bearing blog

bearing blog


bear – ing n 1  the manner in which one comports oneself;  2  the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~];  4  pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation;   5  the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  • Back from a break.

    All right:  we have stumbled back from a long, lazy Thanksgiving break.  

    Here's to not being beholden to anyone else's schedule.

    Blogging will resume as soon as I think of something to write about.

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  • Shielding.

    Thought-provoking opinion piece entitled “How to Live Without Irony:”

    For many Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s — members of Generation Y, or Millennials — particularly middle-class Caucasians, irony is the primary mode with which daily life is dealt. One need only dwell in public space, virtual or concrete, to see how pervasive this phenomenon has become. Advertising, politics, fashion, television: almost every category of contemporary reality exhibits this will to irony.


    Take, for example, an ad that calls itself an ad, makes fun of its own format, and attempts to lure its target market to laugh at and with it. It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself. The ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism. The same goes for ironic living. Irony is the most self-defensive mode, as it allows a person to dodge responsibility for his or her choices, aesthetic and otherwise. To live ironically is to hide in public. It is flagrantly indirect, a form of subterfuge, which means etymologically to “secretly flee” (subter + fuge). Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.

    I don’t think this is solely the possession of Gen Y. I am plenty susceptible to this myself, and had in my mind before encountering it in the article: “the ironic frame functions as a shield against criticism.” It is sort of like wearing black all the time so no one can accuse you of trying to look good, or choosing clothes because they promise to hide you, or parts of you, rather than reveal you.

    There are many kinds of such shields, and the ironic frame might be the one that most closely resembles a Zeitgeist at this moment, but the others are all still around. There is also constant self-deprecation; the embrace of victimhood; pre-emptively wounding everyone around you with a mocking, “Don’t you have a sense of humor?”; acquiring a reputation for unpredictable explosive anger. Add them all together and it seems everyone has such a shield.

    Perhaps it is contagious, a kind of arms race of the vulnerable. You cannot be left the only one who lacks protections. Everyone knows they are naked.

    The author of the article identifies some people who don’t seem to carry the shield of irony:

    Nonironic models include very young children, elderly people, deeply religious people, people with severe mental or physical disabilities, people who have suffered, and those from economically or politically challenged places where seriousness is the governing state of mind.

    But many of these people may carry shields, too. I think elderly people — and the not so elderly, maybe starting in their sixties — aren’t infected by irony, not because they don’t put up shields against the world, but because they came of age before public irony had deeply infected the culture. They had other zeitgeists to deal with. And only someone who doesn’t personally know many deeply religious people — someone to whom they are a caricature — would assume that they are also immune from irony. Maybe if you had been raised in a very sheltered family and school, enough out of the mainstream that American popular culture would be a foreign culture. Once you have breathed that air, though, the shielding becomes part of you, and to learn to be real is to transform it. I don’t think it brushes off so easily, because it isn’t something completely superficial. It is more something you must deliver yourself from.

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  • Public breastfeeding: back to the 90’s again.

    If only it could be back to the 30’s or so. Jamie’s got a good rant going.

    I’ve been listening to people talk about public breastfeeding since 1996. Things have changed a lot since then. In 1996 there was no state in the US in which a man could marry another man, and the idea didn’t seem likely to gain traction any time soon. In 1996 the Unabomber was still on the loose. In 1996 the impeachment of a President was ancient history. The world has changed a lot since then and yet people are still talking about public breastfeeding as a plot for corrupting the youth.

    She dives into the Historic Photos of Breastfeeding trove, too.

     

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  • Jarring, yet intriguing, juxtaposition of the morning.

    Grading papers as foot-washing, courtesy of Jamie (alias Dr. Most-Gladly).

    + + +

    Thought on this one: Why do I always seem to encounter the insights that might have helped me make sense of and/or endure some difficult task, long after I have put that task long behind me, probably for good? I had to do some grading of papers as a TA a few times, and I did it back then with the expectation of a working life spent doing things like grading papers, among other things.

    But I haven’t put grading behind entirely, right, what with the whole homeschooling thing? Still doing it?

    Not even close. Grading your own child’s papers, or the papers of a friend’s child whom you know well, is NOT the same because the intimacy of critiquing lacks the discomfort, that sensation of boundary-crossing. I am supposed to help my child grow up, navigate the requirements of adulthood, which here are communicating like a thinking person in a thinking world, and sending the correct social signals. I am authorized by human sociobiology itself to perform such tasks for my children (and, I believe, for the other children in other family groups close to me). Bathing your own child, however grimy, isn’t even close to foot-washing. Hey, mothers, if you’ve done time in the volunteer nursery — isn’t there a REALLY SIGNIFICANT difference between changing your own child’s diaper and changing someone else’s child’s diaper? Admit it. Your own kid’s poop doesn’t stink quite as badly.

    The essence of foot-washing is that it violates a boundary we would all prefer not to violate. It knocks down an imaginary wall that we put there for our own protection against a number of uncomfortable truths: the sort of truths that are common to human beings. There is something in it that reminds me of the confessional (as it should). There is something in it that reminds me of Snowden’s terrible secret in Catch-22.

    I wonder if Jamie might find some irony in the discomfort of critiquing existing alongside the imposter syndrome — the collection of all such critiquing is the way imposter syndrome is communicated from teacher to student, in a sort of intellectual laying-on-of-hands. (Personally, I would be a little bit concerned for a budding academic who entirely lacked that sense of uncomfortable self-awareness. It’s a useful faculty, if it can be channelled.)

    It might be a little funny to think of such a thing in the banality of grading papers, but I think there is a lot to be said for the comparison. Someone did it for you, and now you’re to turn around and do it for others. It’s thoroughly uncomfortable for everyone involved, but it has to be gotten through and everyone is the better for it, even when nobody’s very well-practiced at the task. It requires the will overcoming the reluctance that persists, for a good natural reason, in our nature. And the will has its own reasons — not wholly natural ones — why it is good and right that it should prevail.

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  • Blast from the past.

    I just opened my email to find an email from myself.  It was a little bit spooky, because I had entirely forgotten sending this email.  I checked the date:  January 9, 2012.

    In a second I recovered, because I send emails to myself all the time using the free version of FollowUpThen.  I just don't always send them for ten months in the future.

    This is what I wrote myself:

    —————————————————————————————

    TO:  bearing

    FROM:  bearing

    SUBJECT:  Get ready for Advent!

    You already have Christmas Cards, and your advent candles are in good shape. You need 

    – Jesse Tree ornament plan or some such thing with daily readings
    – Advent calendars for the children
    – white ball candles for christmas
    – new purple and pink ribbons, and red ones too — go buy some premade
    ones or some spools

    (And while you're at it make a plan for St. Nick's day and your anniversary.)

    ————————————————————————————–

    Yeah.  I was all set to send myself a THANK YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA email, except that there isn't yet a mechanism for sending those back into the past.

    Yeah.  I like FollowUpThen.  This is not a paid advertisement.

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    2 comments on Blast from the past.

  • Blub blub.

    Here is an obscurely inconsequential Minneapolis item:  

    Minneapolis voting precinct located entirely in a lake

    Not one voter cast a ballot in one Minneapolis precinct on Election Day. That’s because the only living species in Ward 10, Precinct 3B, is of the aquatic variety.

    A newly redistricted precinct map shows 3B is located entirely in the eastern half of Lake Calhoun — the biggest lake in Minneapolis. City Clerk Casey Carl says the watery precinct is the “unintentional result of a programming error” made in drawing new ward boundary lines.

    Charter Commission chairman Barry Clegg tells the Star Tribune that the mapping software couldn’t draw a line around the edge of the lake without putting a census block in the wrong ward. Clegg says it was supposed to be cleaned up for the final map, but never was.

    Perhaps they're just looking out for a very special contingency.  It's my observation that the population of the eastern half of Lake Calhoun increases significantly after the ice gets thick enough to drag an ice fishing house out there.

    But generally, Minneapolis stays on top of things.  The error came to light when a reporter asked why nobody voted in 3B.

    If you'd like to see the watery precinct, you can look at the map here.

     

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  • Duck, duck, duck fat.

    Saturday was the last relaxing day I would have for a while (I have to drive to Ohio with the kids by myself next week — long story), and while I was out running errands I semi-impulsively decided that what I really needed was a lengthy, satisfying cooking project.

    There's something I love about spending a few hours in the kitchen and emerging with something tangible, like a big pot of complicated beef bourguignon or a stack of casseroles in the freezer for an upcoming busy time.  I don't really enjoy baking very much, but those of you who do may recognize the same satisfaction in getting all the Christmas cookies made and frozen, or making an extra-fancy birthday cake for someone special.  I suppose it's not very different from the pleasure of having all the tomatoes canned and cooling in rows of jars on the counter, except that I don't can, either.  

    Anyway, while I was out I stopped into a grocery store to get an ingredient I needed for Monday's dinner at H.'s (my turn to bring my crockpot), and in the store I impulsively bought two large frozen ducks.

    + + +

    I do not buy duck often.  I will order it in a better restaurant if duck breast (or even better, magret de canard) is on the menu — I've never been disappointed in it, because I guess restaurants don't tend to put it on the menu if they can't do it right — but it's been maybe five years since I bought duck at the store.  

    Part of the reason is that the price tag is pretty alarming.   My six-and-a-half pound ducks each cost more than twenty dollars at my ordinary grocery store.  (I would have bought smaller ones if there had been any).  Like I said, it was kind of an impulse buy.   It's probably a better idea to shop around, or look for a sale around the holidays (I guess — I know when turkeys and corned beef briskets go on sale, but I'm not sure if duck has a sale season).  Googling around, I see that Aldi stores in the US carry duck for about a dollar less per pound than at my Cub.  Oops, I'll go there next time.  Googling also indicated that I might find a decent price at an Asian market, which I might have to check the next time I need to stock up on fish sauce.  If you have a farmer's market or other source for locally raised duck, or you're a hunter, you might do even better.

    But I intended to squeeze everything out of the duck but the quack, plus entertain myself for an afternoon, so I hoped it wouldn't be wasted.

    + + +

    I thawed my ducks in a sink of cold water, and when they were pliable enough I set out some aluminum roasting pans, opened the packages and started cutting.

    I've never just done "whole roasted duck," even though a properly done one is beautiful, because I am notoriously bad at whole roasted chickens.  Duck is even more persnickety than chickens because — well, in my opinion the difficulty with whole chickens is that the breast meat is different from the dark meat and is done at different times, and I don't like hovering over the oven with foil and thermometers; and duck has even MORE discrepancy between the legs and the breast.  The legs are really full of connective tissue and behave better when braised, while the breast roasts nicely.  So I always cut the damn thing up.

    And that's why I always buy two:  because I need to feed the family on the duck breast alone.  

    + + +

    I performed an advanced separations technique ("cutting the damn thing up") for a while.  I am used to cutting up a chicken to roast the parts on the bone, but the duck separation has a somewhat different purpose.  What I was after was this:

    • one pan with the four duck breast fillets, skin-on, but cut off the bone
    • one pan with as much of the rest of the skin and fat as I could remove from the duck carcass
    • two pans each holding the remainder of the duck carcasses, most of the dark meat attached
    • the internal organs of the ducks, which I was going to toss because, sadly, I hate organ meat, even at $3.59 a pound sunk cost

    This took a couple of knives and a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors, and a lot of paper towels, as well as about six feet of my kitchen counter and both sinks, and a good deal of time.  Maybe an hour.

    (Where were the kids during all this?  With Mark, mostly, or watching movies.  You don't want to cut up two ducks unless you're sure that all small children are being adequately cared for for the duration.)

    I set my bowl of skin and fat aside, and I set my ragged-looking carcasses-trimmed-of-skin-and-fat aside, washed my hands real good, and proceeded to make dinner out of my four duck breast fillets.  They were big enough to feed my family of six, considering that we generally eschew Everybody Gets Their Own Hunk of Meat dinners.

    + + +

    Four-duck-breast dinner:

    • Put a rice cooker on with rice.  For a special treat for the kids, we used WHITE RICE.  They were ecstatic.
    • Wash up some kale and wilt it with garlic and oil, then add some liquid and let it braise on low.
    • Wash some fresh fruit for the kids.  We had grapes.
    • Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F.  Score the skin on the duck breasts in a diamond pattern.  Season with salt and pepper.  Preheat two heavy skillets over medium heat — dry — cast iron is perfect for this, but I only have one and my good big heavy skillet worked fine — and place the duck breasts skin side down in the hot pans.  Let 'em cook until the skin is crisp and the fat rendered out.  I think mine took about 12 or 15 minutes, but you have to keep checking.  You do want them to be good and crispy, so that the skin looks DONE.  Otherwise they'll spend too much time in the oven crisping up.
    • Meanwhile, whisk about 2/3 of a cup of plum preserves (I used my mother-in-law's preserves made from home-grown plums — truly worthy of glazing a duck breast) with a tablespoon or two of soy sauce and some red pepper flakes.  Five-spice powder would be nice if you had it (I couldn't find mine).  I believe that apricot or cherry preserves would also be very nice, maybe even blackberry.
    • Turn the duck over in the skillet and carefully spoon off as much of the fat as you can.  DO NOT THROW THIS FAT AWAY.  Save it in a glass container and set it aside for Phase 3 of Operation Get Your Money's Worth Out of These Ducks.
    • Brush all the preserves mixture over the duck breasts.  Transfer the skillet to the oven and roast.  I believe the internal temperature you are going for is 135 degrees F, if you like them on the rare side, but even if they get a little overdone (mine ALWAYS do — roasting birds is just not my strong point) they will still taste great.  Duck breasts just don't dry out the way a chicken breast will.  Anyway, it will not take long to finish them in the oven.  Five to eight minutes and you absolutely should be checking.
    • Transfer to a cutting board and let the duck rest a few minutes while you spoon off the pan juices.
    • Slice the duck thinly — quarter inch slices — keeping that little sliver of crispy skin on each, for which you will need your knife to be quite sharp.  Arrange the slices on a platter and pour that deep purple-brown, plummy sauce all over.  Toss a handful of sliced scallions on top and serve it with the aforementioned rice and greens.  
    • If you have a Trappist dubbel ale to go with it, SO MUCH THE BETTER.   I did!  

    My six-year-old daughter begged, "Make this every week!"  I said, "um, no."  But maybe next week I will make the rest of the package of white rice, and she will be just as happy.

    + + +

    It turned out that we only ate three of the four duck breast fillets.  I had one left over! You know what that meant?  Duck fried rice a couple of days later.  File that away in the "awesome leftovers" category.

    + + +

    After the meal was done and the ale bottle was empty, I had to head back into the kitchen to deal with the bowl of fat and the carcasses.  I thought maybe I might stick them back in the fridge and finish the next day, but the night was still young and Mark had offered to do the dishes, so I decided to get it over with.

    I put the carcasses in their pans in the oven, there to roast until the meat was all cooked through.  Here is where a little patience might have been better:  I think I would have gotten more meat off of them if I had roasted the duck more slowly at a lower temperature, to encourage some of that abundant connective tissue to let go.  Live and learn.  

    Eventually I would pull the carcasses out and pick them as cleanly as I could of meat from the legs, thigh, wings, and back.  This was harder than I remembered it, probably because I had roasted them too quickly.  But I managed to get quite a lot of meat shreds off the ducks, certainly enough for a casserole, maybe two if I stretched it.  This went well-wrapped into the freezer.  It is, I think, destined for enchiladas, which are easy and very tasty with duck — green enchiladas, maybe, or picadillo.  Or possibly I will combine some with white beans and sage for a Tuscan-inspired sort of dish.  We shall see.

    + + +

    After the carcasses are picked, of course, they are not done.  I cracked them into pieces and distributed the bones among several freezer bags labeled "Duck Carcass For Stock."  I think I can get three or maybe four pots of stock out of the two ducks, or if I like I can add a wing here and a leg there to my chicken stock to make it richer, darker, and more gelatinous.

    + + +

    While the carcasses were safely in the oven, I turned my attention to the bowl full of fat and skin scraps.  I cut the chunks up into inch-size pieces and put them all in a large saucepan with a cup or so of water, then set them to boil.  The water keeps the temperature low until it all boils away, giving the fat time to render; once the added water's gone it still bubbles for a while, I guess as moisture comes out of the duck skin.   You have to stir it from time to time to keep it from sticking to the bottom, and as the water leaves you have to pay closer attention, because you don't want it to burn.  

    The skin of the duck, near the end, starts to brown and crisp, and turn into what looks a lot like pork rinds but is actually duck rinds.  Duck cracklings!  I had a paper-towel-lined plate and a slottted spoon handy, and as these started to turn brown and crispy I started carefully removing them.  Let as much duck fat as possible drip back into the pan; anything that soaks into the paper towels is wasted.  (Now that I think about it, it might be better to drain your cracklings on a rack set over a bowl.  I went for the paper towels because that's what I do when I make tortilla chips.  Duh.)

    Once all the cracklings are spooned out of the pot and the heat is turned off, take that pot of duck fat and pour it through a cheesecloth-lined strainer into a measuring cup.  Admire your work:

    1110122154-00

     There's probably more duck fat lying around the kitchen:  in the bottoms of the roasting pans with the carcasses, in a bowl with a spoon in it next to the stove where you spooned the fat off the pan from searing the duck breasts.  You can expect to get at least a cup of fat out of each duck, if you did a good job carefully saving the fat as you go along.  With two ducks, you can think of this as the equivalent of a pound of expensive butter.  Nothing, nothing, is better for frying potatoes, and I'm told that it is also a nice fat to use for a savory pastry.  Mine pretty much all goes into fried potatoes over the following weeks.  

    I gave a cup of it to H., though, as a present.  She received it with great joy.

    + + +

     So out of my two ducks, here is what I got:

    • Meat for one really fancy family meal (the pan-roasted plum-glazed duck breast)
    • Meat for three less-fancy, but still pretty special, family meals (let's say two pans of enchiladas and a batch of duck fried rice)
    • Three or four pots of duck stock, or alternatively an enhancement for 6-8 pots of chicken stock
    • Almost a pound of premium cooking fat
    • DUCK CRACKLINGS which theoretically keep in your fridge for a while and are a wonderful thing to sprinkle on top of a salad, unless you eat them all with a nice hoppy IPA the next day as a bedtime snack
    • An evening's entertainment, if you like cutting up poultry

    Let's deconstruct this, shall we?

    7 ounces of *rendered* duck fat = $10, so my pound of duck fat is worth more than twenty dollars on its own — there, I already paid for one duck.  

    A boneless duck breast fillet can cost you at least $11 — Looky there, I had four!  Call it $40.

    A quart of prepared duck stock (or concentrate to make a quart) would cost you $6.  I expect about eight quarts of stock out of this.

    Fully cooked pulled duck leg meat is about $7/lb.  I guess I got maybe a pound out of it.

    So for my $45 and one evening's investment, I estimate I produced a retail value of $100.  It's still not cheap — I mean, you could eat chicken breast and make chicken stock and chicken enchiladas (don't bother with the fat, though) and save your money — definitely a premium foody experience, akin to eating in a restaurant.

    But even though it's not cheap, it's frugal.  Very little is wasted (especially if you can find something to do with the organ meats, and you don't lose some of that fat in paper towels.)

    I'm not sure, but I think I even tasted some of the quack.

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  • Poison control update.

    Remember that story about MJ getting pine sap in her eye, and I called poison control from camp, and all turned out well and we didn't have to drive 45 minutes to an ER, and my vacation was saved, and so I wrote a blog post wishing I could send cupcakes to the poison control center, and ChristyP made it happen via the wonders of social networks?

    The Hennepin County Medical Center liked the story enough to ask me if I wouldn't mind contributing an edited version to their "Faces and Stories" section of their PR/advocacy site.  I didn't mind.  

    If you go there today (11/12/12) you'll see my 9- and 6-year-olds in the photo on this month's "Featured Story."  They're fishing in the picture, because at the time I was calling Poison Control I was too busy to snap a photo of my screaming children for posterity.  So we went with "an outdoor activity involving eye protection" instead.

    Also, you'll see a picture of the poison information provider getting his cupcakes!

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    The story, "Delivering Care by Delivering Information," will fall off the front page eventually, and I'll replace the link then.

     

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  • Adult swim, part II.

    Jamie asked me to write about taking adult swim lessons.

    Here’s where I wrote about the year of lessons I took from my local YMCA.

    After a while, I figured it was time to start learning and improving on my own. Continuing…

    + + +

    All along, while I had been taking lessons from the instructors at the YMCA, I had been thinking: “Finally, I know how to swim laps. When I begin my next pregnancy, I’ll stay strong and healthy by swimming laps every week. Maybe twice a week.”

    Soon after I decided to quit lessons and just swim on my own, I became pregnant with my third baby. I started out excited, and in those early weeks I plunged eagerly into the pool, secretly smiling and thinking about the little one who would soon be swimming inside me.

    And then the first trimester hit me like a truck, and I spent every spare minute, for approximately 19 weeks, either sleeping or wishing I was sleeping.

    Didn’t even dip a toe in the pool. Mark took the older one to swim lessons by himself. I stayed home with the toddler. It was one of those long and grueling pregnancies, and the burst of energy never seemed to come. I never went back to the pool, even at the end.

    Looking back on it, I wish I had dragged myself there anyway. I know now (after a fourth pregnancy) that swimming can be easy and relaxing, that the buoyancy of the water is a blessed relief from the weight of a swollen abdomen, that even a little large-muscle movement can restore a sense of total mental balance. At the time, it just seemed too hard. And that was more about my inexperience with regular exercise than it was about the pregnancy. I still thought of getting up and moving as something I ought to do rather than something I wanted to do, and that meant I was eager for an excuse to stay on the couch. Pregnancy was a great excuse. Nobody would blame me for sleeping all day. All pregnancy long.

    + + +

    If you have been following my blog for a while, particularly if you are one of the people who followed me when it briefly became a Weight Loss Blog, you know that I gave birth to that daughter in mid-2006.

    And you know my New Year’s resolution for 2008 — once my daughter was no longer a tiny baby — was to start swimming twice a week.

    And you know that I kept that resolution.

    And you know that this is how I learned to embrace regular exercise instead of couch potatoship.

    And you know that this was a transforming experience.

    I still had a lot of learning to do about swimming, particularly the breaststroke, but I didn’t think that any more lessons would help. So I turned to the Internet and to books.

    + + +

    The first really helpful Internet resource I found was a trove of articles on the website of H2Ouston Swims, a USMS masters swimming club in Houston, TX. It contained so much information I was almost overwhelmed, but I read lots of it, took some notes, and tried some of the drills.

    Probably the most useful concept I learned from the articles was the skill of “sculling.” (The series entitled “Get a Better Grip!” talks about this.) It has to do with angling your hands to act as “propeller blades” as they move through the water, and how that ties into the arm strokes. (I wrote briefly about it here.)

    Just as important as the skill itself was the revelation that I needed to take these movements into my mind and think about them — in particular, I needed to read about them as described by a skilled writer. The real-life instruction in the pool was helpful to a point, but I needed to take the skills apart, analyze them, realize what each motion accomplished as part of the stroke, and then put them back together the way they were supposed to go. Once I understood how the arm motions and leg motions work together to cause body rotation — how the rotation itself provides some of the propulsion — how the relative position of the two arms during the catch can create more or less drag in the water — then I found I felt stronger, purposeful, confident. As if I could choose how to make my body work. More in control.

    In February of that year I ordered two books about swimming. One of them, I realized later, was written by the H2Ouston Swims coach. The other was a begin-at-the-beginning how-to-swim instructional manual. I used the latter one to teach myself, finally, how to swim the breaststroke. (The crucial mental breakthrough? I stopped trying to pull-breathe-kick-glide, and started thinking of it as kick-glide-pull-breathe. For some reason, that made my brain much happier and I became instantly able to integrate the pieces of the stroke together. I have never had anyone evaluate my breaststroke to tell me if I am doing it all wrong, but it seems to work, so I am kind of afraid to ask.)

    The workouts in my books were too long for me to start, so I went online looking for short swimming workouts. I found these at BeginnerTriathlete.com. That website had a set of beginning swimming workouts that started at 400 meters (for me, 400 yards, since my pool isn’t metric). Let me just point out that there are not many published workouts at under 1000 yards. But 400 yards is only 8 times across the pool. That is a nice, easy way to start out — and if you can’t do 400 yards yet, it won’t be long before you can work your way up to it. Highly recommended. Even better, the workouts come in three kinds: endurance, form, and speed. I mostly did the endurance and form workouts, since I only had two swims per week, but I did occasionally dip into the speed workouts.

    + + +

    I kept swimming, and later running too. All through my fourth pregnancy (until I worried about turning the baby breech in late pregnancy) I swam twice a week. I couldn’t wait until I could get back in the pool at six weeks postpartum. Unless I have a sinus infection or lack pool access for some reason, I never go more than a week or so without craving the water.

    I have played around with hand paddles, with lap counters. I have been through at least half a dozen swimsuits. These days I follow a minimalist, 1650-yard workout that requires little thought and takes a bit more than 45 minutes:

    • 300 yard warmup: 2 laps pulling, 2 laps kicking, 2 laps backstroke
    • 400 yards freestyle, 100 yards breaststroke
    • 300 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
    • 200 yards freestyle, 50 yards breaststroke
    • 100 yards freestyle
    • 150 yard cooldown: 1 lap backstroke, 1 lap kicking, 1 lap pulling

    I am too busy right now to think about improving, so this is my holding pattern. I only have one goal, which is to get it reliably below 45 minutes — an average of 1 minute 22 seconds per lap. The warmup and breaststroke are much slower than that, so I need to speed my freestyle up considerably to break that.

     

    One of my greatest pleasures comes weekly when I bring my now-six-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. Her lesson is 40 minutes, so I can almost get my whole workout in while she swims. When she is done, she patters over to the end of the lane where I am finishing up, s
    its down and dangles her feet in the water, and taps me on the hand when I arrive at the wall. “Can I swim with you?” she asks, and if the pool is not too crowded and no one is sharing the lane, I say “Yes” and she hops in with me. I tow her to the midline and back, nodding approvingly at her paddling form, grinning and clapping when she shows me how she has learned to dive to the bottom or to float on her back.

     

    She cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a swimmer, every week stuffing my hair under a cap and jumping right into the cold pool without hesitation or shudder. Every one of her lessons have been, for her, learning to do something she sees me do all the time.

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    1 comment on Adult swim, part II.

  • Test

    Test. Seeing if Google reader will ever pick up this feed.

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    6 comments on Test

  • Adult swim.

    I wonder if the reason I'm having trouble writing blog posts lately is that my two older sons have started setting an alarm so they can be downstairs playing Minecraft before I wake up.  Even though, as the parent, I technically have the right to say "Begone, wretches!" and shoo them away so I can sit down with my coffee, I tend instead to wander off to the schoolroom for my iPad and settle down in the rocking chair with it.  And although I can blog from my iPad, it's not quite as comfortable.  On marginal mornings this might just be enough to destroy the muse.

    + + +

    Jamie asked me yesterday if I would write about swim lessons, so I will.

    I was made to have a few sessions of swimming lessons as a child, which left me able to mess around in a pool without drowning.  And that was good enough for me until after I'd had two babies.  

    Back when my oldest was three and my second was a baby, we had a family membership at the YMCA.  I was sporadically lifting weights and using an exercise bike, Mark was running, and we were putting the three-year-old in swimming lessons for the first time.  As I brought him to the pool and picked him up afterward, I would watch swimmers swimming laps, literally something I had never done for fun or exercise.  

    Swimming seemed to me a magical, mythical exercise.  It seems so difficult to arrange, all that changing and showering.  And there is the mysterious lap etiquette by which three or more swimmers can share a lane without hating each other, despite not being able to rely on eye contact because of their otherworldly goggles.  And I heard that it requires inhuman acts, like getting up early in the morning (isn't that what swimmers do?  swim early in the morning?) and possibly going outside with your hair wet in January.  Also, I didn't know any swimmers.  I just saw them in the locker room, peeling off their caps and heading for the shower as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

    I found myself, though, saying to people over and over again:  "Oh, I lifted weights during my pregnancies… as long as I could… but I kind of wish I could swim better, so I could try swimming during my next one.  I can't really swim though."  I said it to H. often enough that one day she said to me, "Well, why don't you just take lessons then?"

    And after a while I thought:  Indeed — why not?  We were going to the YMCA at least once a week anyway.  I could have a swimming lesson and Mark could make sure the kids were settled (the one-year-old did not always like staying in the YMCA child care).  It would be a real once-a-week appointment to get some exercise, if nothing else.  I asked Mark if he could commit to it, and he happily agreed, and so I picked up a schedule for swimming lessons at the front desk.

    + + +

    At the time, the YMCA had two kinds of adult swim lessons:  the one for people who are uncomfortable or fearful in the water, today called Basic Water Adjustment, and the one for people who aren't afraid of the water and who have some ability to maneuver around in it.  I was the latter kind, so that's what I signed up for.  Today that class is called Stroke Development.

    I dug in my out-of-season clothes and found a swimsuit.  I didn't have goggles or a swim cap, so I didn't bring any.  I changed self-consciously in the locker room — not because I was unused to changing, but because I was unused to putting on a swimsuit.  I felt that everybody could tell that I was not really a swimmer.  (Imposter syndrome had, apparently, followed me home from graduate school.) 

     

    There were two other adults in my first class, both women.  The instructor was a woman who also taught children's lessons; I had seen her in the pool when I brought my four-year-old to the pool deck.  The first thing she asked us to do was to swim from the middle of the pool (just before the bottom started sloping down towards the deep end) to the shallow-end wall so that she could see what skills we already had.  

    From that ten-yard swim, the instructor could learn that I remembered some of my childhood lessons:  I could put my head in the water, and I had the basic idea of what a front crawl should look like.

     But I learned something even MORE important:  this department-store swimsuit was not going to cut it.  I do not remember much from that first lesson except that I spent it alternately trying to follow the instructor's instructions and trying to stuff myself back into my suit.

    (Perhaps the imposter syndrome was, er, truthful in this case.)

    One week later I appeared at the swimming lesson with a brand new Speedo suit from the local sporting goods store.  Also a pair of goggles, which I did not know how to adjust.  Things went better after that.

    + + +

    I took swim lessons from the YMCA for a year.  By the end of that year I had a passable front crawl and backstroke.  I had had three different instructors.  They had all tried to teach me breaststroke, and I could do each of the pieces (pull, breathe, kick, glide) but I could not put them together more than three times in a row before getting mixed up and decaying into thrashing and sinking.   I also gave up on learning flip-turns after it became clear that I always came off the wall pointed downwards, which hurts the ears in the deep end and the head in the shallow end.  

    But I was now able to swim laps, which I'd always wanted to do.  It was time for me to start practicing and learning on my own. 

    …. and I think I'll write about that in another post.

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    6 comments on Adult swim.

  • Semi-quick takes.

    I seriously don't know where the blog muse has gone, but I'll try to bring it back with some quick-ish takes for this Thursday morning.  Some are political; you can skip those if you like.

    + + +

    Simcha Fisher doesn't always write funny stuff, you know.  Today she answers a question from a sixteen-year-old girl:

    I've been struggling with a problem begun during the years I thought I was going to be a nun.  I was very attracted to the idea of Jesus as the bridegroom, as a spouse, and due to my age I fell into a "Jesus-is-my-boyfriend" mindset.  Right now I'm having trouble because though I'm not allowed to date I have a very close friend whom I feel I would like to marry someday, and this is shaking up my view of Jesus, which I think was a little warped to begin with.  I was wondering if perhaps you could tell me how you, being married, relate to Jesus?  

    The first thing I thought was:  If 16-year-old girls are seeking out Simcha Fisher for advice about marriage, then the world is truly far more awesome than I imagined.  

    The second thing I thought was:  This is good.  So.  Go read.

    + + +

    I've never gone to a Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form, but I think some of my readers do.  I heard that there's a new magazine out that is kind of like Magnificat, but for the 1962 Missal.  I thought I'd publicize it because it sounded like such a good idea, and because they'll need subscribers if they're going to survive.

    It's called Laudamus Te.  See this blog post for details.

    + + + 

    Are you still feeling down in the dumps?  

     

    “When you fast, do not look somber as the hypocrites do, for they disfigure their faces to show men they are fasting.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to men that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

     

    Not, of course, that you need to be fasting.  

    But you know, there are two kinds of crosses:  the kind we bear on purpose according to our own schedule (like fasting) and the kind that comes to us unbidden.  I see no reason why we should look somber about the second kind either.  

    So anoint your head and wash your face already.  It's obvious that things didn't go so well for you, eh?  We can all read the newspaper?  Well, if you go out of your way to make it obvious that you're cranky and worried about it, how is that going to help anyone?  

    You know who's in charge here.

    + + +

    There were some spots of good news for life on Tuesday.  Don't forget those.  Be thankful.    

    + + +

    For some on the right, this is the beginning of the "we told you so" cycle:

    I look back at 1984, and say, when Ronald Reagan won a huge reelection, it was an affirmation of his policies. That did not happen here [in 2012]; there is no mandate, because it’s not 1984. However, people have to lay down those markers, and make an argument, beginning tonight, that “we told you so.” This is going to be the two-year “we told you so” cycle. When the currency crisis comes, when the national defense crisis comes, when the Islamists hit us again, it is a “we told you so” moment, and Republicans can’t be afraid of that.

    It is nothing but a fantasy to imagine that supporters of President Obama will be humbled and repentant if and when things get worse.  We have this thing in human nature where we tend to filter out observations that make us look bad to ourselves, and emphasize observations that make our enemies look bad to us.  The worse things get, the surer each person will be that it's somebody else's fault.  And everyone will be at least partly right.

    It is also dangerous to tempt oneself to feel hopeful that people will suffer more.  So don't do it.  If you catch yourself being happy that people suffer because it makes "your side" look better, you are going off the rails.

    + + +

    For others on the right, this is a "what went wrong?" moment, and that is probably a good thing.  Personally, I am convinced that the shift in the Latino vote points to a major, major error for the Republican party.   George W. Bush got a third of the Hispanic Catholic vote — twice.  Senator McCain managed to hang on to a bit more than a quarter of it.  Mr. Romney, only a shred more than a fifth.  And if that doesn't sound like a big deal, please remember that this demographic is growing, and growing in importance.  It is a demographic that tends to be more pro-life, for one thing.

    Pragmatically speaking, white conservative Catholics should be courting Hispanic Catholics, not turning them off.  We need a Catholic vision of the Americas as a whole and of the United States's place in them.   The Republican party, at least, is far too driven by knee-jerk protectionism, and both parties are far too complacent about the effect of U.S. drug policies on Latin America.  It's probably a mistake to assume that it's all about immigration — here is a piece from the Atlantic that discusses the complexity in Arizona, at least — but clearly there's a problem, and it can't all be framed as the unfortunate result of a conservatives-are-racists smear campaign.

    + + +

    I made this chicken in a crockpot the other day to serve with a Trappist ale.  A dubbel, I think.  My beer book says that dubbels and tripels are good with meat-and-fruit combinations, so I thought that a dish of chicken with prunes would be a nice match.

    I left the olives out and added carrots, and I used broth instead of wine just in case the wine fought with my ale.  It turned out great, sweet/sour/savory, with a lovely sauce to have over rice.  If your kids like sweet sauces, this one might go over well.

    I think part of my problem with crockpot chickens is that I've been cooking them too long.  Five hours on low was just right.   I think in the future I will not do anything chicken-related in the crockpot when I need to be gone all day, and will stick to days when I can put it together at lunchtime.

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    2 comments on Semi-quick takes.

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