people drive me crazy

I hate the days when I'm the only one in the office. The phone never stops ringing, and I have to deal, unbuffered, with idiots and crazy people all day.

And, just because it's the mood I'm in, I'm going to elaborate on my pet grammatical peeve:

it's v. its

I see it everywhere, constantly, usually done wrong, and it makes me want to pull out my hair.

ITS: A possessive. Always and only a possessive. It refers back to an antecedent. Its antecedent needn't be in the same sentence. "The cat licked its tail." "I hated that review. Its poor treatment of the subject matter lacked any clarity whatsoever." "The flan collapsed when I pulled it out of the oven. Apparently, its internal temperature wasn't high enough."

IT'S: A contraction. Always and only signifies a shortening of "it is." "It's cold out today." "That ice cream is horrible. It's a shame they tried copying Ben and Jerry's." "It's a done deal."

Most people get the contraction. People don't usually screw up "it's." But "its" seems to be problematic, and gets mutated into "it's," with horrible grammatical results. I usually see things go like this:

"The cat licked it's tail." What? The cat licked it is tail? That makes no sense.

"I hated that review. It's poor treatment of the subject matter lacked any clarity whatsoever." This is one of the most common errors, and potentially confusing because "it is poor treatment" does make sense, but only if you take the phrase that far. "It is poor treatment of the subject matter lacked..." DOESN'T WORK because there are TWO VERBS (is, lacked) and only ONE of them has a subject. In English, you can't have that. What the sentence is trying to say is, "The review's poor treatment of the subject matter lacked..." "Review's" is possessive. Therefore "its." If you really, really wanted to use "it's," you'd have to say something like, "It's [it is] poor treatment of the subject matter, and it lacks any clarity whatsoever." Looky there. Two independent clauses, and each verb has a subject. Nifty. Acceptable.

"The flan collapsed when I pulled it out of the oven. Apparently, it's internal temperature wasn't high enough." Subtly different, because in this case, "it is internal temperature" doesn't make any sense at all. WHAT is internal temperature? Oh wait, you weren't meaning to say that. You were meaning to say that the FLAN'S internal temperature wasn't high enough. Notice the possessive. Therefore "its."

We get ourselves confused, I think, because when you attach a possessive to a noun, you do use an apostrophe. "My dad's tie is black." "My sister's dog ran away." "My parents' minivan died." "The house's sewer lines broke." Yes, there are apostrophes. But when you make them into PRONOUNS, the apostrophes go away. Possessive pronouns don't have apostrophes. "His tie is black." "Her dog ran away." "Their minivan died." See? No apostrophes. Same with the pronoun "it" made possessive: "Its sewer lines broke." No apostrophe.

Whenever you see "it's," with an apostrophe, it means "it is." There is no possessive. It's (look! look here! It is!) just our lazy way of eradicating any syllable we possibly can. It's a contraction.

"Its," on the other hand, always signals a possessive. Its (this "its" refers back to the "its" in the previous sentence, where "its" functions as the subject because it's in quotation marks) flagrant misuse by native English speakers is distressing.

If all of this sounded too confusing, forgive me; I've been too long out of tutoring. If, however, you're still confused about the issue itself (not it'self), just remember: if you use "it's," and it doesn't make sense when you break it down into "it is," use the other "its."

And if you noticed that all of my examples except the cat licking its tail sounded morbid, just remember that it's the kind of mood I'm in.

Here endeth the lesson.

*Oh, and a little aside, because there are times when I love being a bitch, but those times are followed immediately thereafter by remorse and the fear that I've offended my friends: If you couldn't care less about grammar, then discard whatever I have to say in its regard. If, on the other hand, you find yourself using writing as a frequent tool in your professional life, or if you are any kind of perfectionist, or if you want your writing to be as polished as possible, even if it's just a hobby, then please, please heed my words. It's important. People might think, Who cares about grammar? I have more important things like paying my bills to worry about, but the little rules of life are what what keep us striving to be and do more than we did and were when we started out this whole life thing. And I come from a family (read: clan, in the good Scots sense of the word) which views proper education as of penultimate importance.

i'm finally cool

It was one of those "on" days. I got up early, got to work early, got the office up and running early, organized everything on my desk, and finished a few tasks that have been hanging over my head for weeks.

A couple of those tasks involved driving down to the County-City building in South Bend to bother the Assessor, the Auditor, and the Recorder, but everyone was magically in a good mood (or was after I smiled and talked to them for a few moments) and the tasks didn't take nearly as long as I thought they would.

The one fly in my ointment was that I'd run out of wiper fluid on the way down, and the churned up slush from everyone else's tires had crusted on my windshield. But, having remembered that I'd kept a little bit from my last refill in the trunk, I tossed my papers and my purse in the car, locked it up, and went about popping open the hood and pouring the rest of the wiper fluid in the tank.

I am no car expert. That's the only useful thing I know how to do. I can't change a tire, or check my oil, or monitor my brake fluid. No, I rely on male friends and mechanics for that. But it looks pretty spiffy, me matter-of-factly lifting and bracing the hood, dumping fluids where they belong, dropping the hood so it snaps shut.

And apparently the men who could see me thought so too. A scary-looking gentleman preparing to cross the street next to me said as he approached, "That's cool. A woman who can fix her own car."

I replied with a grin, "Thanks; I do what I can."

He then proceeded to tell the guy who had just parked behind me, and who had also been watching, how cool I was. That gentleman, who looked like a basement computer nerd, wholeheartedly agreed. I thanked them both, waved, and headed back to Michigan with a clean windshield and a mightily boosted ego.

Yup. After all these years, I have been declared cool by strangers, for the simplest task a person can perform on a car besides turning it on. Hey, sometimes cool is easy, right? I can live with easy.

In Praise of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

So, anyone who knows me even remotely knows that I love sci-fi. I was reared on a steady visual diet of Star Trek (all series) and Star Wars, and, as soon as I was old enough, The Terminator movies.

Terminator has been as influential on the development of my sci-fi mind as The Lord of the Rings (the book, thank you) was on the development of my fantasy mind. I've always loved dystopic or post-apocalyptic films and stories -- maybe because they're tributes to humanity's drive for survival, maybe because they reveal what people can accomplish when stripped of all the luxuries that we tend to call necessities, maybe because they're semi-prophetic in their way, and I like to envision that "end of the world" sense in order to mentally prepare for something like that to happen.

So of course I loved Terminator, and I loved T2 even more (still haven't seen T3, which I'm probably going to have to break down and give in to watching; I just didn't see how anything could come close to topping the achievements of the sequel film). Thinking about the time loops has occupied my mind, when I wasn't imagining what living in James Cameron's 2029 would be like.

When Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was announced to air on FOX, I almost split my skin from excitement. This has been THE story for me, the defining narrative of science fiction, full of, not just nifty twists and interesting futuristic dramas, but so much heart. So I dedicated myself to the weekly watching of the show.

And I'm appalled at all the nasty reviews it's getting. I'm not sure why the critics are so caustic, but something crawled up their backsides and got stuck there -- disappointment, perhaps? But disappointment in what?

Granted, the show isn't perfect. Sarah Connor's voiceovers at the beginnings and ends of the episodes tend to indulge in overly cheesy lines (but let's not forget the Writers' Strike, folks; the best that had committed to the show were a bit on the absent side). But frankly, that's the show's worst fault. What the other critics have been lambasting a.) is something the show can't really help: that it's not the movies; b.) is a misunderstanding of the multiple "time travel" theories that exist in science fiction; and c.) is a result of all the bad television that has become detrimentally popular in our current time.

I. The Show Isn't the Films.

First, the show can't be the movies. Obviously. Plots and writing and even characterization have to change from a film, often dramatically, in order for a TV show to sustain itself over time. Everyone knows that Linda Hamilton absolutely kicked ass as Sarah Connor; but Lena Headey has a different challenge -- how to kick ass without burning out her character. Hamilton had a span of two hours in T2; she should have been, was, and could be the intense, borderline psychotic woman that she played. A Sarah Connor like that would self-destruct in a TV series, the nature of which is much more drawn out.

And let me address one issue that I've seen a lot of viewers and critics complaining about: how Headey's Sarah Connor failed to kill the liability Andy Goode, when Hamilton's Sarah would have blown his head off on the first meeting.

The response is simple. Look at T2. While Hamilton's Sarah did have a few minutes of going terminator herself in the attempt to prevent Miles Dyson from creating Skynet, she didn't actually kill him. That Furlong's John Connor arrived too late to prevent his mother from attacking the Dysons didn't matter; she had discovered that she couldn't kill Dyson, and in fact was a weepy mess at the idea that she nearly did. Three years out of the mental hospital -- the time interval which has passed at the beginning of The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- and no longer being treated constantly as a lunatic would reasonably have stabilized her a lot, and so the character's development into Headey's thoughtful, reluctant-to-murder, yet still tough and determined Sarah Connor makes sense, rendering her willing to immolate Andy Goode's home, but spare his life if possible. (How many wimps commit large-scale arson?)

And I think that's one of the major disappointments that the show's viewers and critics struggle to resolve, which leaves them (mostly the critics) excessively angry -- Headey isn't Hamilton. The show isn't the movies. But how could it be? When a beloved pet dies, and you decide to get another one, you're in for a huge let-down if you expect the new pet to be exactly like the old one, particularly if the new pet is a dog and the old pet was a cat. The animals have different personalities, and, as different species, distinct and variant qualities and needs. So with the challenging transition from film to television, and from what I've seen, the show is doing it well.

II. There are Lots of Time Travel Hypotheses.

The second thing I noticed, from one review that of course now I can't find, was a lot of ranting about the inconsistencies of the time travel. The writer was particularly convinced that should Sarah and John Connor succeed in their offensive to prevent the war with the machines, John Connor would cease to exist, because Kyle Reese wouldn't have come back in time to protect Sarah and thus engendered John.

Well, goodness, how sophisticated.

In fact there are half a dozen or more different theories as to the effects of time travel in science fiction. I spent a while looking them up. My understanding is at this moment only basic (but it's interesting enough to want to do some real research, and not just haunt the archives of Wikipedia, which is the source of all my information; there are more technical sites, but I found them to be, with my nonscience background, practically unreadable; plus they dealt more with psychology and atomic physics than science fiction), but I found enough to satisfy that critic's question, and a few of my own, in regard to the Terminator franchise's time travel.

It seems that in the films, we're dealing with a mutable timeline, identified as "Type 2.1" in this article. This type of time travel assumes a singular timeline in which the past is indeed changeable, but resistant to change, and so requires great efforts and enormous actions to affect more than a few minute details in the immediate future. The films play this hypothesis out rather well: In T1 Kyle Reese's prime objective is not to change but to preserve the future he knows -- the future in which John Connor exists. In protecting and then impregnating Sarah he fulfills his objective, although he didn't know that falling in love with her would finalize his purpose; in T2 the attempt to change the future appears to work -- the Connors blow up Cyberdine and destroy the first Terminator's chip and arm, as well as almost all of the second Terminator -- but in T3 evidently the attempt only postpones the war (after all, in T2 they melt Arnie but forget about the half an arm he left crushed in a gear somewhere, so futuristic technology survives -- see how the timeline resists major change), and so, while they change a little of the immediate future in T2, they still fail to prevent the war itself.

Maybe it's confusing to contemplate the necessity of the time loop in which Reese travels back to father John, then dies, and then is born and grows up and travels back to father John; but this is where the second factor in time travel hypotheses comes in: the Novikov self-consistency principle. According to this idea, there's no paradox in the Reese-Connor time loop; it plays out consistently, since each "time" Reese goes back, he fathers John. This of course presupposes that no one can stop the war against the machines, and the motivation for sending Reese back in time remains the same.

The mutable timeline hypothesis also answers the question of where the "first" John Connor came from. If one refers back to the idea that the timeline resists major change, but allows for differences in the way events are fulfilled, one can hypothesize that the "first" time everything happened, John Connor could have been conceived in the usual way, with some guy from Sarah Connor's present; Reese's involvement in John's parentage only came from John's "first" decision to send back a protector for his mother and therefore himself. This is consistent with the Type 2.1 mutable timeline hypothesis, since in the end, John Connor is indeed born (after Reese became the father, and Sarah Connor bore his son, she obviously assumed that this was the son meant to save the world, named him John, and never had any other children), although the circumstances of his parentage and birth might have differed from the "original" version.

Based on the mutable timeline hypothesis, with the Novikov self-consistency principle incorporated therein, there are at least two possibilities for the future of the TV series that don't relegate John Connor to certain extinction:

1. They fail. After all, the war between mankind and machines is a pretty big event in the world's future history, the timeline resists change, and they've been unable to change it so far. And there's a lot levied against them as far as possibilities for rerouting the circumstances of the future are concerned: the Japanese computer could become Skynet instead of the Turk; with the many machines running around in 2007, the odds of destroying every trace of the future's technology become small; and most important of all, as the Terminator stated in T2, "It is in your nature to destroy yourselves," so something's bound to come up -- in which case Kyle Reese will once again go back in time to protect Sarah and sire John.

2. They succeed. And since Kyle Reese already came back in time in this present's past, and John Connor was already born in this present's past, John continues to live (none of the major time-traveling stories, or hypotheses, say that a character is wiped out in the present if the future is changed; once an event is past, unless you jump back in time again, that past is fixed. The present keeps you safe within itself, if you will). Given that the rate of technology is moving consistently with the future they avert, and given that the timeline resists change without enormous effort, it's highly likely that someone in the "new" future will invent a time displacement machine, and you can bet your boots that John Connor would have a vested interest in tracking down Kyle Reese and finding some reason to send him back in time to ensure his own existence. Or, alternatively, John doesn't send Kyle Reese back, and so the time loop ends and reverts to the "original" version of John's birth, which includes no father from the future; but "our" present John Connor, who has already been fathered by Reese, still exists.

If one doesn't like the idea of the time loop having an origin, one could also consider the idea of block time -- where time is its own dimension, much like space (this idea flows from relativity), and where an observer outside of time (say, God) would view time as an object, with past, present and future existing simultaneously, almost as though all were individually their own coexisting present, although within the system the observers don't know the future, having not yet experienced it. Therefore the time loop causes no difficulty; in this block time, that loop has always been. If one further adopts the concept of block time that accepts mutability in the form of multiverses (many different block times, in which a change in one past/present/future causes the observer within the block to leap into a different block without being aware of the transition -- consistent both with theories of alternate realities and Hinduism's bhakti yoga's concept of karma), one could say that the Reese-Connor time loop never needed an origin, while allowing for the T2 and SCC attempts to change the future.

In fact, multiverses are the easiest answer to all of the questions posed by puzzled viewers, especially since any change in the "past" (or, from our observatory viewpoint, the present, which is the past to the folks from the future) would have no affect whatsoever on the time travelers themselves, or their memories, but rather create a new alternate universe, or block time; the travelers simply could never return to their original "present" (which was, but is no longer, our future). This might explain Reese's statement to Sarah in T1 that he is from "one possible future," and so her subsequent attempts to change the future have created a number of different universes; it might also explain why SCC's Derek Reese, having killed the present Andy Goode, still remembers the Andy Goode who existed in the future (his own subjectively experienced past).

Whichever time travel hypothesis you want to use, the idea remains, regardless, that what's in the present, stays in the present. Leaping back to the past only changes the present from which the traveler leapt (which, from the perspective of the past to which he leaps, is the future). John's not going to disappear if he succeeds in preventing the war; his past is set. He's already been born. Whether the future John Connor, the one fighting the war, disappears altogether, or whether the prevention of the war splits time into a new alternate universe, the present John Connor's existence is safe simply because he's living in the present, and has a set past.

One last kicker: Multiverses can still work with a mutable timeline, since the change itself is what creates new universes. You can go with the mutable timeline alone if you don't like the multiverse theory.

So after examining the various time travel hypotheses out there, one becomes clear on the consistencies maintained by both the Terminator films and the Sarah Connor Chronicles. SCC is more complex, sure, with people and machines displacing themselves en masse in time, and going backward and forward; but it still works.

III. People Should Watch Better Television.

The last issue that seems to be especially troubling to skeptics and critics is a flaw in their own viewing experience. The most popular TV shows airing right now, which have been airing for a decade or so, are all serials. Each story arc lasts no longer than one episode, in the span of an hour all the major conflicts come to resolution, and all questions are answered as quickly as they come up. Of course, there are always a few longer story arcs that last throughout a season, but in general each episode has some sort of tidy resolution. I'm thinking specifically of CSI and all of its offspring here, along with Law & Order and House and NCIS and Numbers and even my very favorite, Bones, which does the serial crime drama more brilliantly than anything else out there. A few shows have been daring enough to run their seasons more like twenty-hour films shown piece by piece (Angel Season 4, for example, or possibly even Lost and 24); but they tend to wane in popularity, which is a terribly sad statement on the modern viewer's attention span and discipline toward patience and independent thought.

So mostly these critics' yapping about the irresolution in SCC is a result of their own steady diet of episodic TV and their often-pandered-to desire for immediate gratification. What I like about SCC is how it raises all kinds of questions, and opens all kinds of possibilities, without answering or resolving them immediately; it's a show that's running on the assumption that it's going to be around at least four seasons, and thus it develops the conflicts and the themes with appropriate gradualness. Plus there's an enormous amount of story to cover -- this show has taken on something huge in wrestling all the mythology of the franchise into one series.

The slow development of the central issues is actually poetic in its execution. Friedman's not afraid of subtlety; in fact, you have to pay close attention to the dialogue at every point in an episode to comprehend the more intricate points (which makes up for the moments when he comes out and hammers you over the head with something obvious -- in fact, the constant shift between subtle and obvious balances out the show).

One moment in particular that I loved occurs at the end of "Dungeons & Dragons," where Cameron inexplicably picks up a pencil and a piece of paper and starts writing. The allusion of course is to the "grief notes" written by her classmates at school in reaction to another classmate's suicide, and to her own interpretation of the "grief notes": "you should write a note when you can't cry" (and, being a machine, she can't cry); but the question is what she's trying to grieve. She clearly doesn't give a damn about Derek Reese dying on the table (she's still a machine), so one must assume that she's writing it in regard to the Terminator she just "killed," at whose CPU she stared for a long moment when she pulled it out of his head. The implication is that she's somehow "related" to him, but the question isn't answered in that episode, nor in the next; so the viewer just has to sit tight and have a little patience waiting for the answer to unfold itself somewhere, with the knowledge that these little questions will probably have enormous implications when they're answered, and the wait will be completely worth it. (Of course, this is the girl whose ultimate television writing hero is Joss Whedon, for whom every single intricate detail, no matter how irrelevant it seems, ties in to this huge interconnected web of story. I know Friedman isn't Whedon, but when I see a question placed so deliberately without an immediate answer, I know it's gonna be good when it comes.)

You'd think this little-bit-at-a-time storytelling would be even more incentive to keep watching the show, and for wanting its continuance into a second season, because if the show doesn't survive, the answers will never come. And come on, people, this is a great show! The actors perform superbly in their extremely multifaceted roles, and the show is more than up to the challenge it took on in adding to the Terminator legacy. John Connor's character receives a nice fleshing out (and no, I'm not talking about the way the camera loves Thomas Dekker) as a broody, sometimes self-absorbed teenager struggling to forge his own identity apart from his destiny, who at the same time can't help being a hero from time to time -- after all, it's what he was raised to be -- and who furthermore hasn't completely accommodated the difficult years he spent in foster care apart from the mother he was told was insane. Sarah Connor has undergone a little more evolution from the frantic helpless damsel in T1 (who shows seeds of the determination she exhibits later) to the barely sane warrior-woman in T2 (who yet shows seeds of the humanity that she exhibits later) to the internally stable, quieter, but still powerful and terrified woman she becomes in SCC. And of course there's Cameron, the unique and compelling "unknown cyborg" who at times seems incredibly human, and at others seems completely alien, and who seems to be seeking, if her ballet performance at the end of "The Demon Hand" is any indicator, not so much humanity (like Pinocchio or Data) as a soul (vis a vis the original Little Mermaid).

Altogether I love the show. Its minor flaws in writing quality will, I think, be resolved with the end of the Writers' Strike, and grow smoother with time (har). Each episode is markedly better than the last, which is saying a lot because each episode is quite good, even as "beginner" eps. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has set the perfect pace for itself, which, while "slow" to the perception of the mind trained on House, gives itself enough time to address the franchise's themes with the same heart and painful beauty that made the first two films not only good action, but gorgeous.

the roses didn't open

I watched the process for awhile as they dominated the front office at work. When they first arrived on Valentine's Day, a gift from the boss to his wife, they had that sort of power with which fresh roses demand attention. I tried not to pay them too much attention, since I wasn't getting any roses myself and was determined to be perky about it, but I can't really help staring at roses. The world's most messed-with flower, cultivated and exactingly bred and mutated for hundreds of years until they resemble nothing of what they started out to be, and yet so beautiful they lodge themselves in some little corner of my mind and won't be shaken.

Roses have unrolled happy memories for me on a carpet of their own petals since I was a teenager, and ironically they've never had anything to do with the romantic love they traditionally celebrate. One of the best presents ever given to me was a Midas Touch rosebush for graduation my senior year in high school, from a friend who worked in a greenhouse. I planted it on the western side of my parents' house, and three times a summer it exploded with enormous pure yellow roses with a fragrance so intoxicatingly divine you wanted it to kill you. Then there was the nicest Valentine's Day of my current experience, my sophomore year in college, when my roommate's boyfriend, having remembered my story of the Midas Touch, and knowing I was single and unhappy about it, had a half-dozen yellow roses delivered to the front desk of my dorm, to complement my roommate's dozen red roses. I think I cried. My roommate, when I showed her the roses, smiled and said, "Yes, he was quite upset when he couldn't find Midas Touch roses and had to settle for generic yellow."

But since I've seldom received roses of my own, I've always been a rose stalker -- when my father bought roses for my mother, I would steal moments to bury my nose in one of the blossoms and breathe it in. Like stealing chocolates from the tin you weren't supposed to find. I couldn't help myself. So when the boss's wife's roses took up their temporary residence on top of the filing cabinets in the front office, I waited for them to come out of bud so I could sneak my little olfactory indulgences.

They never opened. Maybe it was the lack of light, or some kind of temperature flux in the office; maybe it was that as the days went by and they didn't unfold their petals I lost interest in them. I had secretly hoped to pull them out and dry them to use for decorating -- I have a couple of vases at home that could use a little filler, and dried roses are both beautiful and creepy, with that gothic charm I loved in The Secret Garden or Frost's "Asking for Roses."

But they dried themselves, in the enormous vase they came in, still in bud, and the stems inside the water started to mold, and my coworker Deb shuddered one day, looking at them, and said, "They're beginning to look like something from The Addams Family."

That's when I took notice of them again. "You're right," I said. "I'll take them home." So today I snipped off the stems with scissors and laid the roses to the side, so I wouldn't forget them.

I woke up this morning to a snowstorm and four more inches of cake frosting on my car. It had begun to smell like spring over the weekend, just the faintest traces of waking trees and earth, but it all was buried beneath the final onslaughts of winter, and it made me feel sort of depressed. Waiting for the roses to open was a little like waiting for spring. But things don't always happen like you assume; and fortunately there are adaptable back-up plans, like taking home mummified and half-blackened roses, simply because they're interesting, and you love roses, and you'll be looking at them when you carry them to the front door, instead of at the slush clogging the driveway, and finding just the right corner for their spookiness will occupy a little more time in another evening spent at home with the cat. And thinking about them will remind you of the Midas Touch rosebush resting under the snow far away in Pennsylvania, and make you look forward to the time when you can close your eyes against open roses and enjoy the simple act of breathing.

keep on tryin'

It seems that one is forever in the process of growing up. This is the difficult and the delightful thing about life.

I've been in a phase of restructuring since I moved in October. Suddenly my budget got a lot tighter, and the free-spirit financing I'd employed for -- well, ever -- failed. So I took stock. Budgeting has never been my strong suit; if a person wore budgeting like armor, mine would be constructed of paper. Not terribly sturdy. But I've found a few strategies which wiser people have been employing since their infancy that really work, and I feel a little less strapped as a result.

Here are a few of my methods:

1. (Okay, this is the most obvious one of all. Ever. The wiser people I mentioned will be rolling their eyes and groaning, Duh.) Record all transactions in my check book ledger. All checks, all debits, all credit charges, all online bill payments & purchases (it's only payments for me, these days), all automatic withdrawals get their own little line. I then subtract as I go so that I have an accurate accounting, and can keep track of how much money I actually have when checks that I've written clear. Oh yes, and because double-checking is always a must, I take a gander at my online banking account a few times a week in case any hidden charges crop up. Further, I'm beginning to build a teeny bit of a "cushion" by rounding my expenditures up by ten cents or so, or a dollar, so I have a little more than I think.

2. Every weekend I cook the week's big meal and eat the leftovers all week. This may sound horribly drab to some of my readers, but with the hours I work, and how tired my days render me, I find it nearly impossible to cook anything more demanding than biscuits or a batch of cornbread on a weeknight. Plus, the food I create in my little kitchen is the kind where the idea of leftovers leaves me with a little anticipatory thrill, because what comes out of my oven and off my stovetop is so freaking good.

Now here's where the money-saver comes in: When I cook that big meal, I freeze half of it right away. Boss-Lady bought me a vacuum sealer for Christmas last year, and I've found it to be a fabulous machine. (Vacuum sealed food lasts for two years in the freezer, and up to six months in the fridge; so even things like cheese, which only get used occasionally, can be stored without spoilage and waste.) The benefit of freezing half my gargantuan meal is that I have freshly frozen leftovers available for the weeks when money is especially tight, or I need to stock up on things that don't fit into my regular budget (such as cat litter, cat food, cat medicine, feminine products, a new rug to vamp up the horribly shabby rented carpets), or pay up unexpected doctor's bills. Plus, I like to hoard things, and this habit is in keeping with my pack-rat tendencies.

I've decided to designate one week per month as Freezer Week, and empty out what I've frozen. This will give my budget a little bit of leeway, which might even allow me to buy the very occasional book, movie or CD (hey, a spendthrift can only exert so much self-control), and help me save up a bit more of a cushion. Plus, since my ancient fridge doesn't have a self-defrosting freezer, keeping the stock to a minimum will help with the inevitable several-times-yearly thaw-out.

3. I make everything from scratch. Since I love cooking, this is the fun part of budgeting. This past weekend I settled on carnitas as my meal-of-the-week, and had just written "tortillas" on my grocery list when I thought, Wait a minute. I then fetched down my bread book and found a recipe for tortillas made from scratch. So I scratched tortillas off my list and put down "all-purpose flour" instead, which stretches a lot longer than store bought bread products and saves money in the end. (The tortillas were fabulous, by the way.)

I've also discovered a love for crumbled cornbread in milk as a breakfast food, and cornbread is both cheap and easy to make (and LOTS cheaper than cereal). When I tire of that, I whip up some pancake batter, which keeps in the fridge for a few days. (I'll post a recipe for baked pancakes in a minute.)

4. I've written down a general budget, but I find that it's necessary at the beginning of each month to sit down and plan out my bills and when to pay them, based on when I get paid (which is every other week -- twice-monthly). While bills are almost always due on a certain date, the same is not true of payday, and so a little strategizing is necessary to balance out bills with groceries and gas. Fortunately my bills are scattered all over the month, so the juggling isn't too taxing.

So those are my places of improvement thus far, and I have a few additional goals. But slow and steady wins the race, and lasting change seems to come from more gradual progress. I'm pretty happy with where I am right now; in some respects I'm rather squeaking by, but at least I'm always aware of what's in my account, and when I'm able to take care of my responsibilities. Now I just need to begin surfing for grocery sales, and buying the Sunday paper to hunt down coupons.

This is the stuff that always sounded so drearily dull when I was a kid. But the fun is in the challenge...it's like playing chess against money. And there's a satisfaction in winning.

and the world welcomes

Josephine Sandra Place, born at approximately 3:02 a.m. on Monday, February 11, 2008, weighing 7 lb. 12 oz., with a full thatch of dark hair and beaming, lovely parents. All of them are beautiful.

all things new

I'm at the hospital right now, awaiting the birth of Meg & Phillip's baby. To be more specific, I'm hiding in the outer waiting room pretending that I've gone home, because Meg was worried that I'd be here too long and the weather is really terrible. But wild horses couldn't drag me away, so I'm sacked out surrounded by playing cards, my enormous nearly-finished afghan (I'm shooting for seven feet), Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, T. S. Eliot, the Bible, the Catholic Catechism, a writing journal, a diary and a dying cell phone. I've written one bad sonnet, lost every game of solitaire, browsed through one poem, taken one pseudo-nap, made one phone call and two text messages.

Not that any of that is important. Meg's delivery is progressing very slowly, but still progressing, so there's a lot of excitement there. They're exhausted and I wish I could do something, but for the time being the best I can do is just wait to celebrate or to be useful, or both.

I'd share all, of course, but when she finally reads this, if she hasn't killed me already for not going home, she'll kill me for talking too much.

I'm going to be an auntie!!! She's going to be a mom!!! Phillip's going to be a dad!!!

My family is getting beautifully bigger. Here's to the miraculous fruition of love!

realizations

I think this is going to be "the year" after all. Why, I can't quite say, but inklings keep dawning upon me -- little quiet ones, still small voices, that whisper of the beauty of a coming metamorphosis.

Life seems broader somehow, as if, after months or years of staring at the ground just one step ahead of my feet, something nudged me to "lift up mine eyes" and see, at one and the same time, both the vast expanse of a horizon I'd forgotten or never knew, and chariots and horsemen bordering the approaching hills in flame. And the sky -- such a huge, still sky, like the huge, still plains and the huge, still hills. It all makes my eyes hurt, but the kind of hurt that makes it worthwhile to keep looking. Like turning on a lamp after reading in the dusk.

I've been carrying with me certain, not quite regrets, but wistfulnesses -- courses of action I wished could have ended differently, roads I could not take but wished I could, choices I had to make but didn't want to, memories I've returned to in loneliness that made me long for some of the things I used to have but couldn't keep. This morning I savored the wistfulness, spent a little time in sadness, until just a little bit ago I looked up again and realized that I've outgrown it. That I'm not the same person who fit with the once-had-beens; that I've grown and changed a little bit from who I was, so that what I longed for wouldn't fit me anymore. I opened up the wistfulness that I've kept wrapped carefully in my knapsack and discovered dust where I remembered pressing buttercups (Nature's first green is gold...). And while the land is still in winter, underneath the earth other things are remembering that it's almost time to live.

It's all so strange and different that I'm not even bothered about cliches. I'm more preoccupied with the newness of feeling alive, with knowing that I'm a part of a brilliantly immeasurable world, and that there is room in it for me to grow as expansive as I can. There's room.

How did the dry bones feel when they began to rattle together in reconfiguration, called by a Son of Man to transform? I wonder if they felt a little bit like this.

Gave up smoking for Lent.

strange things

are happening.

I suddenly don't care very much at all about being single. It's like all the grief, rage, anguish and horror of the last four years have been transmuted into an unfamiliar tranquility.

I think there are a lot of reasons. The meds, the growing desire to grow up, gradually expanding horizons, and, lately and most especially, the anticipation of the arrival of Meg and Phillip's daughter. I am going to love this child. And I want her to see her Aunt Sarah as a woman who is happy, fulfilled, joyful, and satisfied, whatever her marital status; not as a woman who is desperate, depressed and miserable. Our generation didn't have many upbeat models of people who found themselves single; I want to show this little girl that joy in any kind of status is possible.

Besides, I'm tired of living in stasis. I want to move forward. Sitting around and waiting for some mythical man to catch me up hasn't worked for me yet, and I'm bored. So here I go.

I've become increasingly eager to put down roots. This year brought the revelation that I don't have to wait for anyone to do it. So I'm overhauling my spending habits and looking to be more and more responsible, with an eye on land ownership once my debt is cut back. True, I'm still a twenty-something, and therefore just a kid yet, but I'm tired of being a kid. I want to grow up. And it's nice to look forward to thirty, instead of dread it.