Fancy Things

The other day, I was dressing Soren in one of his rugby shirts, and he decided he wanted all the buttons to be done up, including the top one. I explained that the top one is generally left unbuttoned.

Soren: Why is it a button instead of nothing?

Me: To be fancy, I guess.

Soren [exasperated]: Well, then why don't they just put a GOLDEN CAR on there? Or a TROPHY?

Giving Away my Secrets

I got this recipe from somewhere that I can't find now, and I'm glad I wrote it down, because it rules. And now I'm going to put it on the interwebs so others may share in my high cholesterol. Sorry, I can't give the true author credit, so just pretend it was me.

Cinnamon rolls (makes 6 - 8 enormous rolls)

Dough:
1 pkg (2 1/4 tsp) instant/active dry yeast
1/2c warm water
1/3 c + 1/2 tsp granulated sugar, divided
1/2 c warmed milk
1/3 c butter, melted
1 tsp salt
1 egg, slightly beaten
3.5 - 4 c flour

Filling:
1/2 c melted butter, divided in half
3/4 c + 2 tbsp granulated sugar, divided
1 1/2 tbsp cinnamon
3/4 c chopped walnuts (optional)
3/4 c raisins (optional)

Glaze:
1/3 c melted butter
2 c powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2-4 tbsp hot water


In a small bowl, mix warm water, yeast, and 1/2 tsp sugar. In a large bowl, mix milk, 1/3 c sugar, butter, salt and egg. Stir well and add yeast mixture. Add half the flour and beat until smooth. Stir in enough of remaining flour to make dough slightly stiff (dough will be sticky).

Knead dough 5-10 minutes on floured board (or in stand mixer). Place in well-buttered glass or plastic bowl, cover and let rise in warm place until doubled (1 – 1 1/2 hours). When doubled, punch down dough and let rest 5 minutes. Roll out on floured surface into a 10 x 15 inch rectangle.

Filling: spread dough with 1/4 c melted butter. Mix 3/4 cup sugar with cinnamon; sprinkle over dough. Sprinkle with walnuts and raisins, if using.

Roll up dough (along the long edge, to make a 15” cylinder) and pinch edge together to seal. Cut into 6-8 slices. Coat bottom of 9” x 13” pan with remaining melted butter, then sprinkle with remaining 2 tbsp sugar. Place slices close together and let rise until doubled, 45 minutes.

[I usually do all the preceding work, up until the beginning of the second rise, the night before and place the covered pan in the fridge, then let the pan sit on the counter while the oven heats up and bake them right away. They don’t rise in the fridge, but will still puff up in the oven]

Bake in a 350 degree oven 25-30 minutes or until browned.

For the glaze: Mix butter, sugar and vanilla; stir in hot water 1 tbsp at a time until it reaches spreading consistency. Spread over slightly cooled rolls.

Breaking the Law

My Colorforms flowers (left), posted in direct violation of Soren's "No Flowers Allowed" sign (right):



Easter photos to follow when I have sorted through all 6000000 of them.

Several Boring Things and One Interesting Thing

Well, our little 16-month-old decided to step up her shock-and-awe campaign this morning by climbing out of her crib. There was some amount of goading from her big brother, who was entertaining her in her room before Chris and I got up, but I don't think he provided any mechanical help. So now, even though J. K. Rowling has lobbied against the inhumanity of cage beds for several years now, we are shopping for a crib tent. Sadly, there is only one maker of crib tents, and their product is widely panned as flimsy (although its ratings do average out to four stars on Amazon), but there aren't any other good options that we can find. There are those who say, "If you need a crib tent, you need a toddler bed!" But I laugh at those people, and invite them to come over and deal with teaching a 16-month-old to stay in a bed.

Other things have happened since I last posted. It rained a lot. Each house in our neighborhood is a lakeside resort now. I dropped my iPod in the loo and got a new one from Apple for half price, because they are nice. Chris and I hung a really attractive wire by the thermostat so we can jump the boiler whenever it gets cold, because the thermostat doesn't seem to work any more. There's something really rugged about jumping the boiler, let me tell you.

Oh, here's a trippy story. Someone sent me an email a few weeks back with the subject header "inquiry". Although, as one friend put it, emails with this title tend to be from exiled Nigerian princes, I chose to read it. Turns out it was from someone in Santa Barbara who wanted to know if I was a certain Kirsten Munson who graduated from San Marcos High School in 1994, because if I was, she had found some of my stuff in her attic. (I am, by the way.) Through further email exchanges, I learned that she'd found some of my paintings from AP Studio Art, and got my graduation year off the back of one that I'd apparently entered in a contest. OK, so here's the weird part. She found these paintings in the attic of a house on Valerio St, where my family moved after I graduated. In high school, I'd lived in a house on Crescent Drive, so that was the address on the back of the contest entry, and the person contacting me had also previously lived in the same house! So we'd shared two addresses in Santa Barbara. Cosmic!

She and her fiancé apparently want to keep a couple of the paintings, which is fine by me. Today, I tend to find my creative work from high school a bit... cringe-worthy, but if they think it's deep and meaningful, my high school self is grateful. That's pretty much what I was going for at the time.

The Soundtrack to my Résumé

I always have a song in my head, so the music I listen to is very important to me, because it determines what I will be listening to when the music is turned off. Sometimes it is good, like Life on Mars? or Don't Look Back in Anger or Magnet and Steel. Sometimes it is bad, like Radar Love, or the little pre-commercial NFL fanfare, or the Sid the Science Kid theme song.

Right now, I have Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind in my head, and I'm not happy about it. It came on while I was driving back from the Children's Museum. WBRU, I expect better from you. Anyway, I freaking hate that song, not on its aesthetic merits, but because I was forced to listen to it eight times a day during the summer of 1997.

Ah, 1997. Ryan Seacrest was just a smarmy DJ on L.A.'s Star 98.7. It was the summer after I transferred out of Brown, the summer before I started classes at Art Center College of Design. The summer I had to make some money. The summer I signed on with a temp agency. I landed a six-week assignment with an insurance company, which was great, because it was a nice long stint of guaranteed income. When it became clear that it was basically going to be six weeks of stuffing envelopes, I wasn't thrilled, but I was sure I could find a way to survive the drudgery. When the workplace turned out to be an office full of catty women whose main pastime was gossiping about whichever coworker had just left the room, I vowed to tune them out and carry on. But there was a conspiracy afoot. A sinister plot devised to make me crazy. A scheme that could only have been perpetrated by the likes of Ryan Seacrest and Third Eye Blind. And the person in charge of choosing the radio station at work.

You know how a lot of soft-rock stations advertise their no-repeat workday? Yeah, Star 98.7 didn't have one of those. They were interested in playing the Top 40 Adult Contemporary Hits of the Summer of 1997, and that's all. The thing about Top 40 hits is that there are forty of them, pretty much exactly. And if you hear them over and over, every day, for eight hours, five days a week, for six weeks, the math comes out to... let's see. I have the equation here somewhere. Oh yeah. It's:

[(2x/3)*240t] = whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

I still get twitchy when I hear Sunny Came Home. Oh god. I'm getting all PTSD right now, even thinking about it.

And then the six weeks was over, and I started school and listened to whatever the hell I wanted while working my ass off to get my degree so I could eventually work at a place that played cool music. I'm still kind of waiting to see how that works out. At my first real job, I could often hear Radiohead coming from one guy's office, so that was cool. And then I think they started piping in classical to see if it would make everyone swear less. My next job had no music, maybe because if you don't play music on the office, you can classify everyone as independent contractors and not give them any benefits. Then I had a job doing decorative furniture painting, and that really had its ups and downs. Usually, we could listen to whatever we wanted to, which included the soundtrack to Hair, all the awesome stuff on my iPod, and a CD of college fight songs. Huh. But these were vetoed during the holiday season by the back office manager -- I'll call her Pat, since that's her name -- in favor of a radio station devoted to playing all Christmas songs all the time starting the first week of November and ending after you go clinically insane. It really gave Star 98.7 a run for its money, repetition-wise. Also, Pat really enhanced the experience for all of us by humming along to every song, very loudly and badly. I pointed the humming out to a coworker who somehow hadn't theretofore noticed it, and she never liked me much after that, but I was glad to have some company in my misery.

The job after that had OK music. Turns out Muzak actually plays songs you've heard of now, with words, in their original recorded form. There was 80's music occasionally, but too much Coldplay in the Adult Contemporary playlist. And John Mayer McCheese. Oh, and You're Beautiful by James Blunt. Man UP, Jim. I'm sorry if you like any of these things. Reallllllllly sorry.

And now, my current job. Chauffeur To and From the Children's Museum. I was somehow transfixed by Semi-Charmed Life, and listened to the whole thing, but then turned the radio off and listened to my usual soundtrack these days, which is two people in the back seat saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeee over and over in weird voices for no apparent reason. So the repetition thing hasn't really been resolved, but at least now I can join in and start saying Mommmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeee as well (much to the delight of my deejays, or office managers, or whatever their titles are) and mix things up a bit by making everyone laugh.

Car Show!

(written by Chris)

Soren has been fascinated by cars for longer than he has been able to articulate that fascination. He had a lengthy phase of pointing out that a car or truck was passing by, then asking what each car he saw was, and then learning the logos of all the car companies and naming all the cars he saw (and he can identify the make of virtually all late model cars by sight). Today, I was able to provide him an all-access pass to more cars than he could imagine by taking him to the New England 2010 Auto Show, at the RI convention center. Kids' Day meant he was free with my admission, and no one could complain I was there following the orders of a three-year old.

As we approached the ticket booth, Soren spotted the banner with the roughly 20 participating automakers on it. "Hey, there's a lot of logos here," he shouts, and begins naming them, "Honda. Toyota. GMC! Lincoln...." I merely shrug to the ticket taker.

In the course of a little under three hours (we had to dash over to the Westin to score some apple juice at the two hour mark), we evaluated (i.e., sat in) a wide spectrum of vehicles, ranging in price from roughly $18,000 to roughly $75,000:

3 GMCs
6 Chevrolets
2 Buicks
8 Toyotas
4 Fords
4 Lincolns
4 accessible Toyotas
3 Mazdas
6 Subarus
3 Audis
4 Acuras

I briefly ogled a couple Lamborghinis and a couple Rolls Royces, but Soren had no interest because he could not sit in them. "Come onnnn, Daddy...."

Visiting a car show with Soren is different from visiting as car buyer in several key ways:

Price does not matter. Soren doesn't really yet understand money or status or quality distinctions. Therefore, he was absolutely as enthusiastic about the most basic Chevy Cobalt and Ford Focus as he was about the much more expensive cars we sat in. Importantly, he is indifferent to size (when you're 39 inches tall, being an expensive sports car is the biggest threat to adequate leg room and view), so the cars vary less to him than they would to someone who is, for example, not three.

The back seat does matter; the front seat does not. In fact, I was only permitted to sit in the front seat of three cars, and of those, two did not have back seats (one was a Corvette, so...). Otherwise, our experience of each car emphasized the back seat: we would approach a vehicle that was deemed worth our time--primarily by being next to the vehicle out of which we just climbed; I opened the passenger side door for Soren, who climbed in (and climbed is often the best descriptor); I would be instructed to close his door and come around the other side; I would enter through the driver's side rear door, and close it; I would be instructed to lock it; after a brief pause, we'd note something about the upholstery; we would decide to move on.

It's always his turn. When looking at popular cars at car shows, I've often had to wait to get into the driver's seat. People aren't generally looking at the back seats, but when they are, they're standing and peering in in a way that allows room for an eager three-year old to slip in front and climb in. Soren was entirely polite about it, complete with "Excuse me," but he'd slip right up to the front to scramble into the back seats.

Basic car features are interesting. During the car show, Soren learned about the different designs of door locks, levers (including the all electronic system on the Corvette) and regular seatbelts. Once he learned about a feature, it had to be examined on subsequent vehicles. We had to try the seatbelts in most of the latter half of cars we tried, but fortunately he grew to understand they all work in the same way (and are uncomfortable).

Salespeople go the other way. These car shows are, after all, sales tools. A couple of times, as I rounded the back of a car to get in the driver's side, I was intercepted by salespeople who wanted to tell me about the car I was circling. (Despite my bicentimillenial Jetta, I'm not in the market.) When Soren pops around the corner, or shouts that I need to get in the car, I just don't get bothered anymore.

Child locks suck. At more than one point, my tour of back seats left me in the embarrassing position of needing either to climb out the far side (to Soren's protests) or to beg fellow patrons to let me out because some previous attendee had triggered the child lock on the door I entered.

Overall, I will say that I'm impressed with the ground that American car companies have made on foreign automakers over the last few years: touch and feel quality was definitely comparable within price point in the cars I saw today. Of course, that's just the perspective of a back seat driver.

RIP 110 Film

Remember that first camera? The slab of a thing that took 110 film and flash cubes, or maybe one of those weird disc cameras, or the Kodak Polaroid-clone which you only had for ten months before Kodak got sued and had to take it off the market? It was so cool to get to take photos of anything you wanted, and you probably didn't even notice the aggrieved looks on your parents' faces every time they had to shell out for another roll of film or another set of crappy prints.

Well, now Soren has his very first camera. A slab of a thing with an LED flash and 50-cent software. It's fabulous.

Digital photography is a wonderful thing, my friends. Not only does Soren get to take a billion pictures of anything he wants, the only thing I have to shell out for is another set of AAA batteries every once in a while. He even has his very own Flickr account, so he can share his weird pictures with the three other people in the world who would like to see them. I am proud to be one of those three people.