February Book Report: Lost Lake

February’s book transported me to summer as I read.  Lost Lake, by Sarah Addison Allen, is set in southern Georgia, around a lake in the humidity of a Georgia summer.  I could practically hear the cicadas and see the fireflies as I read.

Like all of Allen’s novels, there were moments of magical realism in this story about a mother and daughter piecing back together their life.  For a woman who lives in a reality-based existence, it’s surprising how much I enjoy the magic in these stories.  That and a happy ending keeps me coming back to Allen's novels.  I didn’t enjoy Lost Lake as much as I loved Garden Spells, another Allen novel set in the warmth of the South, but the characters were well-drawn and it was a good and gentle read for the chill of February.  

Kitchen Must Have: Handled Batter Bowls

The backstory:

For 2016, I plan to profile one of my kitchen must-haves items each month.  Whenever possible, I’ll include links to the item.  Links are not affiliated; they are just for convenience in case y’all want the item.

This month, we're talking handled batter bowls.  I have two of these bowls that are on heavy rotation in my kitchen.  At least one or the other is in use whenever I cook.  The clear glass bowl is useful for seeing the bottom of whatever recipe is being mixed.  It also has the convenience of doubling as an 8 cup measuring bowl.

I use it for mixing pancake and waffle batter; for stirring together potato casserole, for making salsa, salad dressing, and homemade boursin cheese.  It was a gift for my sister and I've had it for nearly 20 years.  I couldn’t cook without it.

My second batter bowl is a more recent acquisition, a birthday present I received last fall.  I liked it because of the polka dots.

It’s big enough to hold 12 cups and isn’t as lightweight as the glass bowl but is incredibly useful, especially in the Winter soup-cooking season.

Both fit quite neatly into my dishwasher and wash up clean, ready for the next day’s cooking.  And if I’m cooking, one of these bowls is surely in play.

South Carolina Primary: Predictions

Between Friday’s announcement that the bluster and bully duo of Chris Christie and Donald Trump are stumping for T-rump in Texas and the coming apocalypse that is March 1st’s Super Tuesday, it would be easy to lose sight of the fact that South Carolina Democratic voters are headed to the polls today.  But they are headed to the polls and Hillary Clinton is about to score a solid win.  She’ll take South Carolina by more than 20 points, a sign of her robust support among African American voters who are a core constituency of the Democratic party.

Before the night is out, we’ll be turning our attention to Super Tuesday.  I’m still in the production game, so you’ll hear from me on Tuesday.  

Real Life Conversations with JT: Bookish edition

The Backstory: Last weekend, the District wrestling tournament was held.  We’re a small school with about 350 students in the Upper School so our team is relatively tiny to begin with.  We regularly compete against schools with 1500 to 3,000 students in grades 9-12 in a state where wrestling is BIG, so the District tournament is a pretty fierce competition.  Unless one of our wrestlers advances, this event signals the end of the season and the close of 6 days a week of wrestling practice.  That happened last Friday night.

JT: For the first time since the end of November, I can sleep in on Saturday.

Me (secretly relieved that I can also sleep in):  Yes, you can.

JT:  I’m going to sleep in and then I’m going to lie in my bed and read.  I love to read in bed.

Me (smiling):  Me too, son.

Internet, if you’re keeping track, it would seem that I brought the right baby home from the hospital.

New Bloom Thursday: Week 9

Once the amaryllis stem starts growing, it’s rather unstoppable, getting taller each day.  There’s a flower hidden in there and I’m excited to see it.

This year, the growing amaryllis is accompanied by green stems peaking out of the flowerbed soil.  The late amaryllis is just part of the strange weather we’ve had in the last few years.  It’s been a mild Winter, but we had a huge snow storm; the biggest I've ever experienced.  Last night, a late Winter night, 60 degree weather blew in with  a ferocious wind and rain storm, the sounds of which reminded me of a hurricane.  I’ve yet to see the damage in the light of morning, but I expect debris and branches everywhere.  My basement pump is furiously busy, moving water out every 5 minutes or so.  It’s not yet March, but the lion weather has arrived.

Meanwhile, the amaryllis is in the window, turning toward the sun and light.  There’s a bold flower in my future.  That’s happy!

The GOP Circus is in Nevada Today: Predictions

The Democrats caucused on Saturday but the Republicans are in Nevada today.  Don’t try and make sense of this, just know that the Donald is looking to make additional inroads in the land of casinos and strippers.

Keeping in mind the fact that a caucus vote typically features low turnout, I still think that Trump will end the night in the 30% range.  I think that second place will go to Rubio, with a final result in the mid-to high teens, not because he’s done much in Nevada (none of these jackals really have), but because a low turnout event like a caucus is more likely to be shaped by the national media landscape, and Rubio is currently ticking upward as the mainstream GOP parks in his corner.  I see Cruz coming in third in the lower teens and fourth heading the way of Kasich, in the single digits.  Carson, who is still in a campaign, though I can’t fathom why, will roll in with a fifth place turnout, I suppose looking to hold on until Super Tuesday.  And make no mistake, March 1 is looking to be one hell of a political ride.  Here we go…….

12 Months of Miss Read: February

The backstory: At the start of 2016, I pulled out my very favorite Miss Read book, Village Centenary.  The novel is structured in months and each chapter explores a month in the year of a village school that is celebrating its 100th anniversary.  This year, my own school is celebrating its 250th anniversary and as we think of our past and look toward our future, I thought that Miss Read would once-again make a lovely companion for me.  Each month of 2016, I plan to read Miss Read’s reflection on the month.

Miss Read is a pseudonym for Dora Jessie Saint, an English author who wrote between 1955 and 1996.  Her novels were tales of every day life in small English towns.  Village Centenary is set in Fair Acre, an imaginary Cotswold community.  As is the case in nearly all of the Fair Acre novels, the novel is written in the first person and it is through our narrator, school teacher Miss Read, that the story unfolds.

February with Miss Read

In the January chapter, Miss Read and her longtime friend Miss Clare have tea and remember that come February 1 there will be enough light after tea for a walk in the fading light of day.  The imaginary village of Fair Acre is in the Cotswolds and thus several degrees north of central New Jersey in latitude.  Moreover, we don’t have a 4 pm tea time tradition.  But that observation governs my thoughts as February approaches and come the 1st of the month, I take myself for an outdoor walk to observe the slowly lengthening days.

One of the things I’ve learned from Miss Read novels is to stop and appreciate the joys of the natural world.  I’ve always liked the outdoors but reading Miss Read novels brought me a much greater self-awareness of the power of the natural world when it comes to shaping my own moods.   I read my first Miss Read book in 2006, when my life was abruptly altered and I became a single mama.  In that first summer, when virtually every moment of my life was touched by the pain of that break-up, Miss Read’s stories brought me a much-needed respite from unhappiness.  The characters were companions whose advice and worldview lingered well after I closed the books. 

So it is due to Miss Read that I pause and admire the Winter light in February, now aware that from the start of the month to its end, more than an hour of sunlight will be added to our days.  Even as the cold lingers, that light slowly marches us that much closer to the glories of Spring.

A Primary, A Caucus, Oh My: South Carolina and Nevada Predictions

The American primary election schedule is a strange and mysterious beast with nearly no rationale and plenty of hubris.  Though various presidential primaries have been in existence since the early 20th century, they didn’t carry a great deal of influence until the 1960s, when both the Democratic and Republican party began to flirt with selecting their presidential candidates via primary elections instead of nominating conventions.

When that transition developed, New Hampshire’s primary was first on the calendar and became important.  The state held onto its first-in-the-nation status by making it a state constitutional requirement and strong-arming the national parties to agree to the arrangement.  Iowa had a caucus scheduled just before the New Hampshire primary but because it was a caucus (and, let’s face it, in Iowa), it was rather an also-ran until 1976 when a candidate named Jimmy Carter used his showing in the Iowa Caucus to demonstrate electoral viability that might translate to the national stage.  

Since then, the rest of us have been forced to believe that Iowa and New Hampshire are somehow worthy of getting a first crack at the candidates.  Though neither of these contests is famous for actually picking the eventual nominee, they typically serve to winnow the list of potential nominees.  This kind of influence is sought by other states, of course.

Enter South Carolina and Nevada, states that also lay claim to being useful for early contests.

In the case of South Carolina, a southern state, an early primary here does give us a glimpse about how candidates will fare in Dixie, which can still be called the solid South.  That’s more important for Republicans than Democrats, and South Carolina has thus wedged its way into the early primary calendar.

Nevada is a relatively new addition to the early voting race and the state’s contest is a caucus.  As a Western state, Nevada technically might show candidate viability in this region of the country.  In 2008, candidate Barack Obama’s strong showing in the Nevada contest gave the contest greater credibility and thus visibility.  Nevada is a state with a population whose demographics shift significantly from year to year, including a large and growing assortment of Latino and African-American voters, demographic groups that are important to the national viability of the Democratic party.  For the Republicans, Nevada is not expected to be a state that is part of whatever national victory the party pieces together in November, but its relative diversity is interesting for the national GOP, as they contemplate their future in an increasingly diverse nation.

In 2016, the national party’s primary calendars are not fully coordinated so today’s contests include a Republican primary vote in South Carolina and a Democratic Caucus vote in Nevada.  It’s peculiar and will rather divide our attention today.

Still reading?  It’s time for the heart of the matter: predictions.

Let’s start with Nevada’s Democratic caucus contest.  Even on a Saturday, a caucus is still a low turn-out event, especially for the party most attractive to working class Nevadans, as the Democratic party is.  Here, organizational groundwork is essential and that means the advantage goes to Hillary Clinton, who should win the contest by 4-5 percentage points.

The Republican contest in South Carolina will feature a truckload of evangelical voters and, like New Hampshire, should winnow the number of contestants.  In theory, evangelical voters should be looking to Ted Cruz as their savior but Donald Trump is funneling a lot of evangelical voters his way, perhaps a sign that Trump’s brand of discontentment populism is more salient to these voters than religion.  That possibility is worth exploring down the line, especially if Trump’s appeal in Southern contests holds firm.  Marco Rubio has the support of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley; Rubio is increasingly the establishment’s candidate, a designation that has been important in previous years but doesn’t seem to hold the same weight in 2016 Republican circles.

So…how does this messy contest unfold?

Let’s dispense with the easy calls first.  John Kasich’s number two showing in New Hampshire won’t matter in the Palmetto state and he’ll finish fifth.  Fourth place will go to Jeb Bush.  Both of them will probably stay alive for the March 1st Super Tuesday contest, with high single digit-low double digit showings.  Former voter darling Ben Carson is going to come in sixth, with numbers in the low single digits.  His campaign is done.  

That leaves the top three finishers.

God save us, but it’s looking like Donald Trump will win in South Carolina.  If he’s north of 35%, then we need to start believing that Trump is going to be around for a while and might actually score himself the Republican nomination or foster a battle royale brokered convention.  I believe Trump will be north of 30% but just below 35% in South Carolina; still a cause for concern if you are the national Republican party.

I am not in that party; moreover I do not think that Trump can win a general election.  I do think he is actively bad for the Republican party; not to mention the republic.  I no longer find him the least bit amusing.  But this post is already way too long, so we’ll explore that rich vein later.

I will call second place for Marco Rubio by just a smidge over the persistently unlikeable Ted Cruz, with the two of them in the mid-20s.  The unpleasant trio of Trump, Rubio, and Cruz will then head into super-Tuesday with the gloves off.

Yuck.

Pretty Packages

JT turned 16 this week and birthdays mean presents, of course.

That’s happy!

New Bloom Thursday: Week 8

As I slog out the last few weeks of Winter, the late-blooming amaryllis is a cheerful blessing, guiding me forward to the growth and resurgence of the coming Spring.  

That’s happy!