memories

Spring Thing: Delaware Children’s Museum

April 30, 2017 by krisis

This week brought an all-new adventure for us – The Delaware Children’s Museum!

We loved this museum. It is a completely different beast than the well-known Please Touch Museum in Philly.

Please Touch is themed around small-scale, hands-on activities and role play, and it’s kind of expensive at $19 a person, plus parking! If you’re going to go more than twice in a year you might as well be members.

Delaware Children’s Museum was much more geared to larger exhibits and full body engagement, whether that’s climbing, zooming around on person-powered scooters, or playing dress-up on a pirate ship. It had six large play areas, some with just a single theme (like climbing or scooters) and others with multiple engagements (a lemonade stand and restaurant with other counting activities). Delaware Children's Museum

It’s also just $9 per person! And, not for nothing, it’s in the middle of a huge, free parking lot with two decent restaurants, as opposed to Please Touch, which is somewhat isolated.

EV6 probably would have spent her entire day just exploring the ant-hill climbing structure directly inside the front door, but she also enjoyed the physical fitness exhibit and retooling the magnetic race car.

The drive to Delaware from our house is only about 10 minutes difference, and it seems like the museum is much less crowded on weekdays. This Spring Fling gets a solid thumbs up from both EV6 and I.

a wonderful snow day

March 14, 2017 by krisis

I really love snow days.

I’m sure on some level that’s based on the vicarious “home from school” thrill that comes along with them even now that I don’t have any school or work to be home from. More than the thrill, though, there is the wonder. A chilly world covered in white. The familiar landscape transformed into a topography I cannot readily recognize. Even on days I still had school or work my eyes would twinkle with delight on the trudge to the trolley.

Plus, now I get to experience it alongside a tiny person!

Unfortunately, today’s blizzard was not the spectacle of last year’s – complete with fluffy mounds of snow taller than my toddler and a white-out at twenty feet. That day our neighborhood was a wonderland of which I remind EV constantly to make sure her memory of it is cemented. No, today was alternating crunchy flakes and freezing rain, creating a heavy layer cake of ice crystals I can still hear neighbors struggling to upend as I write this.

Thus, EV and I engaged in another time-honored snow day activity: curling up on the couch and reading comic books.

EV has some of her own comics, which she reads until the point of disintegration – mostly Lumberjanes and the spectacular (and local) Creep. She also loves some of mine, particularly Ms. Marvel and Spider-Gwen.

Somehow in the process of making my regular new comics order I wound up with an extra copy of the anthology-style Sensation Comics: Wonder Woman, which has laid dormant on EV’s bookshelf for months.

Suddenly, the past two days, she’s completely obsessed with it. And, well, Wonder Woman was my superhero gateway drug, so I’ve been over the moon to see her carrying the book everywhere she goes. Thus, today after reading her the brilliant Jason Bischoff / David Williams mother/daughter story with Hippolyte from issue #4 , I turned to EV and said, “Would you like to read a real Wonder Woman comic – the ones that I read back when I was a kid?”

I saw the little stars light up behind her eyes before the sibilant, “yessssss,” escaped her lips.

You see, about a year before we had EV I decided that despite not having read Wonder Woman in years that I wanted to own all of it – collections for the impossible-to-find Golden and early Silver Age material, but then floppies from as far back as I could manage to present day.

I’d enjoy knowing I owned it, and maybe the hypothetical eventual child E and I had discussed would be interested in the and I’d have them bound into one massive set of hardcovers to keep on the bookshelf like a set of encyclopedias.

Not only was today a magical snow day, but today was that day. I read EV the first issue of George Perez’s 1987 post-Crisis reboot of Wonder Woman’s mythology.

She stared at every page in slack-jawed amazement. This wasn’t the superhero comic she was expecting, but a story about Greek Gods (which she knows from her treasured Encyclopedia Mythologica pop-up book, and also from Lumberjanes). The gods plotted and struggled, and eventually gave birth to the Amazons, one of whom in turn created a child from the clay of Themyscira’s shores. [Read more…] about a wonderful snow day

hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

March 2, 2017 by krisis

Of my memories of my two grandmothers, both now long since passed, many are of their food.

They were both Italian and both only a few generations removed from southern Italy, but they cooked two distinct sets of recipes. Even their meatballs and gravy were entirely different from each other. My paternal grandmother made the best minestra maritata – or, “Italian Wedding Soup” – I’ve had in my life, to this day. My maternal grandmother made potato gnocchi from scratch – springy, substantial gnocchi the likes of which I’ve never since tasted again.

Some members of my father’s family can duplicate the Italian Wedding Soup, but my mother and I cannot recreate those gnocchis. We’ve both tried. Despite making them many times with my grandmother, I couldn’t possibly tell you the recipe.

There wasn’t one. She eyeballed the ingredients every time, combining them by hand right on her kitchen counter, cracking the eggs into a mound of flour. She could never settle on the most efficient process to cut and “thumb” them – that is, put the little divot in the middle. She alternated between a butter spreader, a pizza cutter, and her bare hands, never satisfied with any of the methods.

(Once I attempted to make them myself from memory right on our kitchen counter, not realizing that our countertops were not actual granite and would not withstand hundreds of passes with the pizza cutter, my tool of choice.)

(Oops!)

There is one recipe of my maternal grandmother’s I can make. “Scapels,” she called them, a sort of plain, egg crepe rolled up like cigars with sharp grated cheese inside and served under scalding hot soup. I only know how to make them because she could not eyeball the ratios of ingredients in the batter. My grandmother grew up during the Great Depression and barely had a grade school education. She wasn’t confident writing more than a few words in longhand and couldn’t easily multiply entire lists of ingredients.

I became her walking recipe card and recipe multiplier. The phone would ring. “PeEEter,” she would say in her Philadelphia accent, “it’s gram-mom.” “I’m makin’ scapels. Eh, what is the recipe again? Three ta three ta one?”

“Three to one to one,” I would reply, exasperated, probably interrupted from reading a book.

“Right, right,” she would reply, as if she was just testing me and had known all along. “But, I wanna make a triple recipe. How many is that?”

“Times three, gram-mom. Nine eggs to three to three.”

“Awright, thanks. Love you.”

The recipe for her scapels is dead simple – 3 parts eggs to 1 part each flour and water, plus some salt, pepper, and parsley, and rolled up with Pecorino Romano cheese.

The hard part is cooking them to the right consistency. [Read more…] about hand me downs (or: an anthropological study of family recipes)

Book Notes: Fiction Friday Preamble

November 4, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug] 2012-02-27_01-04-47_524 In an alarmingly short amount of time I will post the part of this Patreon launch I am both most-excited and most-anxious about – the first publicly-available material from my 2010 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, which has since been through several rounds of edits and expansion.

This superhero story has been with me since 1994, when I scrawled the title “Crisis Team” longhand on composition paper at seven in the morning before being picked up for Masterman to attend 8th grade. It became fodder for English class writing assignments, and later the first thing I rushed to type on my first Word Processor with a screen and memory. I used to carry a binder of it around with my school books, handing it to Gina for a read in Health Class.

After a few years of carrying it with me, its name became my email handle, which then morphed to Krisis with a K when I found that Crisis was often already taken.

Over the years I got in the habit of constantly rewriting the first chapter – updating it as a proof of concept. Of what, I’m not sure, since I never once would follow through with a second chapter or an outline. Perhaps it was just my way of keeping the story fresh for myself.

In 2010, two factors conspired to make me finally get past the first chapter. I had just read (and heard) Eric Smith’s Textual Healing and was suddenly inspired to write my own fiction. And, Gina had thrown down the gauntlet that she was attempting a NaNoWriMo book and that I should do the same.

Finally, I sat down to think about more than the first chapter. Who were these people? What was this world? How would it change as the result of people with super powers emerging? Were they just emerging, or had they been around for a long time.

I was energized by the questions and dashed the book out in 30 days. Yet, having finished the first draft, I sunk back into old habits – I’ve been revising it for six years rather than writing more.

There’s a start-up saying – “better shipped than perfect.” It’s fine that the end goal of writing a book is publishing a book, physically or digitally, but publishing requires something resembling perfection – and perfection is my eternal foe. The way I got the novel out of my head was to give myself permission to write badly for a month just to get it on paper. The way I’m going to get the novel out into the world is to give myself permission to post my working draft here for you all to read, knowing there are still changes both small and large to be made before it reaches a final, printed state.

I am so anxious and excited for you to read it.

35-for-35: 1982 – “Maneater” by Hall & Oates

November 2, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]When I was slightly older than EV I still did not have my own record player (I know – the injustice), so my mother was in charge of pulling out my favorite songs on vinyl and then dropping the needle into the groove.

One of my earliest musical memories is of her playing “Maneater” on repeat for us as we sat in our rocking chair. I know this was an early memory because the turntable was on a set of ramshackle shelves built by my father before my parents separated, rather than its later home on the other side of our living room.

Here’s what I understood about “Maneater” at the time: it was about a creature, like “Thriller.” She ate people! It had a throbbing bass line that was good for bopping along to. Also, it was on an LP called H20, which meant water but also meant Hall & Oates. Basically, it was the most clever thing anyone had ever thought of.

As a toddler, I may have missed a few entendres.

As with a lot of my early-in-life vinyl favorites, I completely lost touch with Hall & Oates as I grew older and amassed my own record (and, later, CD) collection. In fact, unlike Madonna and MJ, who I began spinning again in college, Hall & Oates didn’t make their return to my collection until 2010 inspired by the requests of my communications-buddy and cube neighbor, MK.

I was even listening to The Bird and The Bee’s H&O cover LP before I was listening to H&O again!

Revisiting “Maneater” as an adult and a musician, a whole new set of elements stick out for me.

The intro is a familiar Hall & Oates gimmick – a long minor-key instrumental that gradually adds additional instruments (bass, keyboards, a trickling water effect, and smarmy saxophone) and then pops into the relative major key for the verse.

The lyrics are as lurid as those of my other childhood favorite with an awesome bassline, “Billy Jean.” Here, H&O are unsubtly describing falling in love with a sex worker – or, at least a woman who is ready to devour any high-roller who enters her life.

What makes the song interesting to me today is this line: “If you’re in it for love you ain’t gonna get too far.” Who exactly is pursuing the Maneater, in the context of the song? Is it another rich boy, unware that he’s about to be drained dry? Or, is it someone who is genuinely falling for her.

If the latter, who are H&O to warn him off? Maybe he’s the true love that has been missing from all of Maneater’s conquests.

We’re not meant to know. Hall & Oates wrote fantastic songs, but they weren’t ever especially known for the complete narratives of their lyrics. If you don’t believe me, please share – what is the “That” for which “I Can’t Go For”?

Even without a coherent story, there’s no doubt that “Maneater” is one of Hall & Oates’ stone cold early-80s classics.