The Mr. is out on the town in NYC right now. I am quite jealous of the holiday season NYC outing, even though it’s “work.” Sure, there’s a meeting in there somewhere – but there’s also several meals and yellow cabs and a hotel in Tribeca and SIGH. Don’t feel too bad for me, though, because I spent the day shopping with friends, just finished a glass of merlot, and am about to pop “Magic Mike” into the DVD player. AND I get to wear fleece. From head to toe.

So.

I had fun picking out some holiday gifts today. Do you like choosing gifts for people? I do….I realllllly do. And I’m good at it, if I do say so myself. When I see the right thing, I just know it and acquire it decisively. In a family “secret Santa” exchange, I am the most desired gift giver, I’ve been told. I don’t doubt it. I’m THAT good.

I’m also exceptionally good at buying things for me. One for a gift, two for me. Something like that.

It was a sort of holiday craft fair, a big one that comes to town the same week every year. In reality there are some crafts and a lot of cheaply produced Made in China crafty looking things. I bought a little of both, but mostly the crafty stuff. Including a necklace made out of a Tagua nut, from a tree in the Amazon. Pretty cool, eh? That one is for me, of course.

This craft fair has lots of food samples. I don’t eat them, though, because…..gross! Who wants to try a dip after 6,000 other people did? I tried to get a sample of the wine slushies they always give out, but the vendor lady was super stingy this year, probably because of the little old lady next to me who said, “Can I try ooooone more of these?” as she held up her tiny little plastic cup and slurred her words. HA! 

Up until Thanksgiving, I was pretty obsessed with pumpkin. Pumpkin bread, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin spice in my yogurt, pumpkin pie smoothies – you name it. (That was a very Bubba Gump Shrimp moment there.) I am so predictable, in that as soon as Turkey Day came and went, I moved on to my cranberry obsession. So far it’s been dried cranberries in my oatmeal, a cranberry nut bar, and a weird little sandwich I created that I love. It’s on a toasted bagel or sandwich thin, with cream cheese on one side and kalamata olive hummus from Trader Joe’s on the other side. (Weird already, right?) Then I shove some dried cranberries into the cream cheese and the hummus and stuff it with as much fresh spinach as I can fit in the bread. YUM. Had one for dinner tonight. And it was probably better than whatever the Mr. is having for dinner in downtown Manhattan, don’t you think? (Humor me, folks.)

I’m stalling before watching “Magic Mike,” to make sure the little ones are asleep. They are both a little (cough, cough) sick, and there has been a lot of traipsing up and down the stairs in search of medicine, hugs, and sympathy. A movie in the background about male strippers might cheapen those moments, don’t you think?

Hopefully there won’t be anymore kid visits. I think I drugged them heavily enough, with shots of Mucinex and Advil and a teaspoon-of-honey chaser. Now that’s the good stuff. 

I somehow sprained my ankle. I don’t know how I did it, but late morning yesterday, I began limping thanks to a very sore and swollen left ankle. I’ve been trying to ice it regularly. Trying – because it turns out that it’s not very convenient to ice an ankle when you are unpacking from a long road trip, restocking the house with groceries, roasting gourds, and generally running a busy household with kids. Oh, and painting steps. 

This afternoon, the kids arrived home soggy from the damp cold and with not a lick of homework to keep them busy. Of course. Tomorrow, when we have a busy day there will be lots. Mark my words. 

Anyway, I figured it was a perfect time to tend to my injury. Once I got the ice bag to stop leaking. And got the slippery ice bag to stay put on my elevated foot. 

In the middle of all that positioning and grimacing, our daughter holds up an epi pen. She was standing behind the couch on which I was reclined. “Is this one of the tester pens?” (When you get an epipen, they give you a blank one to use for training folks on how to give the injection.)

I distractedly answered yes, because it looked like a trainer pen. I had a stack of expired pens on the counter because I just picked up the outrageously expensive renewal today. 

Next thing I know, I am on my feet, ice is on the ground, and our daughter is crying hysterically. She’s fine – she didn’t stick herself. But it wasn’t a trainer pen. Oops.

Since she thought it had no needle, she had carelessly jabbed it into the frame of the couch. The leather couch. 

So no worries – you can feed my couch any and all allergens today, as it is hopped up on epinephrine for the next few hours. Luckily, it was a clean stick, so the leather seems unscathed. No fluid is leaking either, so maybe wood absorbs epinephrine? Or it will slowly show up as a Rohrshach-esque pattern on the leather? That might be useful if our daughter ends up needing home psychoanalysis after this whole mess. 

I took full responsibility for said mess, and apologized for being distracted by my sad little ankle icing. The real epipens are in plastic cases with lids. The trainers are not. I didn’t know we had loose (but real) epi-pens in the house. My bad. Someone could have really gotten an unnecessary jolt! 

Our poor daughter was quite traumatized by the whole thing — imagining that scary needle going into her thigh. She said she almost jabbed her leg, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a trainer, and i told her it was one. Ugh. 

Our son was not traumatized. He just wanted his snack, but not before asking me a gajillion questions about said snack. In the meantime, his sister decided to get over her trauma by eating pita chips in the most aggressive and loud manner in the history of pita chips. Seriously, it was loud. So loud that I relocated upstairs with my leaky ice pack. And then she yelled up that all that crunching made her lose a tooth that wasn’t even loose. And it’s bloody, and she “needs” me.

Sigh. This is why I shouldn’t sprain my ankle. Elevating your foot isn’t ever as relaxing as it sounds like it should be. And typing a blog on an iPad is downright torture. Autocorrect is a freaking moron. 

That is all. 

Yesterday, the kids came home anxious to gather items for the school’s holiday food drive. Over the sound of crinkling bags and clanking cans as she rummaged through the pantry, our daughter’s muffled voice asked, “What’s Rice-A-Roni?” 

Her curly head popped out from around the pantry door with a questioning look. “It’s…..well, I guess it’s a processed food version of rice. It’s like rice with seasoning salt and things mixed in already,” I answered.

She said lots of kids in her class had donated Rice-A-Roni, so she wanted to know what it was. I told her it wasn’t something we would likely eat in our house, but that it was probably donated because it’s affordable and it can be a whole meal, in one box.

From our pantry, she produced 2 boxes of organic macaroni and cheese, a vacuum pack of tuna that I have no memory of buying and never eat, and a can of low-sodium Progresso lentil soup that I bought before Hurricane Sandy, in case we lost power and needed easy meals.

I told her that I would buy some more food to donate, because our pantry is not really stocked with lots of the usual food drive stuff. Our son further demonstrated this point when he went on his own pantry expedition this morning, producing a third box of organic mac-n-cheese and 2 cans of Trader Joe’s pink salmon, left over from last Christmas’ salmon mousse recipe. Hee hee. The Mr. took those back and I reiterated that I would buy some cans of food specifically to donate.

This is the side effect of eating as many fresh, local foods as possible — not much to offer from the pantry! Our food bank is making an effort to provide fresher foods through some of their programs – but the reality is that shelf stable food is a necessity when you’re trying to keep needy folks fed.

Last night, I cursed my way through peeling and cubing 2 giant butternut squashes. There is no easy way to get that skin off, I tell you! Once I finally got the suckers prepped, I roasted them in a pan with some shallots, apples, and garlic. Then, I put it all in a pot with some sauteed onions and carrots, a little vegetable broth and simmered it into a tasty soup. Our hand blender broke, so the Mr. helped by transferring batches into the blender to puree. (Someone needs a new hand blender for Christmas.) I served it with the world’s most sour whole wheat sour dough bread, from Trader Joe’s. It was so sour that the kids wouldn’t even eat it. Huh.

Our mantle is currently decorated with a variety of gourds that need to be roasted/steamed/cooked in some fashion. It’s amazing how dated those decorations become, just days after Thanksgiving. Our daughter is particularly anxious to get the Christmas decorations going, so it’s time to process the pie pumpkins, acorn squash, and Cinderella pumpkin. I just don’t know if my wrists can handle it after battling those butternuts yesterday.

I have learned, though, that I do need to cook them now and freeze the resulting products. Last year, I decided to store a few gourds in the pantry, “for a rainy day.” I promptly forgot about (or actively ignored) them until they actually started to break down and ooze into the bin where they were stashed. That wasn’t pretty.

Time to roast the squash.

The Turningreens have taken our show on the road for Turkey Day. We’ve covered over 700 mi in the last 22 hrs, dog and all. Smooth sailing, thanks to a newly downloaded One Direction album on one iPod, a few animated movies on an iPad and a nonfiction audiobook borrowed from the library.

We are 45mi from our destination, where family and good food await.

Here is a photo of the backpack food I delivered earlier this week. Each student got their usual bag and a special Thanksgiving box. I’m thinking of those 35 kids this holiday, as well as families just like ours that lost their homes in Sandy. We have much for which to give thanks.

Have a safe and happy holiday, folks.

Have you ever heard of America Recycles Day? Well, guess what – it’s today. Apparently every November 15th is “ARD,” just like every April 22nd is Earth Day. News to me! The kids’ school is honoring it this year, so I thought I’d take it as an opportunity to revisit the original purpose of the blog, which was to document our family’s transition to greener living.

Suffice it to say that the transition has been made, many times over. It’s hard to write about it from this juncture, because we just do what we do and it doesn’t really feel special or different anymore. In fact, the other day I was talking to our daughter about “An Inconvenient Truth,” and explained to her how seeing that movie had affected me and her dad so much that it made us change the way our family interacted with the environment. She was flabbergasted to hear that we used to use paper plates and napkins on a regular basis, and to find out that we didn’t recycle nearly as much as we do now. What better measure of our success than to know that she can’t even imagine our household any other way than how it is now?

We collect bottle caps for school art projects. We collect aluminum pop tops for the Ronald McDonald House. We gather plastic bags and other plastic wrapping for recycling into artificial wood product (through the school). We reuse cardboard boxes, toilet paper tubes, and non-recyclable plastic food containers by sending them to school for engineering projects. We recycle every piece of paper that comes out of our house, along with all the plastic bottles, cardboard, aluminum, glass, etc. It can be humorous to watch me cleaning up in the kitchen, as I break down all the different pieces of things to put in all of our collection and recycling bins. Like an earth friendly chicken with its head cut off!

There are a few collection bins around that just don’t seem to ever get processed. For example, we have 2 overflowing bins of used batteries in the garage, a giant bag of old cell phones and accessories in a closet upstairs, and a corner of the garage filled with household items for Habitat for Humanity. In honor of America Recycles Day, I’ve decided to make a list of these things and get them out of our house and into the hands of someone who will recycle them responsibly. Of course, I just thought of this now, and the kids are about to get off the bus….so it will be in honor of ARD but take place some other day. 

She’d kill me if she knew I was posting this online, but here goes. This is a conversation I had with our daughter while cooking together recently.

Me: Here’s the bay leaves. Take out 3 and throw them in the pot.

Her: Can I touch them?

Me: (silence) Of course! You have to get them out of the jar and throw them in the pot whole.

Her: Can I smell them?

Me: Sure.

Her: So, are they like wine?

Me: ??? What do you mean? They’re leaves, like herbs.

Her: Yeah, but when we were at that block party, you and the other moms were talking about having coffee with bay leaves, and it kind of sounded like you were talking about wine.

Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Her: What’s so funny?

Me: That was Bailey’s, honey. Coffee with Bailey’s. And yes, that is kind of like wine – like a creamy wine that tastes good in coffee when it’s cold outside.  Ah, that was cute.

Her: You better not put it on Facebook.

Promise kept. 

When last I wrote, I was battling some major election day anxiety about the potential outcome. Immediately after signing off the blog that afternoon, I found myself making phone calls for the Obama campaign. From my couch. It was kind of cool – I happened to see something on Facebook about a call app, clicked the button, and was instantly given the names/polling info/phone numbers for a series of voters in my state. I dialed in a way that would block my personal information (because I’m paranoid like that) and called with my script about getting to the polls to be heard. I only connected with about 4 human beings, all of whom had already voted. I left messages for many others, and I’m quite confident that not a single one of them needed my message to remind them to get out the vote. However, this task kept me busy and off the streets, so it’s all good.

Fast forward a few hours and I was heavily imbibing the red wine and throwing back a healthy portion of chocolate. Stress drinking and eating, as I anxiously awaited the outcome – first with the entire family at my side, then with just the Mr. and the world of Facebook to keep me company.

Man, did that drag on, or what?

But, ultimately, my stress consumption turned into celebratory consumption, including a midnight toast in the street with a few new liberal friends in the ‘hood. We may live in a currently blue state, and in a currently blue county — but our precinct is most certainly red. I checked the local returns – it was 60/40 in Romney’s favor. So it’s kind of a weird dynamic – to have the minority opinion in a precinct who is itself in the minority for the entire county/state. Does that make sense? In my head it does, but it’s been a week heavy on consumption and lacking in sleep, so maybe it doesn’t translate into reality.

The result of being in that situation is that you don’t really get a chance to celebrate. I’m not one to gloat — I’m a really good sport and not very competitive, so it’s not like I was looking to do the political equivalent of an end zone dance. I just kind of wanted to smile and feel relieved and proud with some folks who might be feeling the same way.

After Obama’s last victory, there was an eerie avoidance of the subject the next day. It was as if we hadn’t even had an election, let alone one that put the first black president in the White House. I knew what was coming this year. Actually, I was hopeful it would be a repeat of avoidance and not negativity and disdain instead.

It has been really nice to have a few newcomers to the Bubble who vote the same way as the Mr. and I do. They’re all younger than us, with much younger children. There hasn’t been a lot of turnover in the neighborhood since we moved in, so it has been fun to see all the newer families looking like younger versions of us, right down to the political signs on the lawn. That midnight toast was sweet, but I warned the other participants that there wouldn’t be a lot of toasting happening the next day.

I was lucky enough to run into another new mom in the ‘hood at school the next morning – another person who votes like me. We had a quiet, unexpected celebration, which kind of made my day. I heard buzz about the local vibe being akin to folks receiving news of a post-apolcalyptic zombie invasion. Yikes. Lucky for me, I witnessed more avoidance than rage. Except for the old man in Starbucks who rudely announced to a store filled with women and minorities, “It PAINS me to buy this newspaper. I tell ya’, it truly PAINS me!” as he repeatedly smacked the newspaper on the counter in a ragey manner, near the cashier and while waiting for his tasty beverage. Here’s hoping it was a decaf.

And so it is. Four more years, whether the Bubble people are ready to admit it (or accept it) or not.

In your neck of the woods, what kind of reaction did people have to the election results?

I started the day waiting in line to register the kids for winter swim team. Granted, I was first to arrive, so there wasn’t technically a line to join, and since I set the tone for the rest of the moms queueing after me, we did more of a courteous sofa seating arrangement than an actual line. But still – it was all about waiting. At least our kids got the coveted T/Th spots that were needed to fit our schedule.

The next line of the day was at our local polling place. I’m well aware that I am not the only one who had to wait in this sort of line today. And I don’t actually mind waiting for the privilege of voting. It’s just the theme of the day – waiting in lines – so I have to emphasize that aspect of the voting process, you see.

I remember voting at the same location in the past, when we were much newer to the area, and seeing one or two familiar faces in the mix. Sheesh – now it’s like a big ol’ reunion of every person I’ve ever met in the local area. It’s amazing how raising two kids in a community really gets you connected to the place. 

Some faces I was happier to see than others. A few of the faces might actually have voted the same way as me…..though not many.

The Mr. voted earlier this morning and actually had a shorter wait. He said the atmosphere was tense, with little to no talking and some announcements about no cell phone usage. Fast forward about 4 hours and there’s cartwheels taking place in the space between the snaking lines, more than one school aged kid in pajamas, iPads blaring Angry Birds, old folks chatting up their neighbors LOUDLY…..yeah, it was anything but tense. It was more like a side show, but at least with patriotic decorations and seemingly unobstructed voting processes.

After voting, I took the kids out to lunch at a busy restaurant. It was the kind of place where you have to (guess) stand in line to place your order and then to pick it up. It was so busy today that I even had to queue up to get ice for my unsweetened tea.

Maybe it was all that patient waiting in line, or the fact that I missed my cardio workout, or the fact that we are finally going to find out the new President of the United States (hopefully) – but I have had a lot of nervous energy coursing in my veins today. I need to keep busy and keep myself off the Facebook.

This morning, I convinced our daughter to do a pilates for kids video with me. It was very well done, giving simple pilates-inspired exercises at different levels for kids from grades 1-4. We did all the grades, because she’s a fifth grader and I’m quite advanced, especially compared to the first grader in the video. (Not to sound braggy.)

Small movements, big results. That’s my summary of pilates. And I don’t mean girly waist band results — I mean strength. My core is absurdly strong, though you might not know it from looking at my post-two-c-section abdomen – but trust me, I can plank longer than you can.  Our daughter seemed to like the workout. Especially the parts where you don’t have to move much. She is not the most energetic kid on the block.

We tried to follow it up with a “tween yoga” workout, but neither of us could stomach how cheesy and pseudo-zen that scene was, so we bagged it to go vote instead. (This exercise session came between the swim team line and the voting line.) She waited patiently with me and was excited to press the big red VOTE button on the touch screen to actually cast my ballot.

Over the last few days, we’ve had a lot of really good talks about the political process and various issues of importance in the election. She is one smart cookie, if I do say so myself. She can also spout the number of electoral votes for most states off the top of her head, in a freaky show of 10 year old sponge brain capabilities. At the polling place, she scanned the crowd to see who was wearing red vs. blue, to determine who might win our precinct. Personally, I’d say the fleece party has the edge. (It was chilly in Virginia today.)

To quell my nerves after the lunch lines, I decided to do some cooking. Our daughter walked up to me just as I had decided (in my head) to do some cooking, and said, “I feel like cooking something.” Freaky. Anyway, she was my helper. She baked banana chocolate chip bread, and we made a white bean/collard/chard soup and a batch of tomato sauce together. It smells kind of awesome in here now.

I don’t remember feeling this nervous about previous presidential elections. Maybe I did, but I have forgotten in the passing years. I know I was excited about the possibility of Obama being elected last time, but I don’t think I felt so worried about the opposition being in power as I do this time. For me, it feels like we have a lot more to lose.

So what should I do now that I’m done blogging? Join the rowdy football game on my front lawn? Dance around the kitchen? Clean a closet? I feel like I’m going to start pacing soon, and it’s not even 5:00pm EST. It’s gonna be a looooooong night, and I think I’m going to need some wine. Luckily, I secured a bottle of my favorite cheap wine – Cupcake Red Velvet. I even paid a gouged price of over $10 a bottle because I knew I was going to be needing it.

Ohm. Ohm. 

I know the last thing most people want to see right now is another political advertisement. But, I just have to share this for folks in other parts of the country who are probably not aware of it. This is a new television ad from Wayne Powell, the challenger to our local representative in US Congress, Eric Cantor. Trust me – it’s a good one.