Spiffy

I finally thought of a New Year's resolution I think I can keep. Whenever someone takes my picture this year, I'm gonna pose with abandon the way my grandfather and great-uncle are doing here. I don't think this was even a particularly special occasion, just a random day when they looked good in their Ricky Ricardo-style trousers and they knew it.
In fact, while going through tons of family pictures for genealogy research, I noticed that folks on both sides of my family loved to strike a pose when the camera turned their way. I'll have to post at least one picture of my grandmother and great aunt, who always looked ready to dance and usually had one elbow cocked out or at least one hand on a hip. I'll follow their lead instead of marking my presence on earth as a floating head, trying to hide behind my sons.
Getting your picture made was a rarer occurrence then. Boy, did they know how to celebrate it.

Keep your head down

In the aftermath of Bloody Monday yesterday, I am posting the best quote I've heard in a long time, as reported by my bro-in-law who works for a major international corporation.

The word around the office is, "Employed is the new promoted."

Why I hate the Cumberland Plateau

In today’s episode, we will analyze a growing geographic prejudice against the area known as “The Plateau.”
There is, in fact, a group called Haters of the Cumberland Plateau that largely consists of me and my three sons, though the 5-year-old is only an honorary member with no voting privileges.
We started the club because the Cumberland Plateau gets all our snow, and it’s just not fair. I can’t watch TV news while the twins are conscious because if they see one tiny snowflake on the five-day forecast, they think it’s time to get the “sleds” out.
Not real sleds, of course. We have those plastic disks that slide across the snow because we don’t get enough snow to really go sledding. It’s a shame, too, because Middle Tennessee has all these sweet hills.
Technology hasn’t helped us love The Plateau, either, since folks who live there are having too much fun sending digital photos of what should have been our snow to the Nashville TV weathercasters like some kind of high-tech ransom notes.
Then we end up with cold rain while The Plateau gets big, fluffy drifts, and I have to deal with questions like these before breakfast: Where is The Plateau? Why did they get all the snow? Can we move there? Why do we have to be so close to the equator? Can you check my math homework?
To paraphrase 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks’s comments about the Soviets, I am sick and tired of hearing about how much snow they’re gonna get on the Plateau. Their time is done. It’s our time!
The goal of the Plateau Haters is simple: It’s for the children. Our kids need a really decent snow, significant enough that their dad has no choice but to stay home from work. Bless their hearts; they’re so optimistic when the flurries start flying. At daybreak, they’re planning snowmen and snow angels and snowball fights and snow forts, even though the grass still peeks out because we only got “a dusting.”
Once when we got about a half-inch, Henry found a one-square-foot patch of ice in a dip on the driveway. The boys looked so pitifully happy taking turns, sliding around. “Look, Mom, we’re skating!”
I should be careful what I wish for, since I end up spending the rest of the day counting gloves and forging through the wet, muddy clothes cast off during those fleeting, snow-dusted hours. I can’t imagine the laundry that would be spawned by a foot of snow.
Maybe we only got a dusting last time, but it was ours. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

Puttin' on airs

I adore offbeat shirts and accessories, like this crime scene tape scarf I found on Girlz Lyfe.com.

My problem is that I usually get stuff like this and then, the first time I wear it out into The World, I'm overcome by a fit of self-consciousness and wish that nobody would ask me about my really cool item that just begs to be asked about. I know I've written here before about this old T-shirt I had that read, "Just researching my novel." One time as I stood waiting for the Sam's Club guy to check my receipt on my way out the door, he said, "What's your novel about?" I never thought someone might not buy into the irony of my oh-so-clever T-shirt. And some things just turn out to be stupid when explained.
Once Tim got me these awesome earrings that are miniature levels, the kind you'd find in a toolbox, but I cringe when people lean in to get a closer look. I know, 'Make up your mind, Mrs. Passive-Aggressive Deviationist! Notice me! Don't notice me! Which is it?'

I could just keep getting this stuff and enjoy it without an audience. The truth is, though, it's no fun to be fabulous at home all day. The kids are not adequately impressed by my intermittent eccentricities. I like to wear stuff that has a sense of humor. I just get embarrassed when everybody's not in on the joke.

RIP cheese grits

So Christmas is gone already. I just packed it all up and my husband hauled it up to the attic. Even though I started buying some things in October, it still snuck up on me. But I was determined to complete some holiday rituals even after deadline. I didn't get to make cookie-press cookies until Dec. 27th, and we constructed our gingerbread house on New Year's Day. But we did it.
For future reference, remind me not to try to make ANYTHING that requires standing for hours trying to squeeze ever-hardening icing out of a plastic pastry bag when I've stayed up till the wee hours the night before. At my age, simply staying up late makes me feel hungover. Note to self: Never again.
Another thing I know I won't ever make again is cheese grits. I found out the hard way that Kraft has stopped making the garlic cheese roll that is essential to good cheese grits. The recipe I use is the one my grandmother used, out of Southern Sideboards, the most excellent cookbook published in 1978 by the Junior League of Jackson, Mississippi. I don't know why Blogger won't let me put these pictures in the middle of my post. Anyway, sorry about the microfilm look of the cookbook photo. I'm being lazy today. And I took the garlic cheese photo from a lady's blog whose name excapes me, but I'll find it. It's the only photo of the rare garlic cheese roll I could find.

The cookbook is so awesome because it notes who submitted each recipe the proper way, by her married name. My cheese grits recipe, actually called Cheese Grits Souffle, was submitted by Mrs. Louis E. Ridgway, Jr. and calls for one roll each of Kraft garlic cheese and Kraft Nippy cheese. Nippy cheese went by the wayside years ago, but both used to be staples in the refrigerated section between the real cheese and the canned biscuits (which my other grandmother calls "womp" biscuits because of the sound they make when you womp the can on the edge of the counter to open it.)
As a weird child, one of my favorite harbingers of Christmas was the sight of the little green-labeled roll of garlic cheese in the fridge.
Believe me, I am not the only one who's pissed about this. Southern ladies around the Internet are ranting on all kinds of online forums. Women in Pass Christian, Mississippi, in particular are up in arms.
With them on the job, Kraft should at least trot out the garlic cheese during the holidays, kind of like peppermint ice cream.