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A Prairie Wife Kind of Day


Photographed by Kenneth Chan. youngjediboy@hot...

Image via Wikipedia

Except for the sleeping until nearly noon, it was a farm wife on the little prairie day. Rob rescued our pitiful potato crop on Friday and they needed to be turned into delicious meals before they rotted.

I began the process yesterday afternoon with stock pot full of potato soup. I outdid myself. It was soup for which to die. However, I put barely a dent in the potato stash and so determined to make another pot today for the freezer and turn the rest into delicious breadstuffs.

It’s not fun. Gardening, harvesting or transforming. I am left with little doubt as to why women abandoned the kitchen and cooking in droves as soon as technology, cultural norms and the fast food industry made it possible for them to do so. I am fortunate that I have a husband who doesn’t believe that all things drudgery is women’s work. I experimented with a new soup recipe yesterday and found a way to turned mashed potatoes into tasty buns today, and he dug in, peeled and diced while I made everything else “so”. We are a team like that. Slightly awesome to behold if I do say so.

Before we started, a trip to town was necessary. Hard as it is for me to wrap my mind around, we don’t have enough Tupperware for freezing.

“Canadian Tire or Walmart?” I asked.

Unless we make for the edges of the city or the city itself, our shopping venues are quite limited in The Fort, which is the one thing I don’t like about it. I have no idea why the town council thinks young families would want to settle a place with overpriced, poorly constructed home and zero convenience and ease of shopping when they could find better, cheaper options closer to the heart of the city? But I digress and will leave the puzzlement of the town’s management for another day.

“I guess we should patronize Canadian businesses,” he said and so Canadian Tire it was.

Known generally as Crappy Tire, it has its niche in automotive parts and sporting goods, but it’s no Target.

I haven’t been in since the remodel, which consists of mainly rearranging where is what – something that doesn’t endear a store to me in the slightest. They did nothing about the faded worn feel of the place or to fix the fact that even with a dozen easy to access employees walking around, no one has the any idea what you are talking about when you ask them questions and fewer of them know where specific stock is housed without needing to contact a supervisor.

Tupperware, a new bread maker and Christmas decorations later, we were on our way to tea, slushies and home. Seldom do we indulge in the North America Sunday consuming rituals, so it’s a novelty when we do.

I am not done with the wifery. There is bread to make tomorrow. I am okay with baking. It’s not the worst thing about being a homemaker. That would be cleaning. Not the daily tidy up, but the deep sanitizing/dusting stuff. Baking does shoot your day to shit however, but the oven time part does facilitate writing pretty well.

The day ends with Rob on his knees grouting. The kitchen is about three steps away from done done, which makes this Prairie wife’s day.

 

 

* Just five more days of this mom blog contest thing. I’m precariously perched in the 6th spot and honestly, to get the maximum mileage out of being linked in the list – I need to be in the top five. When the site promotes the list, it only shows the top five and you have to click-through to see the others, which I am guessing doesn’t happen a lot. So to get to the fifth spot – I need more votes. 25 or so to catch or just overtake her. If you care to help out, click here. Remember you can vote daily and more than once if you have a smart phone and a work computer. Thanks!

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AM Radio


Radio Sony ICF-S10MK2I consider myself a child of the 70’s. My formative years, the ones I can actually remember, took place during that decade. The term “latch-key kid” hadn’t been invented then, but me and a great many of my friends did walk home from school to empty houses. The near to last of the free-rangers in terms of our upbringing, we can be found sandwiched uncomfortably between the Boomers and GenXers. They call us the Generation Jones when they bother to remember we exist at all.

The radio was a staple of our growing up. Not in the same way it was for our grandparents and parents, but in a sound-tracking way that I don’t think those just before us or who followed us quite experienced.

Lacking television, our background noise is provided courtesy of the late Steve Jobs and the iPod. Rob picked up one of those docking station speakers for me to use at the hall when I teach yoga, but he employs it more than I do. He can’t really enjoy his renovation work sans tunes. But the dock lacks a radio, and Rob recently expressed a desire for one with an AM/FM option, so he could listen to the local talk radio and maybe have his weather read to him as opposed to searching for it on the Internet, so I found one for him the last time I was compelled to make a Costco run.

When I was a kid, we had a transistor radio that sat on the refrigerator and my parents had it on all the time.

KDTH was Dad’s favorite. The little music that was played was mainly country, but the bulk of the programming revolved around local news, weather and the early versions of call in talk radio. There was also a show called The Cracker Barrel, which featured a form of Kijiji or FreeCycle. People would call in looking for items or they had things to give away or sell. It was a virtual garage sale. I don’t know how much junk Dad picked up that way.

Eventually, I learned of the existence of other AM stations and discovered popular music. Dad never recovered from that revelation. His music tastes never grew to include rock or pop or bubblegum. He liked old-time country, Hit Parade stuff and big band. He fought the inevitable turn of the dial as his children aged, but it was a losing one and once he relented and allowed cable to be installed, MTV sounded the death knell for him and his preferences.

It’s strange to have a radio in the kitchen again. I can’t decide if putting one there is a sign of old age or not. I do know, however, that I can’t work with music as wallpaper.  Rob has no trouble. He can even plug himself in with ear-buds when he is on his computer at work and bang away on the keyboard. Not me. I can totally ignore the spoken word, but put them to music and it’s a struggle.

Trouble is that I haven’t reached a point where I am comfortable with ignoring new music. Rob is one of the few people my age who continued to listen to current music after his early 20’s. His knowledge of groups and his taste for music beyond our youths runs as late as the 90’s, but I still like to acquire new songs. A side-effect of being a teacher for so long probably and I wonder if I will ever lose my ability to pick up new tunes.

It does make it hard for me to push the radio to the background, so I don’t think I will change my radio silence policy when I am on my own during the work week. This week is Fall Break and Remembrance Day, so Dee and Rob are home now until Monday. Noise, noise, noise as the Grinch would say. But it’s a nostalgic kind of thing. FM instead of AM, but warm and cozy just the same.

 

* Here’s the link to today’s NaBloPoMo at BlogHer and another to the Top Canada Mom’s Blog contest, and I hope you’ll take a moment to pop over and vote for me because losing really sucks and if each person who reads this votes (more than once is good), I won’t. Thanks.

I’m Not At Liberty to Say


Secret Bunker

Image by marcmo via Flickr

Banality thy name is blogging. At least sometimes. Though it may seem like my life is naught but husband, hearth and homey-ness, a lot goes on behind the veil virtual reality allows me to shroud my actual life with when I choose to.

There are certain dramas that don’t receive exemptions. My immediate family once removed has suffered more than one outing here, a victim of my knife-edged keyboarding skills.

However, I do keep some secrets and I don’t always blab about the goings on around here. Sometimes for discretion’s own sake. Most times because I haven’t quite worked out a way to say what I want to say but seem as though I am talking about something else all together.

And sometimes, I just would rather not comment.

Suffice to say that life is interesting – not Chinese curse interesting – but, the game is afoot and outcomes are uncertain in several familial arenas.