldn’t make it, and he was still the fastest responder from among the many roofers I called.
• Sit and wait for the plumber. No show.
• Wait for a call from the power company, who’s supposed to turn on pilot lights at my new house so that I don’t blow the place up trying to do so myself.
• Work.
• Wring hands.
• Grow gray hairs over this roof thing.
• At the end of the workday, have friends show up a week early to help us move. I was going to paint Lennie’s new room yesterday, so they came along and helped.
• After the first coat of paint gets applied, run Lennie and Mleeka home for bed-time, go back to buy more paint, and apply a second coat of paint.
• Get home at midnight.
• Can’t sleep.
• Find email waiting for me from the lender on my current home offering me a rates of 5.875% and 7.25% on the two loans I’m getting on my new house. These rates are lower (by 1.5 percentage points on the smaller loan) than what I’m locked in at for the new house. We’re talking a $36 difference per month, $450 a year, $13K over the lifetime of the loans. Nothing to sneeze at.
• Work for a couple of hours until I’m finally wound down enough to hit the sack at 3:00 a.m.

So far, today’s looking a little better. My roofer showed up and seems to think the roof is ok. There are some nails that have popped up and need to have their holes caulked and their shingles renailed. The boots on the fans need to be replaced. There’s one cracked shingle that’ll need to be replaced. Otherwise, he says the roof looks fine. No hail damage whatsoever. I’ll drop $200 to have this stuff repaired rather than the $4K - $5K I was suddenly confronted with paying to buy somebody else a brand new roof. I paint again tonight (and tomorrow night) and will probably be up late again, but it’ll be with one load lifted, at least. I called the lender on my new home and tasked her with trying to break the locked-in rate and get me a slightly better loan. We’re almost there, almost done with all this hassle.