Having completely bunged up the last time I was tagged (wrote a reminder on a sticky, found said sticky on the floor behind my desk when we moved two years later) I feel called upon to respond with haste to the tag suggested by Anyresemblance. No stickies on my watch! At least, not any more stickies.

a) Four job I have had in my life:

- Video store clerk

- Fundraiser

- Commercial voiceover person

- Knowledge Manager (prompting my father to exclaim, "That's not a real job!")


b) Four movies I would watch over and over:

- A Room with a View

- Little Women (the 90s adaptation)

- Little Women (the one with Katherine Hepburn)

- Shirley Valentine


c) Four places I have lived:

- Buffalo, NY

- Canandiagua, NY

- Philadelphia, PA

- Charlottesville, VA


d) Four TV shows I love to watch:

- Alton Brown

- that one on HGTV where the people look at three houses and decide which one to buy

- Scrubs

- Uh..that's it. I don't think I have four, unless I can name the old Max Headroom series which is regretably not available on DVD


e) Four places I have visited:

- Berlin

- Vienna

- San Francisco

- Osh Kosh, Wisconsin


f) Four websites I visit daily:

- BBC

- CNN

- Weather.com

- Gawker.com


g) Four of my favorite foods:

- Melted cheese on toast

- Nutella on challah

- Banana yogurt

- Homemade mac-and-cheese


h) Four places I would like to be right now:

- A hot bath (in a bathroom not having to be cleaned by me)

- The kitchen

- On a trail in the middle of a yellow-leaved fall forest

- A fabric store, with a gift card


i) Four bloggers I'd like to tag:

- My sister, because I want to see what she says, to see if I already know.

- La Femme Follette, although she doesn't strike me as a taggy sort of girl - maybe if we all ask nice?

- Meg, because I think she'd be cool to know and her recipes always work.

- VoirDire SubCulture, because she and I lead lives of geographic proximity and I think she'd have interesting answers,

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In Blue Jelly, Debby Bull writes of her efforts to pull herself out of a post-relationship depression through domestic achievement in general, and canning in particular. I read the book many years ago, I think in the early stages of my pregnancy with the Boy Wonder, and remember not thinking much of it at the time. I don't know what happened to my copy - given to a friend, perhaps, or donated or maybe sold on Half.com but in any case it's gone. Kind of wish I still had it, though, because that theme has been on my mind lately.

Looking back through my archives I see that I am most productive, canning-wise, when I am happy. The boiling water bath, the knife work, the slog of sterilizing and filling jars - it all serves to make me yet happier, to have an outlet for my mental and physical energies. I like the creative aspects, too. Thinking of new (to me, at least) uses for, say, pink grapefruit marmalade is fun. If happiness is a required state for me to fully express myself creatively - with canning as my primary medium and other domestic pursuits secondary - I think I've got a really good explanation for why we've been not so much on the canning around here.

It's said that realizing you have a problem is the first step to recovery. Let us then give three cheers for being conscious of what might just be sadness or what might be an actual depression. Last year at this time, Brainiac and I were trying to extricate ourselves from his graduate school, trying to get back to the Philadelphia area and just generally trying to salvage what was left of our sense of self after a rather poorly executed try at life in Charlottesville. I think we - or at least I - thought that once we got out of that house and back where we feel we belong everything else would just fall into place as if we'd never left. Of course, that could not possibly happen. You can't return to a life you've stepped out of, because that life no longer exists.

I still long for my pre-move house. I miss our church, the park down the street, the friends we'd started to make, everything. I've not really dealt with that sense of loss - perhaps because I thought that the loss would be temporary, that it was all just a matter of undoing the move to Virginia. And now I'm also faced with the ending of what I had thought would be a lifelong friendship, the departure of the BFF from my life - without anger or rancor, just both of us moving onto other things. I think a fight would be easier.

So. Blue Jelly, indeed. If canning while sad brought Debby Bull back 'round to happiness, perhaps it can work for me, too. It's apparent that I'm not naturally inclined to start new projects from within the veil of sadness but maybe doing so would trigger some kind of muscle-memory of happiness - Oh! my brain might say, "We only do this when we're happy, so happy we must be."

Remember that pineapple lime jam I was going to make? Yeah, me too.

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Tonight's entry will serve as a way to avoid the pumpkin that is currently sitting on my kitchen table awaiting not carving, but processing. It's pumpkin butter time and as much as I really, really want the output that actually doing the work will bring I am having trouble getting to it. It's been that kind of week.

Tonight Brainiac - who is having motivation problems of his own - and I attempted to reboot by heading out to dinner without the kids. We needed some thinking time and space to evaluate some of the crossroads (not enough to have a single crossroad - no, we seem to collect them) at which we find ourselves. In the words of Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast and we were having trouble finding time to sit down and hash stuff out. Nothing bad or icky but important nonetheless. I feel better for having sat across a quiet table and shared our thoughts on the subject. Of course, the duck potstickers and chevre gnocchi didn't hurt.

This week I finally opened a jar of this summer's dilly beans. Quite nice, as always. That dilly recipe is so dependable that it's kind of reassuring. How many things in life always come out pretty much as we expect, just about every time? Not at all a bad thing when staring down one or two of the aforementioned crossroads.

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