Fondue, week 2

I’ve been busy this week, so I’m a little late with this post, but we held our second weekly fondue night Saturday. This week’s recipes: beef fondue, garlic butter, green goddess sauce, and olive sauce.

Hazy red tone courtesy of Instagram’s 1977 filter, of course.

Review: The beef fondue was good, but really, how could it not be? We were deep-frying little pieces of steak. The garlic butter was good — hard to go wrong with something as simple as minced-up garlic stirred into a bowl of butter. The other sauces weren’t bad, but they both involved stirring liquids into softened cream cheese, which is almost always more trouble than it’s worth. That was definitely the case this time. The steak was worth the effort, though, and the dogs were really excited when we saved a bite for each of them.

Greatest cookbook ever, probably.

After our uber-’70s dinner, we binge-watched four episodes of the original Wonder Woman series on HBO Max. (Ron signed up for a subscription so we could watch Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas. The TV show was a bonus.) We are now in agreement that Patty Jenkins definitely needs to give Lynda Carter a significant role in the next movie, because she is awesome.

It was interesting to see where our respective lines in the sand were with regard to suspending disbelief: Ron was distracted by the bad special effects, which didn’t bother me because I’ve watched enough Classic Who for dodgy production values to feel like home. I was distracted by the anachronisms: The first season was supposed to be set during World War II, but the producers didn’t always pay close attention to what was happening in the background of a given scene — so at one point, Steve Trevor pulled his car into a decidedly newer-than-1942 right-turn-only lane, and in another scene, the signage on an otherwise period-accurate storefront in the background was printed in Helvetica, which wouldn’t exist until 1957.

Apparently I can accept an Amazon with superpowers flying an invisible plane and tying up Nazis with a golden lasso that forces them to tell the truth, but an anachronistic typeface is a bridge too far. #designerproblems, I guess.

On an unrelated note, I spent part of my morning working on a more important project: I’m in the process of setting up a scholarship at Herrin High School in honor of Anna. It will be called the Anna Morris Ex-A Scholarship (if you get it, you get it; if you don’t, I’m not going to explain it) and will be awarded to a graduating senior who plans to become an English teacher, based on cumulative English GPA. If nobody is planning to teach English, the scholarship will go to a kid who is planning to teach another subject.

If you want to donate, watch this space; I’ll have information about where to send checks as soon as all the paperwork is sorted. If you know any HHS seniors who might be eligible for the scholarship, let them know that they’ll have the opportunity to apply in the near future.

If the brass will agree to it, the scholarship will come with a letter from me providing contact information so recipients can call for moral support and mentoring if they need it as they start their teaching careers. Anna was always there for me through the rough spots, and I want these kids to know they’ve got a veteran teacher from Herrin in their corner if things get crazy.

We’ll see how this goes.

Emily

Big Yellow Taxi

“Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?”

— Joni Mitchell

Late last winter, I came down with a nasty cold that wrecked my vocal cords for months, and I learned not to take my pipes for granted.

A week later, our campus closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and I learned not to take in-person teaching for granted.

Campus reopened briefly in October, but the state ordered my boss to take all the flexible seating out of my classroom and replace it with traditional desks, and I learned not to take my professional autonomy for granted.

I came down with the coronavirus in November, complete with several weeks of brain fog that screwed up my ability to get words out of my brain and onto the page accurately, and I learned not to take my intellect for granted.

The virus also forced me to quarantine, and I learned not to take my pantry and freezer for granted.

In the middle of all that, one of my oldest and dearest friends died, and I learned not to take people I love for granted.

Last night, a colleague and I realized that our usual regional inservice day — which everybody generally hates — will happen online this year, in a scaled-down form, and I learned not to take free doughnuts and coffee and a day of bitching about consultants behind their backs for granted.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been on doctor’s orders not to run again until I can walk three miles without feeling winded. Ramona the Pest and I walked 3.8 miles today, and I feel better than I have at any point since last spring. I did not take that for granted, and I am looking forward to a gentle run later this week.

After a year of loss, I think a good workout is going to feel a lot like slashing the tires on a big yellow taxi.

Emily

Looking ahead

I’m tired, but I think I’m finally ready for the new semester.

Last fall was rough. Rather than go into all the details, I’ll sum up the low points:

1. Thanks to ineptitude on the part of some folks in Santa Fe, I didn’t find out what classes I would be teaching until a week before school started — whereupon I learned I would have seven preps, including two I’d never taught before.
2. Remote learning was a virtual hellscape of buggy software, lost passwords, and tech access issues that persisted much farther into the semester than they should have.
3. We returned to in-person learning for about a month, from early October to early November, before somebody in our building caught COVID-19 and managed to share it with me. I realize how fortunate I was to have only a “mild” case, but it was still unpleasant, and the brain fog and fatigue lingered long enough to make the last month of my first semester of grad school unnecessarily difficult. I still managed to pull out a 4.0 GPA, but it was a near thing, and it wouldn’t have been if I’d been healthy.
4. Being sick and exhausted and busy with grad school meant I didn’t keep up with housework the way I normally would.

By the time I got to the end of the semester, I was exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed. Last week, I took the bull by the horns and did myself three favors: I cleaned, decluttered, and reorganized my kitchen and office during a three-day period beginning Christmas Eve; I got on the FlyLady website and started re-establishing the habits that I’d learned there 20 years ago and hadn’t needed in several years; and I started a new bullet journal using a cheap dot-grid journal I found at the dollar store last fall but hadn’t had time to set up.

Tonight, I have a shiny sink, a set of lesson plans (and most of the ancillary materials) ready to go in Google Classroom — which I spent several hours taking self-paced classes to learn over break — and a glass of sangria in hand. This is the calm before the storm of another semester, but the point here is that it’s calm, if only for a few more hours. That’s something I haven’t experienced in a while, and I’ll savor it while I can.

Emily

Cheap entertainment

Y’all know I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions to start with, and with another semester of grad school on the horizon and a few aftereffects still lingering from a bout with COVID-19 in November, I didn’t feel particularly confident about my ability to keep any resolutions that involved running, traveling, or writing.

That being said, the beginning of a year is a good time to start new projects, and I came up with one that’s perfect for the middle of a pandemic: Since we can’t travel, go to the movies, or hang out at microbreweries right now, I decided this was as good a time as any to break out the fondue pots (yes, I own two — one electric and one that sits on a rack above a can of Sterno) and set out to try every recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Fondue Cook Book, which was originally published in 1970.

I don’t have the time or inclination to eat fondue every day, but I think I can manage once a week. We started this evening with the first recipe in the book: “Reuben Appetizers,” which are little balls of sauerkraut and canned corned beef, glued together with cream cheese and rolled in breadcrumbs. (There are a couple more ingredients and a few more steps, but that’s the upshot.)

They turned out better than I expected. I wouldn’t make them again, because they were awfully labor-intensive for something that’s basically deep-fried dog food, but they were enough fun to convince me that this project will be a good way to entertain ourselves while we wait for the world to reopen — and the dogs were delighted when we saved a few bites for them.

Next week, we’ll try the first recipe in the second section of the book — a traditional beef fondue that just involves frying steak in oil and dipping it in garlic butter or goddess dressing. We’ll see how that goes.

Emily

Circle of Life

For 25 years, I have been the Young Friend. What I mean is that I did not fit in especially well with most of my peers as a kid, so I gravitated toward the adults, who understood and appreciated my quirks.

In the back of my mind, I knew I was playing a dangerous game: If all your friends are 20+ years your senior, there will come a moment when you are left alone. When you reach that moment, you face a question: What do I do now?

I have a few friends my age. Some go way back; some are newer. The older I get, the more I find I have in common with my peers. Age is a great equalizer. But I have always cherished my older friends. And I have always known I couldn’t keep them forever.

Nearly five years ago, my friend Laurel died unexpectedly. I treasure the years I had with her. We had a host of things in common and delighted in discovering them, usually over sushi. She was nearly 30 years my senior, but we might as well have been sisters. I miss her.

In late November, while I was busy surviving COVID-19, one of my oldest and dearest friends, Anna, lost her battle with lung cancer. Anna was my sophomore English teacher. She was my parents’ sophomore English teacher. She was also one of my biggest cheerleaders. If not for this godforsaken virus, I would have headed back to Illinois to see her the minute she told me she was sick.

When I got word that she had slipped away, I wondered: What next? What do you do when you’re the Young Friend, and your Older Friends leave you?

The answer is: You become the Old Friend. I started grad school this semester (something Anna had long nudged me to do), and I soon befriended a young classmate. The book in this picture is a Christmas gift she sent me, along with a sweet note that sounded a lot like something I might have said to Anna or Laurel.

I still miss them. But I am not as lost as I thought I’d be. I understand my role now, and I honor them by fulfilling it. I have always loved circular plot lines, and Tiara’s gift completes a circle.

This new role is strange, yet oddly familiar and eminently comforting. I embrace it. As Sandy Denny said: “I do not fear the time.”