Simultaneously buying and selling a house is the biggest single pain the ass I have ever endured. When you sell, you’re constantly pushed out of your house by people who it turns out look down on the abode you’ve loved for lo these many years. When you’re buying a house, you’re constantly pushing out of their homes people who have loved their homes for lo these many years. It’s a lose-lose situation until you have contracts at both ends of the deal, at which it’s still an utterly bittersweet proposition.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a contract on our house. We did two or three counters and finally agreed upon a deal that got us our minimum acceptable bid. The buyers’ inspection turned up a couple of things that should be within the budget I allotted, so provided they can get financing (on 100%!), the selling part of our pain the ass is over.

The buying part is a whole other story. When we bought our current house, we worked with a realtor who took us around to various houses and tried to convince us that each one was the house we were born to live in. The house we finally bought was one we happened to drive by on our own and think might be ok. It was for sale by owner. We got our realtor to contact the owner and get us in, and we fell madly in love with the house. We’re still madly in love with it. If there were enough yard and the covenants would allow it, we’d just add a room or two and stay here. We looked in some earnest at no fewer than four houses in our current subdivision in hopes that we could stay at least pretty close to where we currently live. But it wasn’t in the cards.

So we made our realtor — the wife of a former boss of mine –  take us to probably 20 houses. We offered on one that we liked quite a bit, but it turned out to have a cracked foundation. A couple of weeks later, we found another we liked on a faux-lakefront property, and we offered on that one contingent upon approval for installing a fence, but it turned out that we couldn’t install a fence.  We finally decided to really blow the hell out of our budget on a brand new house in a nice new subdivision, but as a last resort, we checked out the house pictured above, and it turned out to be totally decent and many thousands of dollars closer to our budget. We seem to have an accepted contract on the house, inspection and some repairs pending. In any case, we’re out on our butts on Nov. 28, so if this third offer doesn’t pan out and you know us, we may be knocking on your door with hat (and furniture and all other earthly possessions) in hand for lodging until we find something different

If you’re buying a house in Knoxville any time soon, here are some tips you may find useful. I’ve learned this the hard way. Phone numbers listed are current at the time of this composition but are of course subject to change. If you live somewhere else, there are probably comparable agencies, and maybe it’ll be useful to you to know that such agencies exist. I had to do a lot of calling around and sleuthing to learn some of this stuff.

Realtors can pull tax data about properties you want to buy that will include information about things like quality of materials used for external construction. On one home I was looking at, the report my realtor gave me listed  construction quality as being below average. My realtor didn’t know what this meant and suggested that I call the registrar of deeds. They didn’t know anything, so I called the vendor of the report my realtor had showed me. They didn’t know what the rubric was or what all fell under the umbrella of construction quality. They did inform me that they get their data from the tax assessor’s office. I called there to learn that the line item in question likely applied to things like vinyl siding and shingle quality and not to things like stud placement or lumber quality, etc. They also listed the quality for the house in question as being a little higher than what my realtor’s report had indicated, and that was odd. In any case, you can call the tax assessor’s office (215-2360) to ask about this sort of information for a given property.

Next, I wanted to find out information about the builder of the house I was looking at. If he’s using below average materials, then I want to see if there are any negative consumer ratings on file for him. It’s not terribly hard to find out who built a house in a subdivision in Knoxville, though it’s an elusive enough bit of information that my realtor couldn’t trace it down easily and I had to do some sleuthing on my own. Luckily, Knoxville has a nifty GIS application with a viewer that lets you look up all kinds of information about property. I went there, did an address search, clicked the parcel icon along the top, and then clicked the “owner card” report in the right-hand pane. This lets you see the general history of the deed, and for houses in subdivisions, you can usually figure that the first or second buyer is the builder. In many cases, the owner name for the builder includes “LLC” or some other corporate marking, so that’s another hint. Now that you have the name and possibly the phone number and address, you can get in touch with the Better Business Bureau (692-1600) and the Knoxville Builder’s Exchange (525-0443) and the state Contractor’s Licensing Board (800-544-7693) to try to get more information.

The Knoxville Builder’s Exchange is a dues-dependent trade organization. They don’t make recommendations and will only confirm membership of a given builder. I imagine they recommend best practices for their builders, but my understanding is that it’s not necessarily a bad sign if a builder isn’t a member (they may just not have wanted to pay dues). I gather you have at least to be a licensed builder to join, and joining means that you’re trying to be a member in good standing of the area builder’s community, though it could also mean that you’ve screwed up somewhere along the line and this is just a way of joining an organization that seems to give you some credibility without necessarily actually requiring anything of you to confer that credibility. So next you’ll want to call the licensing board to make sure the contractor’s license is current. It most likely is, but you’re probably talking about spending tens of thousands of dollars here, so a 5-minute due diligence call is probably worth your time. Finally, you can call or visit the BBB to see if the builder has bothered to become a member and if there are any claims against the builder. When I called, I was told that it’s pretty rare for the BBB to get reports on contractors (these things tend to be sorted out in court), but that if there is one, you can bet it was probably a pretty bad case (then again, some people are just complainers). Still, I figure that if a builder has bothered to join, that’s just one more thing to check on to get some degree of peace of mind.

One of these agencies suggested that I call a builder to ask for references, but I’m not convinced that’s worthwhile. Who points people to their disaster case studies when asked for references?

If you want to take the sleuthing farther than I’ve managed, you could look for other public records pertaining to the property, or you could call the city court (and presumably the county court) to try to find out how you might look up litigation the builder has been a party to.

Believe it or not, this little summary of info is the result of a full morning’s worth of calls and call-backs and web searches and hair-pulling. I document it here for my future benefit and in hopes that some of it is useful to somebody else trying to do diligence before buying a home but just not terribly sure how.

A couple of weeks ago, we began major house-cleaning in preparation for selling our house. We made Mleeka’s siblings come over and do manual labor in exchange for pizza. I pulled an all-nighter to paint the office, only to have to hire a guy to come in and clean up the trim. I spent a day in the rain manually clipping weeds and grass from underneath my fence slats (don’t ever get a shadow-boxed fence if you want to keep it looking tidy without a lot of effort) and scrubbing vinyl siding slats one by one, and I pulled the master toilet up out of the floor to fix some wobbliness (broken flange) only to have to pay a plumber to actually fix the thing because the flange was cemented into the pipe. See to the left the picture I like to call “Stopper or Fuse?” that depicts my having shoved an old tee-shirt into the gaping hole of sewage to prevent us from dying overnight from raw sewage fumes (honestly, we never smelled a thing, and I even out of curiosity got my nose right down in the pipe and took a deep whiff, proving that, as we’ve been saying for years, our shit doesn’t stink).

So, the plumber came, puttered around and killed a bunch of time (luckily, he charged me by the job and not the hour), and eventually fixed my toilet with the help of a big power saw and some shims. He even caulked the toilet for me using some caulk I had on hand, saving me the effort. I was satisfied with the work, if not terribly happy that it cost me $300 (though the guy cut me a break by not charging me for parts, even though he wound up buying a new flange when the one I had gotten wasn’t one he was familiar with). Now flash back for a second to all the hubbub of siblings scrubbing and polishing the house, furniture and appliances and toilets strung out all over the place, a very rainy day (the rainiest I’ve seen since moving to Knoxville), and fatigue on my part. I failed to notice that the plumber had spilled some purple stuff on the floor behind the toilet and in the middle of the kitchen floor. When I did notice it a day or two later, I figured it was the sort of thing that’d come up and didn’t attend to it immediately. And when I did try to clean it up, it wouldn’t budge.

I called the plumber’s office, which informed me that it was PVC primer, which doesn’t come up (why in holy heck do they make it purple, then? the plumber’s office told me that there’s also a clear variety!). They’ve said they’ll fix me up, they’re supposed to have an area manager (it’s a big service company and not a three-guy shop or anything) come out this week, and have generally been pretty responsive. But I’ve been dreading having to get a new floor, even at somebody else’s expense, while trying to sell my house. My dad was in this weekend, and he cleans stuff for a living, so he knows lots of tricks, and even his fancy gadgets and chemicals wouldn’t get the stuff up.

But today, the day of an open house during which we sure hoped to provoke an offer on our house, I tried one last thing to clean the junk up. And I triumphed (partially). The trick was using SoftScrub with a Ceramabryte scrubbing pad and plenty of elbow grease. I’ve briefly and visually documented the cleaning experience here (uh, it’s not riveting or anything). This worked in the kitchen but not in the bathroom. The floors in the two rooms are different, and my guess is that the finish on the bathroom floor is either sturdier to begin with or just less worn-down, the area behind the toilet not being a terribly high-traffic area and the affected spot in the kitchen one of the highest-trafficked spots in the house. Before you try anything like this yourself, beware that it actually seems to remove the finish from the floor. So instead of purple spots, I’ve got slightly duller spots on my kitchen floor. They’re hard to notice unless you know what you’re looking for, and I imagine there’s a wax or substance of some sort that folk less savage than I am treat their vinyl floors with routinely anyway, and that’d probably take care of it.

Anyway, I can’t say enough about how pleased I am with SoftScrub and Ceramabryte, which have saved me a lot of hassle and possibly a bit of money.

These are second perhaps only to the Mr. Clean magic eraser, the existence and magnifigence of which makes me wish that I were some sort of celebrity so that I could do a gratis endorsement because this invention has saved me at least a grand in painting and generally just leaves me in awe.

Tonight, we went once again to the house we’ve put an offer on, to get a look at the attic that we were previously unable to get into. The attic has precious little storage space, but that’s not so bad because the basement has plenty of room to be built into family space and to include a big storage room that would comfortably hold more than my current attic will hold. Our brother-in-law came along with us tonight to look around. He worked for a while as a supervisor for our contractor uncle, so he knows better than we do what sorts of major boo-boos to look for. Unfortunately, as we were walking around out back after looking at the basement, he noticed a large crack in the foundation that had escaped our attention. If I recall correctly (I was too freaked out to remember to snap a picture), it ran vertically for maybe four feet and then shifted over a couple of inches and ran vertically again for another foot or two. In other words, it wasn’t just cracked mortar (which a stairstep pattern might have indicated) but was evidence of cracked cinderblocks. We’ve already turned away from one house because it had a “repaired” cracked foundation. You just have to wonder how one can really repair such a fundamental problem confidently. If you know a local structural engineer who works pro bono, let me know.

It’s going to be very hard to turn away from this house. I tried to go to bed two hours ago but can’t sleep because my head’s spinning over this. I glanced over around 50 houses in online listings tonight and found none that measure up to this one. We’ve got a question in to the owner’s realtor about the history of the crack (she says she didn’t know about it). I guess it’s possible that we could amend our offer to require a foundation assessment and repair, but I’m awfully skittish about purchasing something with this type of flaw, both because it freaks me out in the short term and because it’s the sort of thing you have to disclose when trying to sell in the long term. So we’ll see.

In selling news, we had people look at our house on Friday and Saturday. I can’t really express what a raging pain in the ass selling your house is. First, you have to actually do a thorough cleaning to pretend to potential buyers that you’ve lived the last X years like a civilized human being who wouldn’t dream of, for example, just squirting a big circle of dish soap around a bunch of ants to corral them rather than addressing the actual problem (e.g. mopping the floor to eradicate whatever invisible food trail brought them in to begin with). Then, once you’ve put on this charade of having lived a little less like a savage than you’ve actually lived, you have to actually continue to live less like a savage because you could get the call at any minute that somebody wants to come poke through your underwear drawer and turn their nose up at your beloved abode in the next few hours. This means making your bed (a stupid practice if ever there was one), vacuuming daily, worrying about what window your two-year-old has smudged or what food she’s smeared on her kitchen chair, dusting — get this — dusting your fucking plants (!), wishing you had never used your kitchen sink because the water that naturally spashes from time to time has caused the wallpaper the previous owners foolishly installed to curl up a little (shhh, don’t tell anybody), having to call the plumber who spilled some purple gunk that’s impervious to all cleaning materials right in the middle of your kitchen floor to ask him for the phone number of the witch who knows a hoodoo spell to get this crap up, actually having your vacuum cleaner break (I think a pin or sprocket fell out of the power switch, which now waggles back and forth loosely rather than toggling with a click) and writing a baleful and near-grovelling note to Eureka asking for some kind of help because you’re losing hair over how much money you’re already hemorrhaging and you really don’t want to blow another $100 on a new vacuum cleaner when you just bought this one a couple of months ago, burning through about seventeen very large candles a week so that people don’t have to smell your own dead skin or that of your pets (until you move out — muwhwhaahahaa), and finding excuses not to spend much time living in the home you love anymore because you for damned sure can’t leave behind any sign that any human being currently lives or ever has lived in your home.

Ahem, so we had two viewings this weekend and were on alert for a possible third one. The first viewers thought our home overpriced for the lack of upgrades, compared to the other one-story homes in our subdivision. The only other one that’s not low-balling does have wood floors, but it’s also got powerlines sparking (I imagine) in the back yard and is very nearly under the weaving road that goes by our subdivision. Plus I hear it’s haunted. They don’t call it the old Marswell place for nothing. This is my insincere but embittered wish that if the first viewers buy that home, some careless driver finds himself crashing through their living room on their first day in their fabulous upgraded new home (it has laminate flooring throughout). (We have a fence and a better yard, for criminy’s sake.) The second viewers had a more favorable opinion of our house but were early in the home-buying process. The possible viewing today never materialized, and we lived like higher mammals and burned candles and stood stock-still and barefoot on our tip-toes in one spot all day and locked our child in a stain-resistant box for no good reason at all. Our realtor offered this evening to go ahead and do an open house on Sunday. So if you’re in the market, ignore that stuff I said about living like savages (is it too late to claim artistic license?) and come on by. If you’re not in the market but are curious about my living circumstances, I guess you can show, though I hope you won’t dillute the open house and will bring an interested friend, at least.

With the pending baby comes a need for more space to put our family in. Pictured here is the house we’re currently living in and need to sell before we can move on. It’s about 1620 square feet with (at least) the following amenities:

• fenced back yard
• extra-wide garage
• neighborhood pool and playground
• big-ass kitchen that we’re really going to miss
• big-ass living room with vaulted ceiling that we’re really going to miss
• big master bedroom with cavernous walk-in closet and whirlpool tub
• vaulted ceiling in one of the two smaller bedrooms (both of which are about 11×13, which isn’t terribly small)
• bay-window in the dining nook (no formal dining room, though)
• gas logs
• pretty good attic space

When we’ve thought in the past about what we’d like in a new home, we’ve agreed that we wished we could have our current house with an extra room or two. It has a superb layout, a kitchen that’s almost too big (because all the counter space makes it easy to leave dishes out unwashed for days at a time), a living room that makes you feel like you’re not in a room at all, a very comfy master with more closet space than I’ve seen in a home less than $400K, and two other perfectly nice, above average (I’m guessing) sized bedrooms. Who could ask for anything more? (Err, besides us, as we’re clearly asking for more square footage.)

So, if you happen to need a nice little house or know of someone who does, I hope you’ll let me know and set up an appointment to swing by for a look.

A few months ago, when we started our vegetarian kick, we got a Moosewood cookbook at the suggestion of a veggie friend. The Moosewood Collective is a group of people who’ve run a veggie-friendly restaurant in New York for two or three decades. They’ve published a number of cookbooks sporting recipes they prepare in their restaurant, and we settled on Simple Suppers, which provides a decent variety of general veggie options, all designed to be fairly simple to prepare. After the introduction, they publish about a dozen pasta recipes, followed by a dozen sautes and curries. Next come bean and tofu dishes, followed by egg dishes, main dish grains, main dish salads, soups, sandwiches and other things of that ilk, fish, side grains, side dishes, and side salads. Then come dressings, seasonings, condiments, sauces, and finally desserts. The cookbook wraps up with some short guides to keeping an adequately stocked pantry and some tools and techniques.

As someone who was pretty skeptical about being able to find vegetarian recipes that were tasty (I came into this whole veggie thing not crazy about some curries and coconut milk, though I’ve since had a change of heart) and not a Byzantine undertaking to prepare, I’ve found this cookbook to be an eye-opener. In a good way. Of the half  dozen or so recipes we’ve tried so far, we’ve liked most of them a whole lot and are a little dubious about only one. All but the one are things we’d definitely eat again. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call some of the recipes simple, they’ve all been manageable enough, though they’ve all also taken me more time and effort to prepare than the book suggests. This is probably user error, though there may be a dash (sorry, couldn’t resist) of underzealous estimating by authors who do these preparations many times a day. In any case, the recipes are doable and have so far been a hit among those I’ve served them to.

Now, on to a few of the recipes. Let’s talk cauliflower. In the last month, I’ve made two dishes from the book that relied heavily on cauliflower. The first was “roasted vegetable curry” (page 53). I was serving for four vegetarians, two omnivores (so it was a side for them), and two kids (who don’t eat much). The recipe is designed to serve four, but because I knew we were a hungry bunch and I wanted there to be leftovers, I tripled the recipe rather than simply doubling it. We ate just about every morsel, leaving one small portion for the next day. It was heaps and heaps of food, so the shortage is a reflection of how yummy it was and not of portion size deficiencies. I don’t know what all fair use will allow me to publish about the recipe; here’s hoping I don’t overstep. You roast some cubed sweet potatoes, cauliflower, and chopped onion for a half hour or so. Then you pour a curry sauce (coconut milk, diced tomatoes, ginger root, and curry powder or garam masala) over it and roast for a few more minutes. I served it over basmati rice, and it was, as noted, a big hit. Prep time was longer than advertised for me, partially because I have a lousy grater and ginger root isn’t the easiest thing to grate anyway.

Next up in the cauliflower department was the dinner I cooked (on a whim, thumbing through the cookbook and finding a recipe for which I happened to have the ingredients) tonight. Flip to page 120 for “curried cauliflower and chickpea soup.” For this one, you make a soup of chickpeas, cauliflower, onion, curry powder, water or broth, ginger root, and diced tomatoes. Even though it’s billed as a soup, I served it over rice, and we loved it. The recipe recommends serving a chutney with the soup, and I think that might have added a little tang that would have been good for the recipe, which nevertheless stands well enough on its own. We’ll be eating both this and the roasted veggie curry again. This one also has the added benefit of being pretty darned low-fat (I’d guess), a can of chickpeas weighing in at 6.5 grams of fat (and chickpeas are by no means the foundation of the soup) and the only other fat I can account for being the little bit of oil you cook the onions in.

A few weeks ago, I made a tofu and mushroom marsala from the book for a covered dish affair. Here I have to correct my previous statement about these recipes all being things I’d eat again. I liked this one well enough, but it’s not great for leftovers, and who wants to cook a dinner that’s good for only one meal? I also found the portion sizing on this one to be way off. The recipe claims to serve four, but it should be upped to 6 or 8. This was a fortuitous thing for this outing, as the host made the only other main dish, and we’d've all had room left in our tummies without my contribution. The other thing that bothered me about this one was that though I think it’s supposed to be a plated dish, people kept calling it soup (even though after doubling the recipie and putting a whole bottle of wine in it, I was still a little short on the proposed liquid amount). Again, possibly user error here. It’s something I might make again after halving the recipe to avoid leftovers, but I’d eat one of the cauliflower dishes first any day. That said, one of my fellow cover-dishers said (and not in the backhanded way it could have been said) that it was the best tofu dish she had ever had.

Next in the lineup is the “roasted ratatouille” (page 50), which is accompanied by a gorgeous picture of the dish, which is what made me want to fix it in the first place (there should be a federal law that all recipes in books should have beautiful representative pictures). It’s basically roasted eggplant, zucchini, onions, tomatoes, red or yellow peppers, and garlic, served over the pasta or grain of your choice. We thought this was really tasty and nice to look at. Next time, though, we’ll probably see if we can come up with a sauce to give it a little more zip. But I think there is a next time in the future of this recipe.

I’ve made a couple more of the recipes, but I’m running out of steam here (as probably are you). There are a number of others that I’m ready to queue up (navajo stew, sesame tofu with spinach, and shortcut chili top among them). If you’re in the market for a veggie-friendly cookbook, I’d say this one’s probably a pretty good bet. The recipes aren’t all quite simple, but neither are they terribly difficult, and your mileage no doubt varies with relation to how fast you are with a knife. Portion size seems a little uneven so far, but in my experience, portion sizes are never understimated, so who can really complain? I do wish there were more recipes (the egg and fish ones don’t particularly interest me at a glance, for example), but then, Moosewood publishes a number of cookbooks, so the lack of variety in this case is a function primarily of my frugality. At $30-plus, I think this cookbook has already returned on the investment, but it’ll have to return some more (and it no doubt will) before I’m ready to drop another $30-plus for a little more variety.

The style of this post is pretty self-indulgent and maybe not so fun for anybody but me. If you want to know the basic content but don’t want to slog through the prose (thereby breaking my heart), here are the high points:

• Our gestating child is larger than a lime and has a heart that beats at around 155 beats per minute.
• I thought I was getting fatter again, but I weighed in at 188 today — just 8 pounds above my low for the last year (and on the high end of my average for the last 6 or so months) and really not too shabby given that I weighed 240 a year ago, have been eating like a hog lately, and haven’t been hitting the gym.
• My daughter is amazing, and we should probably go ahead and get her a helmet to prevent an ear amputation because Van Gogh’s got nothing on her. If you disagree, I invite you to go straight to Hell without passing Go.

A few years ago, on some blog I wrote on (whether it was this one or another one I occasionally posted to I don’t remember), I developed the habit for some time of writing posts with comma-separated titles. I’d link a couple of fairly divergent topics in some clever and probably poignant way and put a title at the top that spoke to each of the topics in some literal way but that was a sort of hook into the post because it linked the two topics in a simple, interesting way, sort of the way that if you tell somebody that you love peanut-butter-and-bologna sandwiches, their curiosity will be piqued and they’ll comment rather than just thinking “oh” and moving on (as they would if you told them you liked PB and J). Or that’s my impression of how it came off, at least.

Tonight’s post contains no such cleverness. I just have three things I want to write about.

First, 155. We had a doctor’s appointment for the pending baby on Friday. I went along because it was a likelihood that we’d get to hear the heartbeat. The new little squirt’s ticker registered 155 beats per minute, which I gather is pretty much normal. In other pending baby news, we can actually feel the baby moving around some now. By this time with Lennie, Mleeka could feel her moving internally, but it was some time later before I could feel any external movement. Last night, I was able to feel some vertical rippling movements and the occasional thump on Mleeka’s belly. (She assures me she wasn’t just trying to pass gas off as the baby.) (Go ahead and groan at the pun; it won’t hurt my feelings.) Tonight, we got a flashlight out to see if the baby was sensitive to light, and the baby seemed to respond. We tried to get Lennie involved in shining the light, but she lost interest quickly. Mleeka’s 15 weeks along now, and we read in our weekly status update from Babys R Us’s online service that the kid’s legs are now longer than its arms and that it’s got eyelids but they’re fused shut. That’s all I remember from the update. They’ve stopped for the time being telling us what size the baby is, but I think it’s more or less lime-sized still (or like a lime with arms and legs, I’d guess). Before too long, they’ll report that it’s the size of a mango and then of a cantaloupe. Early on, it was a lentil. They really like comparing gestating babies to food, which if you think about it too much is a little gross (couldn’t we go with ping-pong ball, golf ball, raquetball, wiffle ball, shot put, softball, volleyball, soccer ball, and football [though then I suppose you're comparing the baby to objects that we hit or kick, and that's only slightly less distrubing than comparing it to things we eat]? I suppose those sizes aren’t as univerally known, though it can also be said that there can be a wide variety of sizes among lemons, and one person might think of key limes and another of regular old slightly-smaller-than-most-lemons-sized limes). At our doctor’s appointment in about four weeks, we’ll get to do the big ultrasound and (with any luck) find out what the baby’s sex is. Mleeka sort of doesn’t want to find out, but there’s no way I’m not finding out. I’ve offered to find out and just not tell her, but she’s not so keen on that. So in four weeks, we’ll be able to start thinking in earnest about names. I’ve pretty much refused to date to do much real diligence on that front, both because we can’t see to agree on any names and because if we wait until we know the sex of the baby, we have to do half the work. If Mleeka insists on not learning the baby’s sex, I’ve got a backup plan: We’ll name the baby in advance and, regardless of its actual sex, we’ll raise it as whatever sex its name is (sort of the way Joe Lieberman is a Republican but calls himself a Democrat).

A quick baby break here for the 188 referenced in this post’s title. This is one of those things that I record for my own memory, and you can probably skip it if you don’t care about my fatty tissue. (Side note: When I was in college, I took a Southern Lit course during which we read excerpts from the journals of some 18th/19th-century guy who wrote on a daily basis about “doing his dance.” I guess we had all glossed over this as some weird anachronism or perhaps as a literal statement — those old folk being kind of weird and prone to dance — but our professor asked us if we knew what he was referring to and colored a bright red — being himself something of a dainty and reserved and proper Southern man — when someone posited that the gentleman was documenting his masturbation. As it turns out, his euphemism was for taking a dump, and our professor pointed out that in those days of widespread gastrointestinal horrors and generally poor accurate health awareness, it was important to document such things, because you’d kind of want to know if you’d gone a week or two without a BM. All that in mind, I’d like to take a moment to tell those of you reading my blog in textbooks in 200 years that when I talk about my fatty tissue, it’s no euphemism — I mean quite literally the yellow masses of globular fat that have accumulated in mostly my gut. Also, as noted already, I just document this stuff so I can remember my own history; this seems related to the old dancing-his-little-dance gentleman’s impulse and probably speaks in a more general way to what’s behind the impulse of casual bloggers like myself to document anything about our lives, except that we know that others are reading [really -- I have a stats tool that proves it].) If you made it to this point, you’re a real trooper and I really don’t deserve you as a reader. So, now to the point. I’ve had trouble lately telling what my physical health was like. Until this morning, I hadn’t been to the gym in a month or two for various reasons, not the least of which is that Lennie now arises right in the middle of what used to be prime gym time for me and the fact that I just haven’t been able to get my butt out of bed at 5:00 a.m. to get to the gym and get back in time to be around for when Lennie wakes up. This week, I was telling Mleeka that I was having trouble telling whether I was a fat slob again or whether I was at least maintaining [cross reference the last paragraph here]. My arms, for example, remain as cut [which isn't terribly cut, honestly] as they’ve ever been, and I have some lines on my abdomen that seem not characteristic of a fat slob. At the same time, I have a little muffin-top [more frontal than lateral] that makes me wonder if I’m not heading back down the road to fat-slobville. Plus I’ve been eating like there’s no tomorrow. So I was expecting, after having weighed as little in the last year as 180, to weigh in at around 200 again. But after a gruelling workout that left me sort of physically ill, I measured — you guessed it — 188. Not a bad showing, really. If you made it this far, you’re not only a real trooper, but you probably deserve at least a gold star and probably a dollar and quite possibly a purple heart.

Now on to my daughter the prodigy. When Lennie was very young and just getting started out drawing, Mleeka boasted about how good an artist she was. Apparently, most kids that age tended just to scribble in one place. Lennie would cover an entire page. I wasn’t alone in our family in thinking that Mleeka was just being an over-proud Mom. More recently, I’ve begun to have a better appreciation for Lennie’s art, though. Note exhibit A to the left. The careful observer will note three smiley faces, a red, a yellow, and an orange (the yellow and orange more obvious than the red). She draws this sort of figure consistently now, often placing eyes and mouth with great precision and in such a way (probably by accident, I’ll admit) that they approximate the view of a face from an angle. You really don’t get the full effect from these blunt watercolors that you can get from a picture drawn in thin marker lines. The other day, she was consistently drawing a wheeled vehicle. We had read a story about a girl named Lisa who rides bikes, skateboards, scooters, etc., and Lennie drew what amounted to a wheel with a sort of amorphous frame and said “Lisa scooter.” Then she drew it again, recognizably similar to the first figure. It was a willful representation of something. She holds her markers and pens in a more “correct” way than plenty of adults, and even when holding them from the top of the implement as she sometimes does, she has absurdly good control of her drawing.

Note here exhibit B. I forget the significance of the bottom picture, but the top picture contains squiggles drawn with a control that would probably defy even my abilities (not that my abilities are that great, but I’m 12 times Lennie’s age, so let’s give her some leeway). So, with these latest drawings, I begin to rethink my skepticism with respect to her artistic talents, and I’m thinking we need to get her into an art class as soon as possible so that we can nurture an apparent talent.

In other news, she goes to sleep in her own bed now without a great deal of coaxing. For several weeks, we were putting her down in her bed, but the routine often involved our snuggling her for as much as an hour after finishing books, and that quickly turned into a big drain. Eventually, we started tucking her in and finding various ways to convince her that we’d check on her later. And it worked. She sometimes calls plaintively for one or the other of us after we tuck her in. If it goes on for a couple of minutes, the desired parent will run in and kiss her goodnight, and if she quits, she goes to sleep. Either way, we have her in bed by 8:30 most nights without spending an hour or more snuggling her to sleep. It was the successful initiation of this behavior that allowed her to spend her first night away from home on Thursday. It’s been a good break for Mleeka and me during this time of preparation for another hard couple of years with a very young child, and it’s good for Lennie’s development as well.

And that’s it for this installment of a slice of my mundane life. If you read the whole thing, I officially owe you a Congressional Medal of Honor when I get elected to Congress.

From a late-night IRC conversation with a Flock staffer and a Flock community member. It’s sort of a running joke that, a Southerner, I partake of all the bad habits and am characterized by all the provincialisms generally associated with the South.

daryl: (sorry, it’s late here and I’m working on a blog post entitled “My complex relationship with meat,” so it’s fitting that I should be in a weird mindframe
yosh: mmmmmmmeat
daryl: yosh, I’m occasionally eating meat again
daryl: we ran out of vegetables in Tennessee
daryl: except for tobacco, that is, and it tastes really bad
yosh: well, TN really didn’t have that many
yosh: daryl: tobacco can be good with the right sauce
daryl: like a durian sauce?
yosh: durian-natto sauce
daryl: heh
daryl: actually, I’m mainly eating meat b/c my newly pregnant wife craves it and I’m tired of cooking two meals a night
yosh: heh
[redacted]: daryl: you actually eat tabacco?
daryl: [redacted], it’s a staple in Tennessee
daryl: that and buggering cows
daryl: (no, I don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: (though I am married to my sister, who is also my grandmother and my third cousin six times removed; and my father)
yosh: daryl is his own grandpa
daryl: and grandma
daryl: I’m also my own sandwich
daryl: (my other grandpa having mated with a tobacco plant, that is)
[redacted]: daryl: good (you don’t eat tobacco)
daryl: opium, now that’s a different story

A few years ago, I cooked a couple of big steaks. Impressed with their heft and the real estate they took up on our plates, I said “now that’s an assload of meat.” “Is it, now?” or something to that effect, Mleeka answered, coyly inviting further comment. “Yeah, I get that all the time,” I followed up. Pregnant pause. “So you’re telling me that you get an assload of meat all the time, huh?” Ah, the crumpling feeling of having a double entendre intended to speak to the substantial girth, length, weight, and general power and desirability of your manly parts turned against you in such a way that it (according to the old sensibilities about manliness and accepted male sexual tendencies) is at utter odds with what you were (with an ironic PC wink, of course) going for.

I don’t have a smooth transition here. I just like that story, and it turns out that my topic tonight is once again meat, and given the title I had dreamed up for this post before thinking of incorporating the anecdote, it seemed an appropriate intro, if one that it turns out I don’t have a smooth transition out of. File your complaints with the management and keep holding your breath for my book deal; it’s looking like it’ll be a while yet in coming. Ahem.

So back at the end of March, I posted about leaving meat behind, at least temporarily. At the time, I was just tired of cooking meat, of looking at the “glistening cold red slabs of flesh” (band name, anyone?). Meat didn’t appeal to me. For several months, I didn’t eat meat, or cook it. But then we had a few family gatherings at which standard cookout fare was more or less expected, and I’m certainly not one to push my eating habits on others. So I grilled frozen pre-fab patties, and it didn’t bother me (they’re not glistening, after all). Then I knocked Mleeka up. And she couldn’t eat much of anything because the thought of eating anything made her want to hurl up the very soles of her feet. But she occasionally craved some morsel or another of meat. So I started cooking meat for her and Lennie from time to time, but stuck to tofu or beans myself, not as a matter of principle but merely because the meat didn’t appeal to me. It was much the same as the way I sometimes cook corn but often don’t partake of it myself because it just doesn’t appeal to me.

I don’t remember the precise sequence of events, but some time recently, I cooked some (baked) barbecued chicken for Mleeka and Lennie, and I went ahead and ate some too because I didn’t want to cook something separate for myself, and sugar snap peas and a biscuit alone just weren’t going to cut it for me. At around the same time, we stopped at Wendy’s after Lennie’s dental surgery, and rather than stop at a second place for my meal (Mleeka was craving a Wendy’s burger and a frosty), I just went ahead and got a burger. And because I’m not dogmatic about not eating meat, it didn’t bother me. I enjoyed my Wendy’s hamburger (thin as it was) and my beef tallow fries. Last night, Mleeka was craving Chinese (she described a dream in which we had gone to a Chinese place and she was waiting in line or for takeout or something, and she finally got to the buffet and was craving mashed potatoes and mac and cheese, which happened to be on the buffet in addition to piles of wonderful Chinese food), and so we went to the buffet (which sadly didn’t have mashed potatoes or mac and cheese). And I partook of great heaping piles of chicken meat that I enjoyed (though my GI tract paid the price for all the grease today and I think I would have liked the flavors applied to tofu just as much). Both yesterday and today, I consumed tube steaks. It was a weenie fest, to be sure.

Here let me break for a stupid pun that just came to mind that seems entirely relevant. You’ve heard of the Beatitudes, no doubt. (After googling Beatitudes, I’ve discovered that my pun is not only stupid but also incorrect, as you’ll see momentarily.) I was thinking that the Beatitudes were the part of the scripture where you have all the “there’s a time for this, and a time for that, a time for this, and a time for that.” (Here’s where I was wrong — it’s the part the Monty Python crew lampooned with “Blessed are the cheesemakers” — an entirely different set of repetitive phrases). And but so given my recent attitude toward meat, I was thinking it was appropriate to say that there’s a time for chicken, a time for tofu, no time for beef, a time for fish, etc. The name of this little litany? The meatitudes. If you were camped out in my head and could hear the running internal monologue, you’d be laughing, I promise. It’s hard to capture the genius in print.

Ahem. So it seems that I have an informal and actually uncharted meat matrix that governs what I’m happy about eating of late. It’s not a set of rules but is more like a set of prejudices I’ve begun to notice emerging. And it seems so far to go something like this:

• I don’t really want beef if I’ve had anything to do with its preparation or if it’s recognizable as something I might have prepared (my patties are six times the width of a Wendy’s patty, so a Wendy’s patty isn’t recognizable as something I’ve made, and it’s dubious that it’s recognizable as meat). I don’t object to it, but I sure don’t want it.
• I’m ok with chicken sometimes, preferably white meat and preferably in small chunks (a la the Chinese buffet). I don’t really want it if I’ve had to prepare it myself, but if it’s a matter of eating a few bites of chicken or having just some peas and a biscuit, I’ll probably eat some chicken if there’s no fake chicken around.
• If there’s a veggie option available, I’ll generally choose it. Meat is something of a last resort.
• Although I’m not dogmatic about not eating meat, I feel like a little bit of a failure if I do eat it because I have the weird sense that I’m failing to live up to some commitment I made, so in addition to my general lack of desire to consume meat, I have an additional incentive to avoid it if possible, though it doesn’t outweigh practical considerations like not wanting to make two left turns across a busy street at a peak traffic time to go to two drive-through restaurants for separate dinners or not wanting to prepare two dinners each night.
• Again, this all seems to be a matter of transitory preference rather than of, say, ethics. I just generally don’t want much meat lately, much as I usually don’t want corn, though sometimes it (corn) appeals to me.
• For corn, I’ll just omit the dish if it doesn’t appeal to me; for meat, I feel compelled to find a substitution, preferably highish in protein.

There you have it, the beginnings of an understanding of my complex relationship with meat. Where it’ll go from here, who knows? I’ve got a yummy curried veggie dish planned for Labor Day, I know, and I’ve got a couple more veggie dishes I’m just dying to make soon. I gather meat will remain a satellite ingredient in my diet. It’ll be like that distant relative you don’t really care to correspond with but with whom you must occasionally maintain polite contact.

A few days ago, I blogged about the fact that I had been eating women’s protein bars without knowing it. Empirical as I am, I thought that I should perform an experiment to determine the fitness of these LUNA bars for my consumption. Naturally, I set up a proper experiment. In the photos pictured here, you can see me eating both a feminine LUNA bar and a manly CLIF bar (which I take to be the male protein bar produced by the CLIF company, which happens also to produce the LUNA bar). I’ve drawn my own conclusions as to which protein bar is more suited to my constitution, and I’ll afford you the opportunity to form your own opinion as to which is best for your constitution. It seems clear from the photographic evidence, however, that the LUNA bar is indeed more feminine and the CLIF bar more masculine.