Just like the enthusiastic breeze that’s been whooshing through my windows and setting my papers a-flying, so is my head. It’s like my ears (eyes and mouth, too) are all open windows—anything that enters through those portals upends any ordered thinking that I might currently be applying myself to, setting my thoughts all a-swirl. No sooner do I pin down an idea to ponder than—whoooooosh!—a new gust of ideas comes blowing in, knocking whatever precious idea I was dwelling upon to the far recesses of my brain. I fumble and grab, bend down and pick up, stack neatly and weight down with heavy objects, but it’s no use. The ideas refuse to stay put.

Whoooooosh!

I am still a picklehead. After nearly two months with zero commercial hair products—no gel, no shampoo, no conditioner, no hair spray, no mousse (not that I employ all of those products on a regular basis, but I’m making a point here)—I went to my hair stylist dude guy and plopped my butt down in the chair.

“Now, Jay,” I said, says I. “I want you to tell me what you think about my hair. I’ve changed hair products and I want to know if you think my hair is better or worse for it.”

Then I waited patiently while Jay lifted and looked, touched and fluffed. “It looks good,” he said finally. “The ends seem a little dry, but I think that’s because you need a trim. Why? What are you using now?”

“Baking soda and vinegar!” I half burbled, half giggled, practically giddy with pride.

“Huh?”

And so I told him about my formula. He had never heard of such a thing which surprised me. I figured they warned stylists-in-training about weirdos like me, probably in a special class called “All the stupid things that people do to their hair and why they don’t work,” but apparently Jay didn’t take that one.

So anyway, since then I’ve washed my hair with shampoo once or twice or thrice, and I use a smidge of blue goop to mold my hairs into their proper place, but for the most part, I’m a die-hard picklehead. In fact, I’m not going to buy anymore shampoo. When the few bottles we have run out, I’ll coach the rest of the fam in the art of being pickled.

Whooooooosh!

Just in case you didn’t believe me about our traumatic Saturday, here’s a picture of the Baby Nickel’s poor smashed thumb.

He cried for a long time after whacking it with that hammer.

And he still winces every time I thoughtlessly grab his hand to wipe it with a dish cloth.

(I interrupted his nap for that picture. I went into the room and woke him up just enough to get him to sleepily untuck his arm.)

Tonight, after I told him to stop trying to clean out all the purple under his nail with a nail file, he told me his interpretation of the thumb-whacking event: Hammers have lots of purple in them and when it hits it makes the purple go through. That’s what.

I never would’ve guessed.

Whooooooosh!

Last night a couple of us dancers (ha! that sounds just a tad bit more professional than my skill warrants, but I’ll run with it) broke into our instructor’s house (she’s sunning herself on some distant beach) to practice our moves.

Except that her front door sticks so it makes breaking in rather difficult. You have to pull the door towards you and push down really hard on the knob and then—wah!—the door flies open. Only problem is, the door knob is unusually close to the door frame so you leave a bit of your knuckle skin behind every time you enter.

Fortunately, I also know where she keeps the band-aids, bulk boxes of them probably purchased to bandage all the skinned knuckleheads.

(I’m thinking I might send my husband over there to reshape the door, whatever that means. Think she’d mind?)

(And while he’s at it, I’ll have him replace the light bulbs in her outdoor lamps. If anyone would have seen us teeter-tottering our way down the stairs at the end of the walkway last night, they would’ve thought we were absurdly inebriated.)

Whoooooosh!

This is our bath water. We only get baths once a week.

Come Saturday night, we put a little water in the tub and bathe the Baby Nickel. Then in hops Sweetsie and in goes a little more water. And so on, up through Miss Beccaboo, Yo-Yo, me, and finally Mr. Handsome.

Please tell me you didn’t believe that.

Though I do know a farming Canadian family (or the son of) who did just that.

No, we get baths almost daily and that dirty water is from one day’s worth of four dirty kids. They hop in, soap up, and then stand to rinse off with clean water. We’re speed demons where bath time is concerned. No rubber duckies in this family.

Whoooooosh!

I never showed you what other escapades the kids have been up to.

Here’s their high wire act.

They got out Mr. Handsome’s come-alongs and rigged up their own tightrope.

I don’t even know how to use a come-along.

They took turns walking the wire.

Yo-Yo and Miss Beccaboo got pretty good.

The Baby Nickel about castrated himself. He’s not been so lucky lately.

Then Yo-Yo and Miss Beccaboo built themselves a riff on a potato gun: an apple gun fueled by an air compressor.

They’d jam a piece of copper pipe into an apple and then, using a smaller rod, they’d push the piece of apple that was now in the copper pipe farther in to the copper pipe, down towards the other end that they had semi-closed off with a flat washer and electrical tape.

Then Yo-Yo would hold it steady (and aim away from the house, thank you very much) and Miss Beccaboo would stick the air compressor tube into the electrical tape-wrapped bottom end and let fly with a burst of compressed air and—wheeeeeeee!

Whooooooooosh!

I learned how to dry pears. It’s so simple it isn’t funny. There is no coring or peeling involved. Basically, you just sit back in a chair, put your feet up, and wave a knife through the air and you’re done. Crazy simple.

Okay, so there’s a little more to it than that.

But not much.

Cut out the blossom end of the pear and any tough little knots.

Pull off the stem. Slice the pear into quarter-inch thick slices, discarding the two little side cuts that are mostly all peel.

(Confession: I ate almost every single one and then wondered why my tummy felt funny.)

Dip the pear slices in lemon juice-laced water (4 cups cold water mixed with 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice)* and lay them on your dehydrator trays.

After about 8-12 hours at 135 degrees, you have yourself some lovely, chewy pear slices. (Either pop the seeds out, or eat them. I eat them and they’re so unobtrusive that I don’t even notice I’m doing it.)

Bag and freeze.

Whooooooosh!

Oops, that one went by so fast I couldn’t catch it. Guess I’ll call it quits.

The end.

*This just in: Mr. Handsome conducted an experiment and left one rack of pear slices undipped. He reports that they were no different than the dipped variety. Yee-haw!

This same time, years previous: on being green

I make supper a lot. Like, practically every single night, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, year in and year out. Yadda-yadda-yadda, ad nauseum, so on and so forth. The meals are basic and earthy, intended to be well-balanced, fill bellies, please as many tongues as possible, use up the ingredients I have on hand, and be plentiful enough to provide leftovers. They’re meals that I whip up and smack down, BAM.

Last night’s supper, on the other hand, was thoughtfully crafted, each dish chosen (as I strolled through an upscale grocery earlier that day) to balance against the others. The ingredients were expensive (by my standards, as well as the rest of the world’s) yet simple, requiring only minimal embellishment.

Here’s what we ate: lettuce leaves dressed with lemon-olive oil-honey dressing and topped with slices of juicy pear and creamy brie, jasmine rice cooked in chicken broth, oven-roasted shallots, grilled salmon ($19.99 a pound—yikes! [but I got ten bucks off]) with lemon butter, fresh sourdough baguettes (one with seeds and one without), Kahlua-spiked chocolate pots de crème capped with whipped cream, and, for me only, a glass of red wine.

Dinner (not “supper,” you’ll notice) was an unusually leisurely affair. Afterward, bellies stuffed, the kids ran off to play and Mr. Handsome and I retired (not “moved”) to the living room, him to the recliner, me the the green sofa where I curled up cozy-like, my feet tucked under me.

Mr. Handsome attempted to tell me about his day—I had asked, after all—but it proved pointless. I was hyped up on good food and could think of nothing else.

I caught bits and pieces of what he said, though. There was something about a water heater, a cabin, and a muddy hole that kept filling back in with water, to which I smiled vaguely and said, “Those shallots—weren’t they just incredible? So simple, too. Just roasted with a little balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Nothing to them, really.”

“Yes,” he said. “They were good.” And then he mentioned something about wiring a basement. “If anyone hammers a nail there, they’ll get electrocuted, but oh well,” he chuckled.*

“That salmon, wow,” I amicably replied. “I just popped it on the grill and then topped it with the lemon butter. It was soooo good.”

“Mm, yes. It was good,” he said, and then in yet another valiant attempt to change the subject, “I was listening to NPR about that Florida preacher—”

“Don’t even talk about it.” I said firmly, sitting straight up and punching the air with my wine glass. “It makes me mad just thinking about it!”

Suddenly exhausted, I slumped back against the sofa. “Brie,” I said dreamily. “Brie is amazing, don’t you think? So … creamy. And I got it for a good price, I’ll have you know. There’s a whole bunch leftover, too. I’ll be living on brie and pears.” I sighed happily. “Brie and pears—they were meant for each other.”

Mr. Handsome finally surrendered. “Brie is delicious. The salmon was delicious. Everything was delicious. It was an amazing dinner, hon. Totally amazing.”

Grilled Salmon with Lemon Butter
Adapted from Epicurious

Substitute lime for the lemon, if you wish. There will be leftover lemon butter, which they say is excellent over chicken. I imagine it would also be good tossed with pasta and broccoli and some shavings of Parmesan…

1 pound salmon
salt and pepper
1 teaspoon lemon zest
4-6 tablespoons lemon butter (recipe follows)

Salt and pepper the salmon. Preheat your grill. Oil the rack. Grill the salmon for about 4 minutes on each side (keep the grill lid closed), or until it registers 155 degrees when pierced with a meat thermometer. Transfer the salmon to a platter and sprinkle with the lemon zest. Scoop some tablespoons (start with four and go from there) of lemon butter on the top and serve. Pass the extra lemon butter.

For the lemon butter:
8 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper

In the jar of a blender, combine the melted butter, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. Blend till frothy and smooth, about 20 seconds. Pour into a little jar and chill in the fridge. (Or, if you prefer, you can wait till the butter is cool and then shape it into a log and freeze—then you can chop off a little whenever you need it.)

Oven-Roasted Shallots
Adapted from Molly’s blog Orangette

I ate the leftovers for the next day’s lunch along with some brie, freshly baked sourdough, and pears. And then I died and went to heaven all over again.

1 pound shallots, peeled, large ones cut in half
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon olive oil
a pinch of sea salt

Put the shallots in a 9 x 9 glass pan and toss with the vinegar, oil, and salt. Cover the dish tightly with aluminum foil and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and turn the shallots—the bottoms should be caramel-y brown. Cover the dish and return it to the oven for another 30 minutes. Serve the shallots warm or at room temperature.

*Mr. Handsome is an exceptionally careful carpenter. He was speaking hyperbolically.

Saturday was a semi-traumatic day for my family.

1. I chopped my finger instead of the garlic.
2. The Baby Nickel got stung by a wasp. (We think that’s what it was, anyway.)
3. I deadheaded my finger while deadheading the flowers.
4. A tree branch fell on Mr. Handsome’s head.
5. Miss Beccaboo stepped on two nails simultaneously.
6. The Baby Nickel smashed his thumb with a hammer.

There were tears, band-aids, blood, ice, globs of neosporin, loud yells, and a few choice words.

We all marveled at the collective mess we had become. As Miss Beccaboo dug in the cupboard for the box of band-aids to dress yet another one of my wounds, she said, “I think I should put band-aids on all of your fingers, Mama.”

But it was a productive day, too.

1. Grapes got picked.

Mr. Handsome has a frightfully long torso. Here’s his worker-man legs…

And here’s his worker-man head, all up in the clouds.

You can’t tell from here, but he was super grumpy about picking grapes. He’s like this every year, so I don’t pay him any mind.

This little guy, on the other hand, loves picking grapes.

He shimmies right up into the arbor and hops around like a little monkey.

Considering our track record, I was fully prepared for someone to fall off the ladder and was rather surprised when no one did.

2. Snoozes were taken. (He was gearing up for the dread grape-picking job.)

3. Lawnmower lessons were given and taken.

4. And fruit-on-the-bottom baked oatmeal was discovered.

I read about the concept on Tasty Kitchen and less than twelve hours later I was pulling a pan of fruit-on-the-bottom baked oatmeal out of the oven. It smelled heavenly.

The kids, upon discovering that I had messed with the standard fare, set up a-moaning and a-wailing to beat the band. Yo-Yo was the loudest, but he shut up as soon as he tasted it, had seconds, and was disappointed when it was all gone.

It’s more a formula than a recipe: toss a bunch of fruit (I used fresh pears) with a bit of sugar (I used both white and brown) and cinnamon, scatter it over the bottom of your greased baking dish, and top with your favorite baked oatmeal recipe. I had a couple tablespoons of ground almonds left over from my twittering tarts, so I tossed them on top the oatmeal batter along with a sprinkling of demerara sugar for added crunch—delicious.

It’s a wonderfully delectable and hearty breakfast. And the best part is that it’s fortifying enough to get you through whatever the day might bring.

Thank goodness.

Fruit-on-the-Bottom Baked Oatmeal
Inspired by Tasty Kitchen

I used about six pears for this recipe, but I imagine peaches, nectarines, apricots, apples, and/or plums would be delicious, too. No doubt nuts and dried fruits would make a tasty addition, as well. The bottom (ha! a pun!) line? Do whatever you want.

4 cups fresh fruit, chopped, peeled, and cored, as needed
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons white sugar
1-2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 recipe baked oatmeal (enough for a 9 x 13 pan)
2 tablespoons ground almonds, optional
1-2 tablespoons demerara sugar

Grease a 9 x 13 pan. Toss the fresh fruit with the brown and white sugars and cinnamon and scatter over the bottom of the pan. Spread the baked oatmeal batter gently over the fruit, and sprinkle the ground almonds and demerara sugar on top. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-40 minutes. Serve warm with cold milk.

This same time, years previous: the big night and my artistic mother