The Professor and Mary Ann

I made my first quilt top last week. I grew up with three or four quilts made by great grandmothers: a yellow pinwheel pattern, one with seafoam green leaf shapes, one made from jeans on one side and sunday suits on the other, and my favorite made out of pink, blue, and yellow flannel. We nearly loved that one into oblivion. When Rob and I got engaged, he had a quilt top that he'd commissioned from a woman in Ridgefield Utah, a whirling fan pattern which my parents' ward then quilted for us. The ladies of Oakland I had been quilting for about 25 years by then, and they knew what they were doing. Then for Christmas of 2000 my mother gave me a quilt she'd made out of the flannels from all of the nightgowns that she'd made for me and my sister each Christmas growing up. When our German friend came last semester, she was very taken with American quilts. We showed her ours and I took her to a few places to look into buying one, but we couldn't find anything. She went hom

Maddie McFarland Actions ▼ me: girlfriend, what are you doing on the computer? what sort of homework requires gmail? Maddie: i was looking up translations on the interwebs Sent at 2:47 PM on Wednesday Maddie is offline. Messages you send will be delivered when Maddie comes online.

I told the professor that I'm not blogging right now because it would just be a litany of messes and scrapes by this one. "Today I nearly throttled my son because he shouted 'SHUT UP' at me all through the grocery store. Today I nearly killed him when he dumped out two baskets of clean laundry I'd just folded and danced on the clothes. Today I wanted to drop kick him to the state line when he ordered six things for breakfast, wouldn't eat any of them and then threw them on the floor so he could fingerpaint with the yogurt." No one would want to read it, including me. So instead I've escaped three times in the last three months and it's been heavenly. When I come home I am ready to take more of the daily punishment he dishes out. Of course he's equal parts exasperating and darling: Here he is in the swim diaper he insisted on, going through my desk. Last night he drew on some tax forms. Then he shredded them. The darling part of him is solely f

While I was off getting my zen fix, Rob took over with the kids. Except when he was at Sundance. Then Maddie was in charge and filling the coffers for her next big purchase. On Saturday Grandpa flew in and he had a firm pinewood derby mandate. So that's what we found when we got home. Three pinewood derby vehicles primed and ready for painting. There had also been plenty of eating out and watching exciting computer clips. Grandpa also got to see Joss as an engine of chaos one morning. He would run from spot to spot, creating mayhem and leaving destruction. He'd made ten messes in 10 minutes. And that was before he climbed up on the counter and drank half a glass of Rock Star. Grandpa said "I could see that it would be fatal to try and keep up with him." Ain't dat da truth!

We spent the next two days relaxing and retreating. I read nearly an entire "O" magazine, none of my Isherwood novel, and I even colored in a coloring book. It was such a peaceful day and I felt no guilt since it had been snowing outside. This is some of the view out the window. Later we went out walking around the grounds of the Homestead and Zermatt. On Monday we got to check out the spa. It has a fitness center, steam room, dry sauna -- the works. It also had plenty of skulls and horns and some fabulous homegrown masseuses (is that the plural of masseuse?). Kim worked on my back and ground out horrendous knots from one shoulder (the one I thought was my good shoulder). I went home a new woman. It was a wonderful retreat. Happy Birthday, Mom!

My mom came up to Zermatt resort to celebrate her birthday a few weeks back. We got in Friday evening and had soup for dinner, played Blokus and stayed up late talking. Saturday morning we attended yoga with Ned. He was a different sort of instructor than I have had in the past, but he put us through a good workout. We had missed breakfast completely by then, so we skipped straight to lunch at Matty's Bistro. We made a stop by the Heber thrift store of great renown to pick up some $5 boots so I could go snowshoeing. My sister has taken up the sport, so she took us on our first hike at Wasatch State Park. It just so happens Wasatch State park was having a snowshoeing race that very day, so we got to hike on groomed trails while true masters jogged past us on the final leg of the race. They were very chill and I liked snowshoeing. I'd love to go again with my own boots on! That evening we met up with my cousins and my aunt and all went to the Homestead across the street. The food

[Sorry, just had to do that with the picture. Sort of a Picasa imperative] Don't know if I've explained this, but Maddie's school has half an hour in the schedule called intervention/enrichment. When you need to catch up or catch on to something in a class, you attend during this half hour. If you're up on everything, you get to choose from the mini-classes offered like Suicidal Poetry, The Graphic Novel, and Ballroom. As soon as she got herself situated, Maddie became a fixture of the ballroom class. This semester, she and her papa talked the school counselor into homeschooling German and art at BYU and taking ballroom with her friends instead. Now she talks of ballroom, she rejoices in ballroom, she preaches of ballroom, she obsesses over ballroom, and she actually practices her ballroom without being nagged or even reminded. Last week she told us that she had a competition on Saturday. I couldn't quite grasp the magnitude of the situation since she'd only