Easter eggs

newspapers, beeswax and candles

Many years going running now, probably about 15 years, I set aside time for decorating Easter eggs. I learned to do Lithuanian ones as a child, and it was always a very meditative process. You sit around a small container of wax melting over a candle, dipping a stylus into the wax and dabbing the wax on the white egg. When you've finished your design, the egg goes into some color dye. The part I liked the most about this was that there was no push to talk much, because you were engaged in a group activity, but concentrating. It was easy to reconnect with people you hadn't seen in a while more gently than having to have a big discussion.

We decorated boiled eggs with food-grade dyes, and included them on the Easter dinner table.

Then I learned about the Ukranian method, which is kind of like the Lithuanian method. On speed. You use raw eggs and industrial strength fabric dyes - no eating will be happening here. You use a stylus you purchased, made with a copper funnel, or a machined funnel (Lithuanian egg styluses are, well, more humble - a flat head dress pin stuck into the eraser of a #2 pencil). You paint pictures on the egg, and layer up to 4 or 5 colors - wax, then color yellow, then more wax, then egg goes into orange, etc until black.

Apart from making 100 Lithuanian style eggs for wedding favors, I have not really looked back. Ukranian all the way, for me.

One year, soon after I got my own dyes and styli and egg-blowing swag, I was so taken with the possibilities that I made egg Christmas ornaments for everyone. I must have spent 40 hours on them all told. They traveled back to the Midwest with me from Tucson, each in their own hard plastic case, in my carry-on.

when using fabric dyes, especially black, you wear all black. plus a black apron.

the newspaper gets marked with test-swipes of the stylus, to see if the wax is flowing - the paper towels take the brunt of drying the eggs after each color

 

 

You use a lot of paper towels in the process, your hands get dyed, you break some eggs when blowing them out (AFTER you spent an hour decorating them - it requires a kind of Zen detachment from the finished project or else I don't make it through).

The last few years I went really minimal on the whole process. Whereas I used to have day-long weekend parties in Tucson, dozens of eggs, dyes, implements, guests, things are necessarily simpler now. For two years now, I've dyed alone, using only black dye, making black and white eggs, my only goal to have one egg that survives, blown out, with a design that represents something A really liked that year. The first year's egg was a design from an IKEA pillowcase, that she used to make goo-goo eyes at when she was a few months old. It mesmerized her.

This year, I'm trying for fish and for ladybugs, in honor of her 12-24th months. And I managed to mix up a whopping 8 dyes, and even invite a few people over to dye eggs. Three people, last minute, and one couldn't make it. In a few years, hopefully there will be time and space for a party again. But for now, this is more than enough to get my cravings out.

And someday, when A moves out on her own, and gets her own Christmas tree, she'll get a box of ornaments from me to take with her.

Birthday weeks

The plural on that title is meant to indicate many weeks, not multiple birthdays. I give myself a lot of guilt over not doing something productive at every moment, but not these weeks. I've been giving myself license to take time to myself. Not often enough on the days I have A, it seems, because I'm feeling like she pushes all my buttons to see how many things she can do that are on the "no fly list" at home, and I get pissed off when "no" and "stop" and "come here" have no effect whatsoever on her. And we are trying to get her pacifier-free. And that is working and not working and then working again. Then it decides a little more not working is in order.

But today was glorious so far. I had coffee for breakfast and then extra coffee. I took time to sit on the couch and knit a ridiculous beret pattern that calls for this nasty little stitch called a Make, every 3 stitches. It is not fun, it requires paying attention, and means I can only get caught up on my NPR listening at best. Which is not really something I aspire to do most of the time anyway. I'm a mindless knitter. I don't like fancy patterns or many colors that I need to keep track of. I like simple, repetitive patterns that just need some initial investment and then kind of knit themselves. The simplest beret, however, is not one of these.

Anyway, I spent enough time knitting it that I could actually put it down, and more importantly, away for now, because I realized I wasn't going to like working on it come round two of having to Make 1 on top of previously made ones.

Then I did a little bit of work e-mail and editing, took a shower, had some more coffee, bit the head off the dark chocolate Lindt Easter bunny I have hidden in the pantry, and admired my new haircut in the mirror. I followed that up with some yogurt eating, some online window shopping (wherein I browse clothing and shoe sites, putting many things in my online cart, only to click away to another site, and come back maybe days later...I don't actually buy that much in the end, but I virtually try a lot of things on). I then thought about going into town to actually try things on if I was in such a shopping mood and decided to let myself off that hook, too. And just read. To sweep the balcony, to pull the porch sofa closer to the bedroom window so I could hear the radio, and to put my feet up and read. For however long I wanted.

Eventually, the cleaning lady came, and after a chat, and the rounding up of shoes that have been long overdue for a trip to the cobbler (people use cobbler here...often), I headed down to town, then up to campus. I dropped off some things in my office, checked my work email, and headed out again to one of the cafes up here. To read again. Once I was done drinking my tea, I walked across the street, got some chocolate at the campus grocery store, walked over to the outdoor seating at the other campus cafe and sat down to read again.

It is glorious. Especially since it involves a new-to-me author, Anne Lamott's first book about being a single mom and her son's first year, and she had a rough time and it doesn't make me feel bad about my own first year. I'm reading it to get ready to read the book she and her now 19-year-old son just wrote about his just becoming a dad. And I'm not feeling at all guilty.

Happy birthday to me.

Those first 30 minutes

As we have been planning for the Funnest Summer Ever, over here in our little family, where I plan to travel as much as non-pregnant-humanly possible, I've found a conference to attend. On physics education. In Istanbul. Score.

There will be an international community of physics educators attending, and I think that given my thesis topic, I can actually come up with an interesting talk or poster, even though I have not been doing Science Ed. research in the last 3 years. So I have to come up with an abstract in the next 6 days, that fits the feel of the conference - not too much about physics itself, but not heavy on the educational psychology, either. And I've decided that it might be a good time to force myself to condense my thought on how intelligence is viewed in academic physics and astronomy.

Only one problem - I need to actually start writing the abstract in order to finish it and submit it. Dang. Because, with the internet all available, the increasingly sunny days, the fact that we've finally started watching Battlestar Galactica after A goes to bed, my need to browse the whole Gap and Old Navy online catalog to find the perfect summer dress for our trip to Greece, and a host of other non-life-threatening-yet-completely-engrossing factors, I am having a hard time actually starting this abstract. Which was supposed to be relatively easy.

So I am back to my thesis writing strategies - 45 minutes work at a time. Ok, ok, I'm starting with 30 minutes, at the end of my work day. I can happily download and browse articles for hours, but just try to get me to actually concentrate on one? Sure, just as soon as I go get another coffee, and cookie, and check if there is any new post on Motherlode or BBC News.

I finally did it, though. And I'm going to try to post about this in the next few days, just to force myself to actually write about it. So I did my 30 minutes - I started re-reading a favorite article from a compilation: "The "Inside" Story: A Cultural-Historical Analysis of Being Smart and Motivated, American Style." It is an interesting look at how Western ideas of intelligence and competence tend to attribute to the individual, and not look at learning community or context. And how many Western metaphors for the mind and thinking involve "machine" words - cranking through to find an answer, wheels of the mind turning, the power of the mind, etc.

And then I went to look up some articles referenced therein. Hmm, a bit esoteric. I'm still wanting more tales from the front lines of academic science. So back to searching on Google for things like Genius Myth, Cult of Genius (a good commentary by Julianne Delcanton comes up from 2007), and this time, Weed Out Courses. And it turns out that Science Magazine had something useful, about 5 months ago. Perfect. Good place to stop and let things simmer until tomorrow.

My pants

I've packed all the maternity clothes back into a suitcase and it went down to the basement. Now the extra pants size I seem to have eaten my way to while I was pregnant is proving quite the bitch to lose. I've stopped eating sweets, I had a flu that took away my appetite for a few days, and I'm walking up hills again. But I'm not fitting in my pants anymore, and I'll be damned if I'm going to wear any maternity clothes. I mean, I feel fine about all that happened, but there is a point past which it becomes too much.

I guess it is time to go buy some bigger, non-maternity, pants.

In other mommy-life news, I've discovered that I can toast bread and then dry my hair while letting the oven broiler coll off afterwards. Superb. I'm sure that the European-ness bestowed upon me by not owning a toaster is not completely nullified by my drying my hair in front of an open oven door.

And in parents who just want to crash on the couch after baby's bedtime news, we have finally started watching what everyone else is long finished with - Battlestar Galactica. And as if it wasn't enough on its own, there was this episode from season 1 of Portlandia that just completed the look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw-SvzkMqhI

Sometimes, TV is all the culture I need.

Beginning of the day blogging

It really is much better this way. To start of before starting work. While the day is still full of possibilities.

It is sunny, and going to be warm. I'm going to be all sassy about that fact and go in to work without drying my hair. I just switched the shampoo and conditioner I'm using because, after my all-in-one shampoo/conditioner ran out, I went back to the Body Shop stuff we have at home. I'm big on getting my beauty and body care products cruelty free. And the Body Shop is the easiest place to do it here. The problem is, they changed their haircare line about a year ago. And for the last week, after using their "for oily hair" conditioner, I leave the house feeling like I might have left both shampoo and conditioner in my hair by mistake, not rinsed it, and even put some hand lotion up there for good measure. Greasy, chunky hair. Definitely not the kind of hair I can leave without washing for 2 days. And around here, washing hair every day is not the norm. So I was not very happy with this. Actually, since my hair looked like it hadn't been washed in days, precisely the moment after I'd washed it, I could have gone for any number of days without washing again, I guess.

The point is, I've finally admitted that there is something not quite right with this shampoo and conditioner, and thank goodness I can pay twice the price for half as much better stuff, that is still not tested on animals, from the local drugstore in our village.

It is amazing how humans can just not notice, or willfully ("because I can't bear the thought of what else I'm going to buy and where to find it and it is just easier if I pretend this stuff works even though I keep thinking I must have put mayonnaise in my hair by mistake"). And we do this all over the place, all day long. In education this comes up again and again - lectures don't help students get over deeply held conceptions that are not physically correct, neither, it seems, do demonstrations at the front of the class. Only having to struggle with inconsistencies directly ("um, wow, do you need an extra hour at home this morning? maybe take a shower finally?") that we start to deal with certain facts we have been happily ignoring for a while. And we ignore for all manner of reasons. Probably at the top of the list - it is easier and it saves time to ignore. That's why I do it.

It is why my go-to app on the iPhone for weather is the one that comes with the device and, pretty much on a daily basis, is wrong. It is very cheery, especially when it wants to let me know there will be sunlight tomorrow. It says that a lot. Sunny, but always tomorrow. And if I can be forgiven for hoping for sun tomorrow, how do we get me out of the pickle that this app is constantly telling me the current temperature is higher than today's high temperature, or lower than today's low? Seriously? Shouldn't that be app-writing 101, that your weather app has to reset the high and low temperatures for the day based on what they actually are? And yet, there it is, on my first screen, waiting to be tapped yet again as I waste time.

No wonder education is so hard, and the basic debunking of astrology lecture we used to do in class didn't change anyone's mind. I won't even stop listening to my weather app that is constantly cancelling our dinner plans and telling me we didn't actually say we'd meet for coffee. Honestly, how does anyone learn anything they didn't already know?