On not moving

I dreamed last night that I was making my way from here to Seattle, broke and on foot, like in a video game. Sometimes I had companions, sometimes not, and we got into all kinds of adventures and distractions, and if I made the wrong choices I'd just fade out and end up back at the beginning, not always knowing what I'd done wrong. I'd just about made it and was noticing that the mountains made me a little uneasy when I woke up.

I've stopped talking about moving with my family. We're still trying, or still trying to try; but the house isn't selling and job-hunting isn't easy in the current economic climate and particularly not when your two-month-old is crying whenever she isn't feeding at night and your two-year-old wants to be played with all the time and wakes up at six. I don't know if my family figures I've given up or is bored with the topic or is just trying to give me a break. I hate that we're not leaving. The house isn't right for us and neither is the climate, either geological or sociopolitical, and Eric doesn't want our daughters in the local school district and I miss my family more than Eric seems to think he'll miss his; but we can't go. I've already wasted my youth in the Midwest (why did I decide I wanted to experience the Midwest?) and it's so much harder to move with a husband and two kids.

Blah. I will try to get to the job-hunting as I can. I will continue with all the little things that are nice about our life. Maia is now stopping in the middle of nursing to smile up at me. It's inconvenient, but it's very endearing. Chloë can do complicated sentences and minor reasoning and her hair is long enough to put up into pigtails. It's ice cream and tomato season. And work is slow enough that I can write every day. These are good things.

Gas, and also hot air

Gas is $1.99 outside work. The gas in my tank is $0.49 per gallon more expensive, and I bought it a week ago. Wow.

I remember the first time I bought gas for over $2 per gallon. It was in Dayton, so no later than 2004, and I was driving to Columbus to catch a plane for work early the next day so I didn't want to take the chance on finding something cheaper on the way. I found a receipt in my car for $4.07 per gallon gas from July. These are funny times.

I'm anticipating that very late tomorrow people will start talking about "our first black president," so I shall say now how much that annoys me and get it over with. Unless he identifies completely with black people, Obama will not be our first black president. He'll be our first mixed-race, partly-black president (or at least I hope he will).

I do realize that to most people in this country, any black means black. He's not white enough for most white people. I also strongly suspect that at least when he was growing up, he wasn't black enough for black people, either. I have a book at home that examines mixed-race children in America. It's mostly on black/white mixes, since that's the major, and most emotionally charged, mix around here. At the time I was vaguely annoyed by that because I was looking for something that related to me, and that doesn't. But now that I live in a city that concerns itself with this kind of thing, and hope to shortly live under a mixed-race president, I'm glad I read it. And it says that a mixed-race child is too white for the blacks, and too black for the whites, and generally only finds refuge in the people who actually see him or her as an actual person. I've long since forgotten the race issue except when reminded because I know enough about Obama now to consider him as a person. I wish more people could do the same.

Eric and I talked recently about how his dad routinely talks about his black students and his white students and how that bothers me, and Eric's stance is that though he personally doesn't use the same language, he doesn't see his dad as wrong because, statistically speaking, there are differences in the two groups. --But then he went on to discuss theories of teaching, and how there are theories that a group of mostly females should be taught differently from a group of mostly males, and he doesn't believe in that either. We were also talking about how I grew up always believing that "liberal" was a good thing, and that Republicans were mostly wrong, while he grew up thinking "conservative" was a good thing, and that Democrats were mostly wrong. "It's like we lived in different countries," he said. There are no black-white issues in Seattle as there are Toledo. The major minority (hmm) there is Asian, and there isn't as much tension, or the same kind of stereotypes, so it's a different dynamic--and as far as I ever noticed, a nonissue.

People who say they're afraid that Obama will "take care of his own people first" don't know what they're talking about. They're trying to say, "He's black, so he'll give special favors to the black people." Presumably they believe the same is true of McCain but in reverse, but that doesn't bother them because they'll be the ones being taken care of. Maybe they assume the candidates would act as they themselves would--or implicitly realize that that actually is what already happens, with the people in power--mostly white people--taking care of their own.

Probably there are lots of people in the country about whom that would be a reasonable fear, but none of them would become the likely winner in the American presidential election. There's an old saying that women have to be excellent just to be recognized as competent, and I expect the same is true for black, or partially-black, people. I'm hopeful about having Obama as president because he's had to do very well in everything else in his life to get where he is, and he has the intelligence and capacity to keep on doing it. I'm not very hopeful that America's race issues will get significantly better anytime soon, which depresses me very much. "Maybe when that generation is dead," I think, but then I assume that people my age--or even most intelligent people--are like me, and that's not true either. Eric's mom says, "Obama scares the shit out of me, and I don't know why. There's just something about him." I think I know what the something is, but it's something about her, not him.

I'm glad I can cast a vote in a swing state, but I wish I didn't live in a city with such a divisive attitude. Alternately, I could wish I had a "people," but I don't, other than the friends I choose and the family I love. I'd have to ask him to be sure, but I don't think Obama has a "people" either, any more than I do, or than most people do. (If I am ever elected president, all left-handed half-Asian non-high-school-diploma-possessing master's-degree-bearing vegetarians named Jennifer shall get preferential treatment. I don't think this will tie up much of my presidential time.) He has a family, and a hometown, and a country, and so do we all. And I hope that in January he has a presidency.

(With that said, I am not voting tomorrow. I voted two weeks ago. Eric voted yesterday and the line was three hours long.)

Complicated

"I'm not sure what I'm planting in the garden next year," I said last night. "But I should probably act like we're going to be here an extra year."

"Yeah?"

"Well, maybe it would be a selling point--but then, if things are bad enough that a vegetable garden is a big selling point, we're probably not going to be able to sell the house."

"My mom asked me about that earlier," Eric said. "She wanted to know if we'd considered the economy regarding our plans to move. I said of course we had, we're not idiots. Only not in those words. I said yes, we've discussed it. That we've been discussing it off and on for months."

"Did she bring up her contention that we'll never move? Or that we won't come back?"

"That was the other mother," he said. "But no, she didn't mention that. She was just asking if we'd thought about it. Especially if we're going to be spending all this money to try to make sure we have a kid soon."

"Moving with a newborn would not be fun," I said. "Neither would moving while eight months pregnant."

"Right. So next year is going to be complicated."

"I think..." I said. "I think we're probably going to end up staying an extra year. But I'm not willing to give up yet."

"That's fine," Eric said. "We'll wait and see. We could always put the house on the market and see what happens. And maybe things will get better after the election."

Muses and musings

I have finally finished that scene in Shoelace that has been blocking me for (ugh) two months now. The solution lay in doing other things to give the protagonist the motivation she needed to make an effort that would have otherwise made no sense. Temporary victory is mine!

I am eagerly looking forward to tonight's presidential debate, mainly to see whether McCain shows up. We don't even need to vote in the circuses, they come to us.

I had a fit of economy-induced anxiety last night. It's not looking good for our plan to move next summer, though I suppose you never know. But if credit gets that bad, we may not be able to buy a house out there even if we sell ours here. (We could always rent my parents' old house. James is living in it now but I've got a better history of on-time payments, so they say they'd be happy to kick him out and rent to us instead. We wouldn't really kick him out...I think...but we might sublet it to him.) And leaving a perfectly good job might be a really bad idea, unless I've got the freelance/telecommute plan going by then. (Luckily, teachers will probably always be in demand in some form or another.)

But we'll see. Chances are that the worst that will happen is we'll have to stay here an extra year...or two. I don't want to end my twenties in Ohio, but that's the way it goes sometimes.

We could probably find a renter for the house.

On the way to work today I heard a radio DJ discuss how he went with a friend to an appliance warehouse and was embarrassed when his friend tried bargaining with a salesperson for a TV. "He said, 'I don't like this price, how about X instead.' I was mortified. I put my head down and walked away. I mean, who DOES that??" I turned it off because I was yelling, "People from other cultures, you narrow-minded twit!"

We had Easter dinner with Eric's family. I assisted by braiding the dinner roll dough and setting the table. Over dinner, we discussed making biofuels, moving to the country, white asparagus, conversations you never want to have with your mother (Brenda was having one and her daughter was trying hard not to), and our house. Angie says we overpaid, at least for the amount of time we're staying here. Eric (and Angie's husband) disagreed, saying that part of that judgment was hindsight; if the economy hadn't turned south, we'd have been fine. "As it is, we might have to move a year later than we planned," he said. Brenda said, "You won't move." I said nothing.

Previous to dinner, we were sent out to Kroger to get an Easter basket for Addie. She is one year and eleven days old. We got a felt basket, a little stuffed animal, and a box of banana toddler cookies, and the mothers added shoes before they presented it. On the way back to the car, we discussed whether we would want to give our kids Easter baskets and how we would celebrate Easter, if at all, since we're not religious. (Our solution was to get invited to the nearest grandparents' house for dinner ever year. And I'd be happy to celebrate it as a "welcome to spring" sort of thing.) "I mean, Christmas is more of a secularized holiday," Eric said.

"So is Easter," I said. "At least, where I grew up it is. I had no awareness growing up of this fish-on-Fridays thing, and I still don't think that our spring breaks always included Easter like yours did. And we certainly never got Good Friday off." I looked up my old school district (Lake Washington), and I remembered correctly. Their spring break is next week. We are moving. In one year, I start job-hunting.

Hearth and home

I'm currently craving tofu-bean paste soup with chopped-up greens and sticky rice with black onion and a tiny bit of cinnamon. Apparently I'm having a childhood gustatory moment.

This weekend I made more rye bread (with oil this time; we'll see how it turned out when Eric finishes the current loaf), garlic-rosemary bread, and oatmeal bread. The oatmeal bread was 100% whole wheat and turned out flat and dense, but Eric liked the taste, so I'll give it another try with some AP flour substituted. I'm starting to feel baked out. At least this week.

This weekend we also went up to Ann Arbor to be maudlin about our ninth anniversary of meeting. I'm glad we'll be able to go up again for number ten, but after that we'll have to find another coffee shop to be sentimental in because we'll be on the West Coast if all goes well. Well, if all goes 67% well--we're figuring that in order to move, ideally three things would happen: he gets a good job, I get a good job, and the house sells. But we can still do it--potentially--with two out of three.

Incidentally, Eric's mom is considering buying the house next door to hers. It's $70K and could probably be negotiated down further so I can kind of understand her thinking--how can you pass up a bargain like that??--only that sort of thinking applies better to, say, shoes, or books, or maybe a nice set of pots, than a house. I asked her what she would do with it, and she said, "Whatever! Use the land, build a garage..." I'd say maybe she could buy our house, but it's less convenient and would cost nearly twice as much--well, depending on how the market goes over the next year.

I'm reading up on candidates to figure out who to vote for tomorrow. My phone keeps ringing with an 800 number. I don't pick up and they never leave a message.

Snapped

It's snowing. Again. MAKE IT STOP! TOMORROW IS MARCH! MY PARENTS ARE GARDENING! STOP SNOWING!

One more winter to get through here. <whimper> Just one more.

I made Rose Levy Berenbaum's flaxseed wheat bread last night, as part of my ongoing quest to make sandwich bread for Eric--I can't make rye because we haven't gotten rid of the old stuff yet. I really shouldn't have because we already have three kinds of bread in the basket, but I wanted to make bread, so I made it and froze it once it was cool. I tried a bit and it's really good! Wheaty and chewy and soft and a little sweet. Even if he doesn't like it (he had a bite, but said he'll have to try it in a sandwich to really evaluate it), I may make it again for me.

I also pulled out the sourdough no-knead bread from the freezer so that I can snack on it because the rosemary-garlic bread is gone. Despite having three kinds of bread in the basket. Um, at least this hobby is healthier than cake-baking, right?

Eric and I discussed his likely upcoming unemployment again last night, and he mentioned something I hadn't properly thought about: if he gets fired tomorrow and can't find another student teaching placement, which is likely, and he really has to teach a year in Ohio before he can get his permanent license, we have to stay here an extra year. I HATE this idea. He doesn't know for sure that the latter statement is true; he's going to call a couple of people today and ask about this, among other things. I hope it isn't. Or that he finishes his student teaching this semester. I really don't want to stay here an extra year. It would be good for house appreciation and finances and stability and such, but I want to go home. I want to get out of the Midwest before I'm thirty, darn it. But if we can't we can't.

Tonight, I'm doing a last load of laundry (and trying to felt my Palm case again...I did it once but it's still too big) and packing for ConFusion, including figuring out what knitting project to bring. And preferably cleaning. I'm so bad at keeping up with cleaning. How am I ever going to get by when we have kids? We won't be able to afford a maid, and there will be at least a six- or seven-year gap until I can start making the kids do it. (What? Isn't that why people have kids?)

Eric just called to tell me that our water has been shut off. There's a leak on our side, they said. We have to get a plumber. We don't know where this leak is, or whether they'll be able to turn on the water tonight if we do get a plumber in time. We were planning on having a New Year's party, but a party without water will be problematic.

Aside from that, the Christmas break has been lovely. The trip to Seattle was great; we met some online friends, I saw M for the first time in years and Eric met her for the first time ever, we ate lots, we saw family, we delivered presents, it snowed on Christmas for the third time in sixty years; good times all around. I also checked out an apartment rental brochure. Rent isn't too bad. We're thinking Lake City or Bremerton might be good places to try for if we're going to move to the Seattle area rather than Portland (or somewhere in between). Eric says it's starting to feel more familiar, which is a good step. And he enjoyed his two Jamba Juices very much.

When we got back, we exchanged presents with Eric's family, which was a bigger to-do since they like to give lots of presents. I got a rolling pin (good-bye wine bottle rolling pin), knitting needles, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, an "Ove-Glove," the non-indie Regina Spektor CD, and a greenhouse. A plastic greenhouse on wheels. I love it very much. I can't decide what to do with it, though--put it outside now and protect my strawberries and sage with it, or keep it inside for extra seed-starting room in February and March.

I gave Mom her quilt and she loved it, and Eric his astrolabe (from the Michigan Renaissance festival) and he loved that, and we gave Michelle The Daring Book for Girls and she loved that. We made friendship bracelets yesterday for her to give to her best friend. We still have a few presents to give out, but overall I think we've done very well on the gift-giving this year.

I spent an entire day in Seattle making Christmas cookies: honey-lemon cutouts, Christmas bells, gingerbread people, lemon bars, and fudge (well, James actually did that one, from a box kit). I intended to make plain chocolate chip as well, but got tired out. "Jenny always makes cookies like that," Bev commented at some point during the family party, and I was slightly concerned about being so predictable before realizing that was ludicrous since this was Christmas, wherein every little thing you do can become a tradition if you're not careful, and everyone loves the cookies. Mom requested a double batch of the bells, most of which James took home with him; Dad assisted in eliminating the cutouts with imperfect icing; Eric enjoyed making mutant gingerbread people (two heads, a peg leg and hook, a third arm, that kind of thing).

I think I need a different gingerbread recipe for next year, but otherwise I was quite pleased--even more so when Mom gave me the cookie cutters and her old Betty Crocker Cooky Book, which used to belong to Grandma, to take home with me. We're having Christmas here next year--Mom became mostly reconciled over our stay--so I'll be making the cookies here, plus Mom and Dad don't bake really anyway. They didn't even have a full set of measuring cups, and only one enormous mixing bowl.

Today I'm making cranberry-and-orange spiral cookies, for the party if we have water, for the mothers to buy the use of their bathroom if we don't. We're mostly ready for the party except for the water. I think we're ready for the new year, too.

That's the plan.

I started to write a post the day before yesterday and I ended up writing about something I hadn't intended to, and that led to an evening spent differently from the plan (well, to start with anyway) and some crying, but also some good discussion. It had to do with our eventual move to the West Coast and decision three years afterward on whether we're going to stay, and it involved us getting closer to actual fighting than we ever have and also some mutually agreed-upon blaming of Eric's mother. Anyway, here's the first, innocuous part of that post:

***
I hate O'Hare airport. This is probably not a surprise to anyone who's been there before. It was O'Hare that Bev and I got stuck at for a day when we were flying out to Baltimore to apartment-hunt. It was O'Hare that Eric and I almost didn't make our connection at because the previous flight had had to de-ice its wings and we arrived two terminals away from the flight we were catching. On Thursday night, it was O'Hare that delayed flights going in and out three hours so that my parents had to pick me up at 2:30 instead of 11:30. I admit it wasn't O'Hare yesterday that delayed my flight (I called my parents to complain right away, and they actually picked me up so we could talk for another hour while I waited) and didn't post its gate so that I had to guess which terminal it might be in and track down agents at three different gates to tell me the gate number. But it was O'Hare that rescheduled my initial connection for one that was due to leave ten minutes after the first got on the ground. I made the flight, but I had a plane full of people to stare at as I bumped my way down the aisle with my ridiculously heavy carryon and dropped into my seat very shortly before the safety talk began.
***

My whirlwind weekend trip was wonderful. It was sunny and warm there, I had a great time visiting with my parents, we finally got the family pictures done, and my wedding shower was lovely. I did decoupage for the first time and the food was all vegetarian (I love my matron of honor) and I got some extremely neat stuff--it was a craft shower, so people gave me materials for cake making and candy making and beaded ornaments and quilling (paper filigree…have you ever heard of this? I hadn't) and stamping and sewing and cooking. My project this week is to make handmade thank-you cards. (Then it's to finish up last year's queen-sized summer quilt. If we're buying a new bed--and we are, because that's cheaper than putting Mom and Dad up in a hotel, and we wanted a bigger one eventually anyway--we need a blanket to cover it, and I can't see a single reason to buy a blanket when I've got one almost ready-made in my closet.)

Mom gave me a pair of blue topaz earrings to wear in the wedding, thus explaining why I could never get her to answer me when I asked if she had any earrings I could borrow. I did borrow some earrings of hers for the family pictures; later she asked where they were and I said I'd put them on her dresser, and she said, "Why did you give them back? You can have them. I don't use them." She doesn't, since her ears aren't really pierced anymore, so I did take them. They're opal and gold, and she bought them in Korea a long time ago. Eric tells me I need to pack them in wet cotton. This makes me wonder if they'll get moldy--either that or whether I'll have to water them every week, like a plant. And I tried on my wedding dress, and it's too big but otherwise fantastic. Mom grumbled about the amount of work, and also about my asking her to cut a foot off the train (I asked for no train, but as Dad says, I didn't tell her three times), but I think she's okay with it, and I know I'll be proud to wear this dress on my wedding day.

When I got back my plants were on the dry side, but alive, and I’m plotting to repot them this week and figuring out how many to give away to whom. Next year I'll definitely be more conservative with the seed sowing. Happily, my outdoor plants don't seem to be dead either--the spinach and lettuce are hanging on, and there are a few tiny green points in the carrot rows, and the onions are sprouting in their corner. They're being threatened by some fresh green weeds invading from the neighbor's yard (the onions are right on the fence), but they're alive, and now that I’m back and the weather isn't quite so nasty I'll be being nasty myself to those weeds and the hundreds that are popping up over the yard.

Today we're working on the cars and the invitations. Eric is off for the week, which means there will be much wedding stuff and house stuff taken care of. Or at least that's the plan.

Another point in favor of the West Coast.

Have I mentioned that possibly the greatest point of contention between Eric and me is where we're going to live? I've promised him Toledo until he graduates, and he's promised me the West Coast for a few years, but after that we'll have to decide based on who hates the other's homeland least, where the jobs are, where the good school systems are, etc. Frankly I'm counting on his dislike for change to work in my favor, once we've lived in a house in Portland (or wherever) for a few years. Today we were in Ann Arbor, celebrating our eight-year anniversary of knowing each other (and one-year of being engaged) by going to the same cafe where we first talked, plus out to eat and also to Trader Joe's, because Toledo has no Trader Joe's. We've pretty much settled it that if we do move back here, we're going to move to Ann Arbor rather than Toledo. I like it better, and the job market would be friendlier for both of us, and apparently the schools are better, too.

We were in Trader Joe's (yay Trader Joe's! Except: boo Trader Joe's not having Granny Smith apple rings or eggplant cutlets or frozen peaches!) browsing the cheese aisle when someone who knew Eric walked by. He started talking to us, asking how he was, and were we stocking up for the snowstorm?

"It's supposed to snow?" we said. He said yeah, that's probably why the store was so full (and it was packed). When we got home we checked the news and yes, we're supposed to get ice accumulation of a quarter-inch tomorrow. That's ice. It may prevent me from going to work Monday, and I'm already having problems with the Valentine's Day snow day because my boss said to put it in as vacation, but the HR people said no because I'm not allowed to take vacation until I've been there six months (great place to work, stupid benefits policies), so I'm supposed to resubmit it as a floating holiday but now the pay period's passed so I don't know what's going to happen. Stupid Midwest winters.