There is a good sale this morning on one of my favorite Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendars (normally $16-17ish, this morning $11.68 at time of posting):

(image from Amazon.com)

I bought one a number of years ago, and it’s one of my favorite holiday things to bring out. Even Rob, who is now 18, still wants a turn choosing which ornament to put up next. It’s all wooden, nice quality, and nice and flat for storing. I like that there’s a little box for the ornaments that haven’t been put up yet.

I don’t want to wait long for this, because I’m worried the price will go up—but IF THE PRICE STAYS LOW and doesn’t, say, suddenly go to only third-party sellers trying to get $50 for it, I will do a giveaway of one of these mid-day, U.S. addresses only. No comment-content requirement, but if you’re like me and you get shy trying to think of what to say, tell me if you had an Advent / Countdown-to-Christmas calendar when you were growing up, and/or if you have one now.

[Edited to add: Jessica (Nov 24, 2017 @ 1:49) is the winner!]

In fact, let’s talk about that even if you don’t want to enter the contest (just make a note of that in your comment), and even after I’ve picked someone, because that’s a fun topic and it’s after Thanksgiving now.

When I was growing up, we made a paper chain, alternating red and green links. Each night we could take off one link. Inside each link was written an activity for that evening: sing Christmas carols; watch a family slide show (real slides! we had a screen!); make gingerbread houses; read a Christmas story; draw a nativity scene. (I think my mom must have sorted them to make sure we didn’t have a bigger activity on a busy night.)

When the kids were little, I bought a really cute drawered unit with one drawer for each day until Christmas—but it was too hard to think what to put in the drawers, so I gave up on that. Now we have the Melissa and Doug one.

(image from Amazon.com)

Also, this year I bought the Lego Advent Calendar for the first time, at a price significantly lower than what I see it is today. I’ve been tempted every year, but they’re so expensive, and then last year I thought, “By gum, I’m going to buy one!!”—and then it sold out, and I was disappointed. So this year I bought one, and we will just see. I’ve heard such mixed reviews of delight and disappointment, I think my expectations are nicely managed. It’ll be fun to TRY, even if it is not all that we hoped.

I would like to write a post today, and I will, as soon as I can get Rock Me out of my head.

The lyrics are below dumbness (I think the worst part is when they are spelling out the word “rock”), but it’s so so catchy. I can’t stop. HIT THE PEDAL HEAVY METAL SHOW ME YOU CARE. I can’t comfortably sing along with lyrics like those even when I’m by myself. And is it deliberate that the beat is the same as We Will Rock You? And why do I love it. Why. I am going to have to listen to it over and over until the compulsion is extinguished.

Speaking of embarrassing obsessions, have you played a phone game called Love Nikki Dress-up Queen? I cannot explain its appeal for me. Am I at all interested in fashion? Does the “plot,” in which the heroine encounters people who challenge her to fashion battles and then her cat evaluates the results, make sense in any way? Do I approve of how slender and beautiful and perfect everyone is, or how sexualized some of the levels are, considering how appealing the game is to pre-teens and teens? Are the incorrectly-translated instructions intelligible or helpful? NO TO ALL. And yet here we are. It’s a fun game, once you figure out the one hundred million confusing things about it. I would recommend having a teen or pre-teen play it first and then explain it to you, except that that means feeling mounting horror as you realize that the lingerie challenge you are currently playing was first played by the teen or pre-teen.

Have you ever made cold-brew coffee? There was a booth handing out free bottles of Starbucks Cold Brew, so I tried one, and I really liked it, and then I went to the store to buy some and found it was QUITE A SURPRISING AMOUNT OF MONEY for cold black coffee in a bottle. So I looked up how to make it, and it’s not hard. The worst part is finding a couple of jars, but if you have been enthusiastically participating in the “EVERYTHING is better in a mason jar!” trend you will likely have a couple of them in your orbit. I’m using two well-cleaned 24 oz Ragu pasta sauce jars.

Recipes vary considerably, but this is the one I’ve been using. I put half a cup of ground coffee in the first Ragu jar, and fill it almost all the way to the top with cold water, and put the lid on. I give it a few shakes. I let it sit on the counter for some amount of time over 12 hours, shaking it a little when I see it and think of it. Then I put a funnel in the other Ragu jar, line the funnel with a paper coffee filter, and pour the coffee/water into it. I put a lid on the second Ragu jar and put it in the fridge. When I want some of that coffee, I dilute it 50-50 with water and heat it up in the microwave; if I’m going to drink it cold over ice, I use less water to allow for ice-meltage.

It’s kind of fussy, is my feeling about it, but not as much fuss as it seems like it will be, and it would be a handy thing to know how to do in case of a power outage. Also, Paul keeps drinking it all before I get to it: he says it doesn’t taste much different to him considering how much cream and sugar he adds, but that it DOES significantly reduce the Coffee Mouth afterward. I should get bigger jars, but right now I’m not sure I’m going to bother to do this much more.

I think for a man to more fully enjoy the movie Wonder Woman, he should spend five minutes before the movie picturing this alternate reality:

A nation where presidents and vice presidents are and always have been women, literally never men. Until 101 years ago, only women served in Congress; and even now, not even 20% of congresswomen are male. Fewer than 100 years ago, men didn’t have the right to vote—only women could vote. In the 1960s, there were still states that didn’t allow men to serve on juries. Education for men is a relatively recent idea, and many colleges had to be forced by legal action to let men attend. “Traditional values” includes the idea that men should stay at home and raise children and take care of the house and defer to their wives out of respect; many men do go out to work now, it’s true, and this development is blamed for current rates of divorce and the problems kids have in school and the breakdown of the family unit. Almost all religions worship female goddesses, and have female leaders; many still don’t allow men to be priestesses, elders, deaconesses, board members, or serve in any leadership/governing role. (Men can teach Sunday School, sing in the choir, and help set up the refreshments.) Superheroine movies and costumes and books are popular and there is tons of related merchandise for little girls. Even movies that aren’t about superheroines still tend to feature a woman in the lead role; male characters are mostly present to help her learn lessons about herself, or to further her plot development, or to be eye candy so that women will be willing to see the movie. Sometimes there is a movie where one or more male characters play the lead, but it’s called a Dick Flick, and men go see it with their groups of boyfriends because their girlfriends/wives aren’t interested. Fun Boys’ Night Out!

There. Now. Men! With all of that still in mind, pretending we do not instead live in a world where spellcheck underlines the word “superheroine”: imagine that after many, many superheroine movies (including multiple remakes of the same movie), MANY years of going on dates to see yet another movie about a woman saving the world or leading the mission or finding the killer (and then later watching your girlfriend flex her muscles in front of the mirror as she apparently identifies her ordinary self with that heroinic character), MANY years of seeing the male character endangered or attacked or killed in order to give the female lead an excuse to clench her teeth and repress her grief and start shooting up the place—there is a movie staring a MAN in the heroine role. The first whole movie about one of the only MALE superheroines! And the movie is directed by men, too, so the male superheroine isn’t dressed in just a metal speedo and sexy boots as usual! (He still doesn’t get pants, of course, but we will take our progress in stages if we have to. And maybe Davy Duke short-shorts are better for ease of movement in battle.)

And then when the movie comes out, women dismiss it, and roll their eyes, and say it’s no big deal, and deny that it’s anything special, and don’t want to go see it with you because it’s stupid and just some sort of forced political correctness; or they do go see it but then write think-pieces/tweet-threads about how masculism has gone too far in this post-sexism age, and how there are too many movies these days catering to males, and how actually it’s women who are oppressed by men’s relentless demands to be considered equal members of womankind when in fact they’re now OVER-privileged, and you don’t seriously expect any MORE movies about male superheroines now that we’ve indulged you with this one, and maybe we should remake Batboy and Superboy to be about girls if this is how it’s going to be, and is there a way we could make the seventh Spiderwoman movie so that it has more hot guys in it, like maybe by having flashbacks to when Uncle Jay was young and hot?

“It’s not even that great of a movie,” the women say, shrugging, as if their opinion is the only thing that matters, as if that’s the point, as if movie quality alone is why the men are happy-crying and heartened. You make sure your kids see it (“especially the boys”? “especially the girls”? it’s hard to say which seems more important), and you buy a Wonder Man shirt to wear to bed; and if another movie about a male superheroine comes out, you’ll see it in the theater.

Elizabeth said she wanted to try eating a vegetarian diet for a week, and she did so, and then she said she wanted to try a second week. So here I am with things like TVP and MorningStar hot dogs in my shopping cart: one week of winging it seemed like it wouldn’t hurt her, but now I think I need to pay more attention and come up with substitute meals other than peanut-butter sandwiches.

I was a little dismayed to see that the faux hot dogs are made of almost nothing except wheat and “corn syrup solids,” which seems…non-ideal, nutritionally-speaking. I guess I was assuming they’d be made of tofu or something, and I should have checked. It was the only option at our grocery store, though, and Elizabeth said the hardest thing to give up was Friday night hot dogs, so I probably would have bought them anyway. There’s a health-food store in town; I’ll see if they have better options.

I feel like I don’t even know really where to start. I’ve never tried to eat a vegetarian diet myself, or had to cook for someone who was on one. I did go through a brief and non-strict Diet for a Small Planet stage in my very early twenties (like, age 20 and 21), because my first husband was into that kind of thing, so I remember there is a bunch of stuff about combining incomplete proteins, but I don’t remember how to do it. Also, I am pretty sure I remember reading a number of years ago that protein-combining was not as important as previously believed? But I don’t remember the source, or whether it was a reliable one.

I remember BEANS playing a big role, and Elizabeth does not yet like beans. She is also not fond of eggs. But I’ve told her she might need to learn to eat beans and eggs as well as some new things, and she is agreeable to that, so I’m going to start experimenting. She does like cheese and milk and yogurt.

Some meals are easy to replace. She can have her pizza with no pepperoni. At Thanksgiving, she can eat potatoes and vegetables and stuffing and cranberry sauce; she never ate the turkey anyway. I’m going to experiment with the TVP in tacos, or she can learn to like burritos made with beans, rice, and cheese. I’m going to see if there are some veggie burgers that are better nutritionally than the veggie hot dogs. But she and I were shopping on Sunday and we stopped at Wendy’s for lunch and…oops, I forgot she wasn’t eating meat. I got her a baked potato and a Caesar side salad, but it seemed a bit sad to both of us, and she said it completely removed the Treat element of eating out. I got her a cookie afterward, out of food pity.

I don’t know what to make for her if I’m making chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes and broccoli for everyone else. I need something kind of easy that can be cooking alongside, so that she can have whatever it is, plus mashed potatoes and broccoli, without me feeling like I’m making two entire meals.

I’d like to find some things that are not just vegetarian versions of other things. That is, I’d rather make her something that doesn’t have meat in it to begin with, instead of substituting in a lot of Faux Meats.

I know there are tons of resources out there, but right now it’s overwhelming. I don’t want a book of two hundred recipes, all containing items I’ve never cooked with before, all of which look like meals for a grown adult with adventurous palate rather than for a picky child; I don’t want a website with ten years’ of archives and a lot of talk about how bad it is to eat meat. I want, like, one recipe that someone’s teenage vegetarian daughter really liked. Or, like, one recommendation for a vegetarian item from the frozen-foods section. (I mean like one or two items per commenter. We don’t have to stop talking after the first comment.)

Edited to add two things I forgot to say:

1. She’s not eating fish.
2. She’s allergic to tree nuts (though not to almonds).

Paul has reminded me that it is time to print out Daylight Saving Time Ends to put on the fridge if I want to avoid everyone having those teeth-clenching conversations about whether it’s “really” earlier or later right now.

My friend Surely mentioned this song the other day and I had forgotten all about it and I am listening to it right now for perhaps the dozenth time since she mentioned it:

When I’m With You, by Sheriff.

DARK-HIGH-SCHOOL-CAFETERIA SLOW DANCING FOR MILES.

One of the things I like best about listening to a song on YouTube is following the suggestions. You start with When I’m With You, and then it’s Love of a Lifetime, and then High on You, and then Make Me Lose Control, and then I Can Dream About You, and then Just What I Needed, and then Wait, and then You Spin Me Round, and then To Be With You, and then ’80s Films, and then Love Love Love (avoid watching that last video if you share my Underwater Largeness Phobia)—and by then the Daylight Saving Time transition is over and no one is commenting on it anymore.

This weekend with friends the conversation turned to First Kisses: the FIRST-first kind and also the first kiss in a new relationship. This is a subject I apparently like to talk about more than The Average Person, so when the conversation turned (oh, too soon! always too soon!) to another topic, I was already getting ready to talk to you about it more later. I am not exaggerating when I say I woke up this morning impatient for comments to start coming in. KISS TALK!!

My FIRST-first kiss was when I was 16, with my first boyfriend, and it was after we’d been dating two months. We were not in any way unkeen about the concept of kissing, and had done plenty of hand-holding and sitting close and so forth, but I thought the kissing stage was Important and shouldn’t be just CAREENED into, and I especially wanted the FIRST-first one to be nice and meaningful; and he’d kissed girls before but never their First Kiss, and never someone who was making such a big deal about it, so he was all psyched-out and nervous. We ended up scheduling it, which exasperated and appalled our friends, but amuses and pleases me to look back on it now.

Another memorable first kiss, also high-school era, was with someone I wasn’t even dating. There had been Considerable Flirting but we were not in a relationship, and we were hanging out watching a movie and he said, “If I ask very nicely, can I kiss you?” And I was surprised, and took a moment to consider the question, and came down on the side of “Why, yes you may, good sir!” I don’t quite like the phrasing of the question now, but at the time I found it wonderfully meta and charming—and since we weren’t dating, it seemed right that he would inquire. And I was just starting to emerge from the hurricane of my first heartbreak, so a little kissing around with a cute non-serious boy seemed like a super good idea.

I completely fumbled the first kiss with Paul—and by then I had a whole (albeit petite) MARRIAGE behind me so you’d think I would know what I was doing, but no. I wasn’t yet old enough to realize I was never going to be someone who could pull off a devastating femme fatale move, and anyway it was really embarrassing and let’s not talk about it. We had a do-over another day and that was much better and allowed me to MOSTLY stop cringing about the first one. Life lesson learned: if you’re a femme fatale, WORK that femme fatale thing, gurl; but if you’re a talker/scheduler, BE a talker/scheduler. Just LEAN INTO IT.

I would like now please to hear about your various first kisses: FIRST-firsts, the firsts of each new relationship; the bungled ones, the sweet ones, the awkward ones, the successes. OH DO TELL ME!