March Haiku

Are you up for haiku-ing? A little mental shake-up? An unusual exercise for the brain? This picture made me want to write a haiku. I haven't done that since middle school. In case you need a brush-up, haikus are 17 syllables long, written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables.

Check out my haiku below the picture. If you come up with a haiku for this picture, add it as a comment under the same picture here on my Facebook page.

Go ahead... try it!

March morning glistens.
Winter sits on warm branches.
Spring night... winter gone.

Simple Squid Dinner

For dinner Monday night, I had leftover ingredients from the weekend to work with: a bowl of very ripe tomatoes, an onion, some garlic, two lemons, a handful of linguine, a bottle of Chardonnay, and one-and-a-half pounds of squid.  The squid was leftover from the paella Bill made Saturday night. I rustled through my on-line recipe box looking for an easy tomato-white wine sauce that I had made a few weeks ago. With a quick search for "squid," a stuffed squid popped up. Upon opening the bag of porcelain sleek & glossy white squid tubes, I decided stuffing them would be a ridiculous endeavor. I would just quickly chop them up. A deconstructed squid dish. (Think Indiana Jones, in battle with a whip when a quick shot just seemed to make more sense.)

Thankfully, all the skin, ink, and cartilage was gone before said squid entered our house. I was left with long white tubes and long purple tentacles. I chopped the squid tubes into calamari rings and threw them into a strainer to rinse. I picked up the tentacles, some 4 - 6 inches long, and put them into the strainer as well. It was right about then that I thought, "I'm a heck of a long way from Iowa."

I didn't have time to soak the pieces in milk to tenderize them. I didn't get the meat tenderizing hammer out because I didn't want squid juice squirting all over my clean counter and floor. Rather, I decided they would just need to tenderize as they simmered away in tomatoes, onions, garlic and wine for a half hour.

As the ingredients came to a happy simmer in the pan, I took one last peek before putting the cover on. Puzzled by the bizarreness of these little creatures, prepared by my Iowa-born hands, smothered in a Creole-infused sauce. Would my granddad have eaten these? He loved fish, but this was a far-cry from beer-battered bullheads. Would my dad knowingly eat these? (Dad had unknowingly eaten them as we ordered fried calamari once while he was visiting. We didn't tell him the source of the nice rubbery, crunchy appetizer.)

The end result was delicious served over rice.  So, do you eat chewy purple legs covered with little suction cups? Please do tell.

(This "recipe" is a little more complicated: Corn's On!)

Linda Malcolm on Facebook

With the help of Wendy Sue, my web guru, I am bringing Linda Malcolm to the age – gulp – of social media. Today, meet Linda Malcolm on Facebook. This is the best place to leave comments to my blog posts. Your comments are funny, thought-provoking, surprising, and relatable…“I’m-not- the-only-one-this-happens-to?!” They need to be seen by more people than just me!

Facebook will also help me finish stories started on my blog. For instance, the afternoon of the Hump Day Short about Will and the hours he spends with the Children’s Dictionary, Liam came home with his first definition exercise. Honestly, the same day. After working with Liam on basic strategies of looking up words in the Children’s Dictionary, I was dying to tell you that a cow has four stomachs. However, I refuse to litter your in-box more than a couple times a week. But, I really – desperately – wanted you to know that a cow has four stomachs. Now, I can include P.S.’s like that on Facebook.

Anyway, borrowing a bit from Sally Fields – “You like me! Right now, you like me!” OK, her speech was within the context of confirmation while holding an Oscar; mine is in the context of… well, a directive. “Like” me on my new Facebook page. Please. Go here Linda Malcolm on Facebook and click "Like."

Nothing like begging for love.

:)

Happy Hump Day.

When Plans Change

Running a tight ship. Magically getting it all done. Type A personality. Everything has a place & everything in its place. A Pottery Barn house. Not me. So not me, particularly post-chemo with not a hormone in sight to glue it all together in the old memory bank. Consequently, I'm taking an Executive Functioning webinar, trying to re-train my brain in the ways of time management and using visible tools daily. It's helpful to have daily, weekly, monthly, and long-term planning pages in front of me -- as long as I remember to use them.

Early yesterday morning, I had created the perfect do-able list: take boys to school, meet workers at the house to get gas fire place working, write the Hump Day Short, grab lunch, buy humidfiers and toothbrushes, get home for webinar, pick up boys & take them to play dates, buy groceries, reverse pick up of boys, make quick taco dinner, have dinner together, get boys to bed at a decent hour.

Well, plans change in my non-Pottery Barn life. The best goof-up in my schedule was lunch. I stopped at a little restaurant that I had recently discovered; I'm usually there at odd times but yesterday I as there at noon. I sat down with my planning clipboard and a blank piece of paper (aka: grocery-list-in-the-making) as diners filtered in.

I recognized one woman as the mom of a Little Leaguer that played on Liam's team. And another as the mom of a little girl in my god-daughter's class. Long story short, we slid my table together with another and had lunch together. We chatted, laughed, joked, and poked. For not remembering either of their names nor ever having met the third woman, the conversation was lively. Enjoyable.

So if you felt the world brighten a bit around 12 Eastern time yesterday, it may have been the sparks from that lunch. Why won't you take your child bowling? Roller-skating? Should an inmate on death-row receive cancer treatment? When should you pay a contractor? Why was my Christmas wreath on the door until March 6th? (See the 1st and 2nd paragraph... and there WILL be new decor on my door TODAY! ...I'm putting it on my daily planner.)

Alas, much like the rest of the day's events, lunch went on longer than I had allowed in my planner. "Inhale lunch" then "Write Hump Day Short at library" then "Webinar at home." I skipped the middle task to get the next one done.

So, I'm writing the Hump Day Short at 5 a.m. And happily so. Lunch with these ladies and another surprise visit with old friends were the highlights of my day. Conversations when plans change.

I didn't have "Lunch with virtual strangers" nor "Unexpected chat with old friends" written in on my daily planning sheet.

Perhaps that's why I plan my day in pencil?

Happy Hump Day.

Children's Dictionaries

I’m not God. He made 24 hours in a day. He made us with the intent that we sleep for a good chunk of that time so as not to get grumpy. Well, probably many other reasons, but that’s certainly how he built me. Those are the parameters within which homework needs to get done: fit it into the 24-hour wheel of time, at home before you go to school the next day. Some days are busier than others; still the homework needs to be done. And truly, the word HOMEWORK that occupies Will’s mind takes much more time than the actual amount of homework to be done.

When the phrase, “You need to give me more time!” slipped from Will’s tongue for days; I tried the white board approach, with the evening laid-out in half-hour slots. I marked in dinner and bedtime then left all the other half-hour slots white. “Honey, that’s it right there. All that blank space is up to you to work out. I can’t give you any more time. That’s it. You need to get your homework done in that time.” It worked beautifully. A visual that said time is finite.

Then come the Tuesday evenings when I hear, “I don’t have much homework, Mom. It won’t take me too long.” I do the math: “It won’t take me too long” + Tuesday = definitions and sentences for 10 spelling words are due tomorrow = The Children’s Dictionary. I cringe. I skip the white board for it is powerless over the Children’s Dictionary…

Five minutes ago, I opened the Children's Dictionary to find periscope, one of Will’s words. I landed at the end of the P’s. Py. Pyramid. Wow. The most amazing diagram of a pyramid. All the chambers, corridors, and galleries are illustrated in detail. Half the page is the Great Pyramid, Giza, Egypt. But, wait, I need periscope! With a backward flip of a few pages, past clear, color pictures of portcullis (very cool!), pole vault, platypus (my favorite animal), planets, piano, pheasant, and penknife, I skip right over the small diagram of the periscope. Fortunately, when I go forward to the periscope page, it is the only drawing on the two-page spread.

This is how the Children’s Dictionary works. The Children Dictionary opens the spigot of imagination time after time. This is why ten definitions and sentences take two hours. Which is fine if you want to make an evening of it.

I can only give you more time, Will, with a 6-inch thick, good, solid Webster’s.

Happy Hump Day -- and for those of you with Children's Dictionaries at home, we only have around 12 more Hump Days this school year.