Borderline Savage

Borderline Savages in Ancient Egypt

There was a rare sighting (Okay, the *only* sighting. . . so far.) of both of your Borderline Savage co-pilots together this weekend. I know some people think that we are one in the same person, but we are actually two people. We have photographic proof:

That's us, with my kids. We went to the members-only preview of the new Lost Egypt exhibit at the Museum of Science. There was a nice staff member at the entrance of the exhibit taking this photos. If she had used a different camera angle, it wouldn't be so obvious that we were in the museum, but what can you do. Nancy's son declined to be photographed, and he definitely didn't have anything to do with this off-kilter photo.

We weren't allowed to take photos inside the exhibit, but we all had fun, and I'd highly recommend it. We had a second grader, a fifth grader, and a high school junior with us, and there was something there for everyone. It was nice to go to the preview because it wasn't too crowded. There are some cool activities that we were able to enjoy without having to wait forever in line. Unlike some other Egyptian exhibits, this wasn't too morbid for my kids, either.

While we were there, we touched a little bit upon why this exhibit was different from most Egyptian exhibits you see in museums, and that was a topic that we discussed further when we got home. Most exhibits about ancient Egypt focus on the art (Indeed, Boston's collection of Egyptian antiquities resides in the Museum of Fine Arts.) or on the history (As in the fabulous collection at the British Museum.). The Museum of Science's exhibit was the first I've seen that really focused on the science behind ancient Egypt: how the giant stone blocks were moved when the pyramids were constructed, how hieroglyphics were decoded, how pottery shards are put back together to form vessels, and how modern diagnostic tools (CT scans, x-rays, forensic facial resconstruction, etc...) can be used to tell us how ancient people looked, lived, and died. Nancy and I both agreed that the ancient Egyptians could have used more dairy in their diets. They seemed to have a lot of issues with their teeth and bones.

One of the best moments (for me) of the day was when we were in the museum lobby having a little refreshment break. The names of some pioneers in the various sciences are engraved in the walls, and Nancy's son was reading some of the names and filling us in on what their contributions to science. When we reached Marie Curie, both Nancy and I said we liked her because she was Polish. Jinx!

I think the other possible highlight of the trip was when we were in the planetarium and my son asked why we had tickets that said Child and Adult for the planetarium show. I told him that we have a family membership to the museum and it admits two adults and three children. His response was to look at Nancy and me and ask,"Are you gay?" Apparently, my efforts to let my kids know that it's okay to love who you want have had the unintended consequence of my eight year old believing that I am romantically involved with *any* adult I know. There could be worse problems.

After the museum, we went to Kelly's Roast Beef, a Boston institution. If you eat roast beef in Boston, you have to eat it at Kelly's.  I'm not even a big fan of roast beef and I love Kelly's. My little guy got a second burst of energy because after lunch, as we were driving Nancy and her son to the station so they could depart for home, he treated us all to an original song called, "Mommy Had a Mohawk." I wish I had recorded it, because he was in fine form. Everyone in the car was laughing, and my daughter laughed so hard that she cried. I have to admit, I was tearing up a bit while I was laughing. We requested a command performance at my dad's birthday dinner later that night, and the little dude couldn't remember it, so that gem has been lost to history.

We had such a great time, I wish I could have kidnapped Nancy and her son and kept them for the weekend. We did a lot of other cool stuff that I wish they could have done with us. Suffice it to say, this was the first time we've been seen in public together but it is most definitely NOT the last time.

Black and White

Sometimes, random things happen, yet happen in way that makes them seem less than random, if that makes sense. Take the past week, for example. I started listening to 70's on 7 on Sirius/XM because I was sad about Donna Summer dying and figured that was my best chance of hearing some of her music on the radio. One of the songs that I heard was "Black and White" by Three Dog Night. I remember hearing this song a lot when I was five years old and taking dance classes on Saturday mornings - I have vivid memories of tap dancing to this song as a little kid, and hearing it still makes me feel a bit like putting my hands on my hips and slapping my right foot on the floor (which is the only part of the tap dance routine I remember).

There are videos of this song that show Three Dog Night singing it, but the sound quality isn't great, so here's a video of the 45 (remember those?) spinning on a turntable, which isn't too visually stimulating, but which features the exact version of the song that I remember.

 

The interesting thing about this song, which I didn't know until I was much older, is that it was written in 1954 (not by anyone in Three Dog Night) to commemorate the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which established that separate was not equal. The lyrics make a lot more sense once you know that. Even if you didn't know the historical roots of the song, it was a perfect early 1970's song, when peace and love and equality were popular musical themes in a country that had spent the last few years being rocked by the Vietnam Conflict, Watergate, and racial unrest, among other things. 

Peace, love, and understanding (Thank you, Elvis Costello!) are things we strive for in my household. It's sometimes jarring when we encounter people who don't feel the same way. This week El Esposo told me that a man who works at a supplier he frequently uses for work supplies told him, "Your wife must be lucky, to have married a hispanic man." I have no idea what that means, and when I asked El Esposo he thought that  the man meant that white women like hispanic men because they are latin lovers. But white women are supposed to like black men, as the stereotype goes, I countered. Then I thought about it and realized that, according to stereotypes, white women like any kind of man other than a white man. What's up with that? Why on earth do people care so much about race?

Why can't we think about race more in terms of "Black and White"? In the lyrics of the song, black and white complement each other, as in, "The ink is black, the page is white, together we learn to read and write." Without one, there is no other. Separately, they accomplish nothing. And what about mixing colors? Black and white mixed make grey. The world is grey. Very little in this world is 100% anything. Even the protagonists in the tv shows and movies we watch have serious flaws - we love them anyway and we keep tuning in to shows with these complex characters.

It's a grey world out there, people. Let's acknowledge and accept the beauty of black and white, and all the many colors in between. To quote Wonder Mike, "I like to say hello to the black, to the white, the red and the brown, the purple and yellow."

You can listen for yourself, Wonder Mike starts the song out:

 

Yeah, it's The Sugarhill Gang with Rapper's Delight - check the audience out. . . very diverse! I don't know if this song broke down barriers, but it certainly blew through some. I'm hoping to see more barriers knocked down.

Dim All the Lights

We lost Donna Summer today. I decided to scrap my planned Throwback Thursday post to remember her. And I'm starting with Dim All the Lights, which shows how strong and powerful her voice was. There are videos with better sound, but I chose one which shows Donna singing live.

 

I wasn't a huge disco fan, and a lot of those songs didn't age well, but Donna Summer made music that was cool even after the heydey of disco. I remember still listening to her music in the late 1980's. People still thought it was good.

Donna Summer was popular before Tipper "I'm Going to Restrict Your 1st Amendment Rights" Gore and her friends who don't believe in the Bill of Rights started the PMRC and attempted to tell Americans what we could and couldn't listen to, getting Congress involved, and slapping those stupid warning stickers on CD's. I'm sure Tipper and friends would have gotten on Donna's case for singing songs that seemed to glorify prostitution, and Donna herself turned to religion later in life and seemed to denounce some of her recording career. But I have to say, when my friends and I were singing songs like "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls" and dancing around, we took these songs as nothing other than fun songs about strong women. It certainly didn't motivate any of us to become prostitutes. I'd like to think that women like Donna Summer and Pat Benatar paved the way for other strong, talented female musicians to make music about women standing up for themselves.

I also have to give Donna Summer credit for aging gracefully. She wasn't one of those former stars who was stuck in the moment of her greatest success, laughably attempting to hold onto the era in which she was at the top. She aged gracefully and matured, and I was always happy to see how she was doing when a tv show or magazine would find her on her farm and interview her.

I have a question for all of you. What was your favorite Donna Summer song? I have a hard time choosing, depending on the mood that I'm in. I haven't mentioned On the Radio, MacArthur Park, I Feel Love, Love to Love You Baby, or many more.

I'm going to leave with another favorite of mine, Last Dance:

 

This was a staple song at the end of the night at school dances when I was in junior high, and it seems a fitting way to end this post.

Goodbye to my Boston-born homegirl, and thanks.

Curses!

Remember that sock I was knitting while I was watching the Stanley Cup playoffs? It's gone. I knitted it twice. The first time, it was too tight, even though I went up a needle size from what the pattern required. The second time, it was fine as far as El Esposo was concerned, but I thought it was too loose and floppy on larger needles. There wasn't a good marriage of pattern, yarn, and needle size.

And let us not forget, this is the sock that sunk the Pittsburgh Penguins and went on to do in the Boston Bruins:

Here's a camera phone shot of the sock (and the Bruins) before they both met their untimely demises.

I wasn't really sure what to do with the yarn after this debacle. El Esposo wants me to knit him socks. I need something portable to knit during my down time and tv watching. But there was some bad juju there, and the last thing I wanted to do was share some of that with Nancy and her beloved New York Rangers, who are doing really, really well in the playoffs.  (I like the Rangers, too. I will always remember going to New York for the World Cup in 1994 and arriving shortly after the Rangers had their ticker tape parade after winning the Stanley Cup that year. It was pretty cool.)

So. . . I worked on some other stuff for a bit, and then started a new pair of socks. Same yarn, different pattern. These are Diagonal Cross-Rib Socks by Ann Budd. They're in the book Favorite Socks, and I'm pretty sure they were also published in an old issue of Interweave Knits.

Here they are, well the start of the first one. I'm about that far along on the second sock now, only on the second sock the cross rib slants in the opposite direction. El Esposo loves them. The pattern is easy to memorize so they are a good project for me right now. The curse also appears to have been lifted, as they have not caused horrible things to occur to any hockey teams. I'm also helping the curse along by avoiding hockey.

I'm hoping to have these socks done in the next week or so, as I have decided to go to camp this summer, Camp Loopy that is. I'm planning my project for the first month of camp, May 27th - June 27th. Is anyone else out there doing this? The first month's challenge is to knit something using at least 400 yards of yarn, using a pattern from a designer who is not from your country. When my yarn arrives I will post more information. I would love it if someone else out there was doing this. I know you can go to Ravelry and find people who are doing this kind of stuff, but I'm not a big fan of knitalongs via the Ravelry boards. I prefer reading blog posts and getting to know the other people, and I get annoyed by people who post and post and post and post incessantly on the Rav boards.

I guess I'm getting curmudgeonly as I age. El Esposo used to laugh at me because I would tell him I wasn't going to do something (quite often, it was watch the end of a movie) because I only have so much time to live my life, and I'd rather do nothing than fill my time with nonsense. He definitely took it as my being grumpy, but he has come around and realized that it's not meant that way. I decided that there are a lot of unpleasant things in this world that you should push yourself to finish, so when there's something that really isn't going to make such a big difference, go ahead and give yourself permission to cut your losses and move on to something more enjoyable.

Clown Town

Jut in time for Throwback Thursday, it's almost Clown Town time again! That was the highlight of my spring when I was a little kid, the next big event after Easter. Clown Town happened every May and it was a sign of summer fun to come.

Clown Town is an annual event run by a local women's group. When I was little, the women's group members had clown costumes that they made themselves, and they ran little carnival games that even preschoolers could win (Okay, everyone who played won.). They also had rides that were hired from a carnival ride operator, most of them oriented toward the under-ten crowd. We don't have any photos of Clown Town from when I was little, but here's a photo from about that time:

I remember Clown Town being at this site, but I think they are a little before my time. Clown Town has sinced moved around the corner from the original site. I did take photos of my kids at Clown Town once I grew up and had kids to bring. Here's the Princess, enjoying a ride when she was two (almost three):

There aren't any photos of the little guy because he was only two or three months old when he went to Clown Town for the first time. I think the kids are getting a bit old for it now, and they haven't been in the past couple of years because they have been with their dad on Clown Town weekend and he won't take them. It's a little different for me now, too. The women who volunteer all wear professionally made clown costumes and there seem to be more rides. It doesn't have the same homegrown feeling to it any longer.

Still, it's nice to see some traditions continue, even if they change somewhat.

Right now, we've just started what has traditionally been an insane time of year in this household. It's dance recital season, so my attention to e-mail and blogs and the like has been very sporadic. But I'll try to keep posting. And, if I can get my hands on photos of me when I had my dance recitals, I will post them on another Throwback Thursday. Don't get too excited in anticipation - I only took dance lessons for a couple of years when I was little, so they're nothing spectacular.

Does anyone out there have any memories of something like Clown Town from where they grew up?

Throwback Thursday - My Female Role Models on 70s TV

(or how Emma Peel made me the woman I am today)

There is a lot of fun to be made at the expense of 70s television heroines but there is also a lot to be said for the influence they had on my generation of women and those who came after. There's a famous encounter that Nichelle Nicholls had with Martin Luther King that epitomizes what I mean. "During the first year of the series, Nichols was tempted to leave the show, as she wanted to pursue a Broadway career; however, a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., changed her mind. She has said that King personally encouraged her to stay on the show, telling her that he was a big fan of the series. He said she "could not give up" because she was playing a vital role model for black children and young women across the country, as well as for other children who would see African Americans appearing as equals.^[5][6][7] It is also often reported that Dr. King added that "Once that door is opened by someone, no one else can close it again." In this role that today seems rather unimportant, she was making a huge difference to the kids who watched.

I know for myself the shows I watched with female characters I admired impacted my view of where I could stand in the world. When I was 3 I watched The Avengers repeats with my grandparents. I so wanted to grow up to be Emma Peel. She was beautiful yes, but also strong, intelligent and didn't always need to be rescued. 

                                             ...and face it girl could rock a cat suit.

She was in fact kind of the brawn of the duo, Steed definitely didnt like to get his hands dirty. I got my first pair of black knee high boots at this age, which I of course called my Emma Peel boots. I have no doubt the obsession I have with boots to this day (and perhaps my penchant for leather as well) started with Emma but perhaps so did my aspirations to be a badass. She was my female ideal as a toddler and frankly she still pretty much is.

I've gone on ad nauseum on my various blogs about my Dad's influence on me but his taste in female characters also played into my view of who I could be as a woman. His favorite show when I was little was "Get Christie Love". I didn't watch it when it was on since I was so little but I made it a point to watch later when they repeated it because my Dad loved her so much.

He definitely liked strong women who could take care of themselves and Christie was one. She was way cooler and more badass than Police Woman (although that show lasted far longer and Angie Dickinson did her bit for tough women there as well). As an adult I discovered how Christie Love was the toned down TV version of Blaxploitation heroines like Coffey and Cleopatra Jones which are two of my favorite films. 

Then we get to the somewhat controversial choice of Charlie's Angels. Yes, it was a T & A fest and probably created more for that than female empowerment, but when I watched Sabrina, Kelly and Kris (or Jill when it was Farrah) I wasn't really thinking about their skimpy clothes or how beautiful they were. I was focused on the fact that they always got the bad guy. 

                                       Yes, I had this lunchbox. It was my most prized possession.

I'm sure we could go on about body image and ideals of beauty when talking about the Angels but honestly when I was on the playground playing Charlie's Angels I wasn't laying around pretending I was in a bikini. I was chasing the boys around with my imaginary gun because they were criminals who needed to be arrested, and yes those boys ran. They knew my justice was swift and unyielding.

There's no denying that things are different now and most of these women don't come off as anything close to empowering to a modern day girl but this was a different time and women were just carving out new places for themselves. A little girl had nothing but possibilities ahead of her and it was important to have these non-traditional women to look to for ideas of who she wanted to be.  Maybe most women still ended up looking to more traditional women for inspiration but for me these women made me want to grow up to be strong, self sufficient while still decidely female and for that I thank them. 

Ten on Tuesday

I really wanted to post today but I couldn't think of a thing to write about. Then I saw Carole's post for Ten on Tuesday and thought, "ok that'll work". 

Here are ten things on my bulletin board:

 

1-  a reminder about the youngest's class trip to see the movie, Chimpanzees tomorrow. Which I will be joining him on.

2- the oldest's invitiation to a Conference for High Schoolers for the Presidential Inauguration. Hopefully he'll be celebrating Obama's re-election.

3- picture blown up from a comic book cover of Supergirl knitting. I've gone back on forth on it possibly being a future tattoo but I think it's a little too cutsie for me, as much as I like it.

4- Domino's Pizza coupons.

5- tutoring class schedule at Fordham for the summer.

6- pictures drawn by the youngest.

7- buttons, mostly from Comic-Con last year: DC Nation, Wonder Woman and and from the Vladimir Todd series. Plus one from a Ravelry meet up a million years ago at NYS Sheep and Wool.

8- Picture of my step-mom and her seeing eye dog.

9- Letter from the youngest's teacher telling us how beautifully he's adjusting to a mainstream classroom.

10- my favorite page from the eldest's Latin Word a Day, "Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur" translated it means, "Anything said in Latin seems profound".

Hey Susan what's on your bulleting board?

 

 

 

Shredded Chipotle Lime Chicken

I was inspired by the Food of the Month Club over at La Cocina de Leslie to try an original recipe with limes, as limes were the Food of the Month for April. I don't feel confident enough to have posted the recipe prior to the deadline for FOTMC, but here's a lime recipe that I created especially for El Esposo. I hope you like it, too.

Shredded Chipotle Lime Chicken (Crock Pot Recipe)

Ingredients

1    TBSP olive oil

1    small yellow onion, chopped

2    limes (You will need the zest from one and the juice from both.)

1    can GOYA chipotles in adobo sauce

1     clove of garlic, minced (or 1/2 tsp minced jarred minced garlic)

    cilantro, to taste

    black pepper, to taste

1/2    tsp. cumin

1/2    tsp. paprika

1/2 cup chicken broth

2     lbs. chicken breast (This is about 4-6 skinless, boneless breasts.)

Instructions

1.    Chop the onion  and cook for about five minutes in a medium sauce pan with the olive oil.

2.    Remove seeds and stems from chipotles and chop. Add chipotles to the onion, along with the cumin, garlic, and paprika. Cook for about four minutes, stirring regularly.

3.    Add chicken broth, cook on medium heat until it boils, then lower heat and simmer for two minutes.

4.    While mixture is simmering, put chicken in crock pot. Add pepper and cilantro to taste. We don't have fresh cilantro in the grocery stores here, so I used dried, though I would recommend fresh if you have it available. Add the zest of one lime, and then the juice of both limes.

5.    Add the onion/chipotle/chicken broth mixture from the sauce pan to the crock pot.  This should be enough to cover the chicken. At this point, the contents of the crock pot will look like this:

6.    Cover and cook in crock pot on low for 1 1/2 hours. I'm a little cautious about making sure chicken has been cooked all the way through, so I flipped the chicken over and cooked it for another 1 1/2 hours.

7.    Remove the chicken from the crock pot and shred it using two forks. Put the chicken back in the crock pot and mix well with the other ingredients. Cook for one hour more.

You can serve the chicken many different ways. The first night, I thought it tasted so good that I didn't want to do too much to get in the way of enjoying the flavors, so I made tacos with corn tortillas. I put a little shredded cheddar cheese under the chicken, but that's all I did. They were better tasting than they looked in this photo:

I think they would have been really nice with some slices of avocado, and El Esposo said that he would like to try the chicken in a burrito next time I make it. This recipe got two thumbs up from him. I trust his input. I tend to like things very, very spicy - it doesn't bother me at all to burn the inside of my mouth with hot spices, but El Esposo likes sweet and slightly spicy, and this recipe is for him. I have to admit, I really loved it, too. When the time came to eat the last of the leftovers, there wasn't enough to make tacos, so I shredded a tortilla, put it in the bottom of a bowl, threw the rest of the chicken on top, and microwaved it, like so:

It was delicious, just like that. This chicken is a little soupy - the liquid does not all cook off - because I like to store and reheat the chicken in a little bit of liquid, to keep it nice and moist, but for this last dish, I didn't have to worry about draining off the liquid before serving the chicken.

I hope you like it! Buen Provecho!

A Loaf of Bread, a Carton of Milk, and a Stick of Butter

Do you recognize that grocery list?

Today's Throwback Thursday idea came to me the other night while El Esposo and I were watching Top Shot. The contestants had a challenge where they had to memorize different types of targets and then shoot only those targets. During the practice, one of the contestants used the great memory device of repeating what he saw out loud, and it worked really well for him at practice even though it looked a little strange. So I told El Esposo that I use that same memory trick, and I've been using it since I was a preschooler. I learned it on Sesame Street, and to this day I remember the grocery list from the cartoon:

 

Pretty impressive, lol! I was actually the first generation of Sesame Street kids. Sesame Street started airing here while my mom was pregnant with my younger brother. She used the twice daily broadcasts of the show to earn some free time to get things done or rest. So, starting at the age of two, I was watching this show twice a day. Yeah, I remember the original cast, and when Snuffleuphagus wasn't even on the show, never mind being invisible to everyone but Big Bird.

The funny thing is that the result of my watching so much Sesame Street was that my mother thought I was a little bit mentally impaired. There were quite a few other kids in our neighborhood who were in my age group, and their moms were all so proud that they were learning their numbers or letters through Sesame Street. Remember, this was the infancy of popular children's educational programming. My mom never had anything to share with the other moms about what I had learned on Sesame Street because I wasn't showing any signs of having learned anything. And then someone gave me a chalkboard, either for Christmas or for my third birthday, and I sat down and wrote the entire alphabet on the chalkboard. It turns out my mom had nothing to fear.

When I was really little, my dad went to school at night to get his MBA. After he graduated, it was my mom's turn to go back to school, for her M.Ed. I am a little fuzzy about exactly when this all occurred, though I know that they had both graduated by the time I was eight. While my mom was in school, she and her other teacher friends had no end of ways to test me and try things out on me. It was actually a fabulous experience - I had no idea that other kids' mothers weren't putting together books and games and other activities to promote learning. That was my mom's homework, and it fit really nicely with my development. Although I do not understand phonics to this day, when I was four my mom worked on putting together a series of phonics booklets, and she used them to teach me to read before I started kindergarten. I don't mean that I was already into Nancy Drew when I went to kindergarten, but I was fully literate about that fat cat who sat on a mat. And I distinctly remember reading The Borrowers on a day home from school with strep throat while I was in first grade. Like my blog co-pilot Nancy, I was the kind of kid who didn't go to bed at bedtime. We stayed up to read.

I'm going to close with a clip that I remember *loving* when I was a kid. It's not about reading, and it's not the kind of thing they show on Sesame Street any more, but the baker falling down the stairs was one of my favorites. (Also, notice the voice. .  . it's the same person who voices Kermit the Frog.)

 

Monthly Questions

1. Name three things you have a fear of:

Falling off the subway platform. My Dad did when I was little, he was fine and I wasn't there but I have a huge fear about it to this day.

Dragonflies. I have no idea why, just that bugs shouldn't be that big.

 The Exorcist. I can sit through the movie with just some issues but running into a photo of her possessed, commericals, previews, or anything with quick shots of it, sends me screaming from the room. Just knowing it's on can give me nightmares.

2. Cheese or fruit pie? 

Cheese! 

Long or short hair? 

Long hair. I try short hair from time to time but in the end I always miss having long hair.

Small town or big city? 

Big city mostly but a really small town could work for me if I found the right one.

Blue cheese or ranch? 

Neither.

White or wheat bread?

Wheat

3. Have you ever won a contest?

 Yup.

4. Would you rather camp out or stay in a Hilton?

 Hilton baby, all the way.

5. Have you ever had surgery?

 Yes, two cesareans, an impacted wisdom tooth, tubal ligation (though not for a dramatic reason like Susan just because I was ready to close up shop) and a gland removed from my breast.

6. Are you a planner or a go with the flow kind of person?

Planner when its something that stresses me out but for most other things I can go with the flow.

7. If you could have anything to eat right now, what would it be?

chocolate lava cake. 

8. What's your favorite type of flower? 

Roses. I know its a little overdone but I do love them. I just prefer them in colors other than red. 

9. Do you remember your dreams? Do you have any?

My dreams are insanely vivid and I do remember them for the most part. They are a Freudian buffet, they always involve what's going on in my life at a given moment. I also have quite a few nightmares where I wake up calling out or fighting. They tend to be about intruders. 

10. What do you miss most about your childhood?

Not much actually. I didn't have a horrible childhood but I had responsibilities even from a young age so it wasn't as carefree as most kids. I also grew up way too fast so I didn't get to enjoy being a kid as long as I should have.