I Left My Heart in Ohio (and Soothed it with Some Sightseeing)

This was perhaps the greatest AND worst moment of my life to date.

A few weeks ago, we took a family trip to Ohio to see my older child off to college.

Obviously, there was an Office marathon running. If you don't encounter an Office marathon on your hotel television, are you even traveling?

The thing is, on the day you drop your kid off, the school keeps you so busy you don't have time to get upset. You're way too focused on trying to find parking, then trying to find the Housing office so your kid can get her student ID, then trying to find her dorm, then trying to move the car and find parking near the dorm, then loading her five Frakta bags and two plastic storage bins back and forth into the dorm, then sending her back to the Housing department because her room card doesn't work while you stay in the dorm and poke around--

--then back to the Housing office because why does she have a single when she signed up for a double, then to the campus bookstore which you, personally, treat like a gift shop (I LOVE my new university-branded sweatsuit!), then to the mailroom to find her mailbox, then to the Scholarship office AND the bursar because the National Merit scholarship money came in late so you had to pay her tuition out of pocket but the check finally arrived so now we want some money please, then to a catered lunch for the new students and their families, then to a series of family workshops about mental wellness, extracurriculars, and the dining plan, then on foot into town so she could sign up for a public library card because you do not trust the university library to provide for her fantasy novel needs, then to a catered dinner, then back to the dorm to finish getting her settled but not too settled because the Housing office promised to get her assigned to a double in the next couple of days and she'll have to move those five Frakta bags and those two plastic storage bins herself so you might as well not even open the 3-inch mattress topper because how on earth will she carry it when it's expanded, and then before you have even caught your breath, your beloved child is hugging you goodbye at the car and running back inside and just like that, your whole life is changed.

Is it possible to sob your heart out while binge-watching an Office marathon? Friends, it ABSOLUTELY is.

Back when we were first planning this trip and I hadn't quite realized that my heart would be completely broken, I'd followed my old habit of not being able to so much as sneeze at a location without also seeing all the tourist sites. So of course I planned out a whole day afterwards of sightseeing before we went home, and then I realized that we'd be driving right through Columbus, Ohio, home of the Columbus Blue Jackets, who, coincidentally, were playing at home against the North Carolina Hurricanes the very night after leaving my college student at college. 

I like the Blue Jackets well enough to watch them play anyone, but OMG I LOVE the Hurricanes! 

So somehow dropping my kid off at college turned into dropping her off at college, spending another night in town, sightseeing the whole next day, going to a hockey game that night, spending ANOTHER night in Columbus, and then finding a place to eat crepes the next morning before finally driving home.

I went to college about the same distance from home as this kid is from me, and when my grandfather and uncle drove me to college the first time, they helped me move all my boxes and bags inside, gave me hugs goodbye, and left my ass there at the door of my dorm room. They were back home by lunch!

To be honest, I maybe should have chosen enough of that route to at least have driven home that night, because all through our sightseeing the next day, I was MISERABLE. Not even hiking around a real-live ancient mound system created by the indigenous peoples of North America could cheer me up!

This is the Great Circle Earthworks, one part of the much larger Newark Earthworks, the rest of which I hope to see on subsequent visits.

This is the Great Circle Gateway. Eagle Mound is off-camera to the right.

Eagle Mound. It is raining, and I am crying.

This ring encircles the site and opens to the east.

Up and over the ring!

Here's a good view of the ditch from the top of the ring.

You can see the three lobes of Eagle Mound with this view.

Back through the gate.

This was the fifth Hopewell-era mound that I've visited in Ohio! Here are the other four:

• Serpent Mound
• Hopewell Culture National Historical Park
• unnamed mound at Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park
• Alligator Mound

After walking around in the rain long enough for me to both have a good cry and see all the parts of the mound system that I wanted to see, we left my kid's little college town. Normally, I'd probably cry even harder at that, but I was stalking her on Life360 so I could see that she, herself, had already left town with her freshman Orientation group. We were actually headed in the same direction!

I mean, sort of. Her group of freshmen headed into Columbus proper, while we stopped at my personal favorite immersive art installation, Otherworld:

My favorite part is still the archaeology finds!

These two beat the snot out of me and the older kid, because THEY SOLVED THE PUZZLE!

When we left Otherworld, it was only to go to yet another immersive art installation, because I found out that Columbus, Ohio, has a Joann concept store!

It was glorious, even though I only found one of the three things that I was specifically looking for. The younger kid found that beautiful flowered mesh fabric that I made into a ballet skirt for her, though, and therefore got to experience the digital cutting counter! They also had this fancy--and FREE!!!--coffee maker, and I drank approximately fourteen mochachinos. The kid drank at least double that.

We ate dinner at North Market, of COURSE, and then walked over to my most anticipated event of the year (so far):

I LOVE hockey, but I only ever get to watch it on TV, and I was beside myself with excitement whenever I wasn't beside myself with sadness. 

Watching it live and in person is SO. MUCH. BETTER!!!

I really wanted to see the Carolina Hurricanes play an awesome game--which they did!!!--

--but I also really wanted to see the Blue Jackets score at least a couple of goals so that I could hear the cannon fire--which they did!!!

And I promise that I did not plan this, because even I am not a big enough Smother to do that, but... guess whose freshman Orientation group also had tickets to the hockey game?

My brand-new college freshman was kind enough to pop over during the first intermission, but later I found her group in the crowd... ish:

On the other hand, the seats I purchased were good enough to get us on the ESPN broadcast!

My favorite parts of a hockey game are the post-score cuddle pile and the post-game loving on the goalie, and I got to see both:

AND I left with a souvenir commemorative puck!

A few weeks in, my distress over having my kid gone isn't acute like it was the first week or so. It takes a while for a kid to settle into a new experience, and when I could tell that she wasn't having a good time, was a little lost or a little overwhelmed or a little lonely, that ramped my own distress WAY up. But now that she's got herself a routine and knows some friendly faces, has a roommate and a lab partner and a convivial relationship with the town librarians, found the best study spots and which cafeteria has the deli station on which nights, I can just miss her instead of fretting over her.

I wish she'd text me back more often, though...

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Three New Ballet Skirts, or, It's So Fun To Sew with Slippery Fabrics /s

 

The world of children's ballet is a Whole Thing, y'all. And I'm not even talking about the body politics or the stresses of casting or the superb posture training. My teenager has danced in the same pre-college ballet program since the age of approximately four, and so you'd think the uniform would be pretty standard. Leotard, tights, and shoes, and you can even skip the tights if you're dancing Russian-style.

But no. Every year, and sometimes every semester, is just a new, annoying way to spend my money because these people cannot seem to make up their minds about how they'd like the children to dress! At one point in time, several ages wore the same leotard color, so that switching to a new leo color was a momentous achievement. Then they decided that every level should have its own color. Annoying to buy all new leotards each year, but at least there was something of a resale market. Then they decided that kids could only wear camisole-style leotards, so we all had to go buy new ones. Then they kept everything the same for a year, which was cool, but in the last month of classes decided that the kids should wear a completely different color of leotard and ballet skirt just for the recital--here, by the way, is that white leotard and skirt that my kid wore exactly once. Then they decided that you could wear any style of leotard you wanted as long it was the right color, but they had two different levels wearing two different colors of green, and do you know how hard it is to tell online if a leotard is more mint green or forest green (this one is neither mint NOR forest, it was determined)? And don't even get me started about the level that had to wear "grey"--Friends, there are a lot of greys in the world! Then there was a year in which they did uniform by ages but grouped several ages into a single class, and that's how we discovered that my teenager is the only teenager exactly her age in the program, because she got to be the only black leotard in a sea of burgundy, and guess how much she did not love that.

Over the years we've gone from kids can wear ballet skirts to every class (everyone bought SO MANY skirts) to kids can never wear them ever (after, of course, everyone had bought and owned and loved 4-6 different skirts) to now kids can wear them on Saturdays. I think. For now.

My teenager is, as you might imagine if you've ever known somebody who submitted daily to a strict dress code, thrilled by the upcoming Ballet Skirt Saturdays. Because I can never just buy something and be done with it, I found this pattern for an asymmetrical SAB-style ballet skirt from DsSewingPatterns on etsy, ran it by the teenager, she approved, and then I bought it and we went fabric shopping.

Because fabric shopping is the funnest part!

Four-way stretch isn't really my jam, nor is sewing thin, slippery mesh and tulle, but the teenager had a fabulous time picking out a few fabrics to try, and she was so excited to have me sew them up for her that she literally stood next to the table as I worked, just, like, watching me stitch while listening to my Dolls of Our Lives podcast. I felt very attended to! 

Luna helped, too:

Fortunately, this is one of the best, easiest, and most straightforward patterns I've ever used. The magic is in the cut, which, as you can see if you look closely at the template below, IS asymmetrical!

This means that you can wear it truly asymmetrical, with one side longer, or the way my teenager likes it, with the longer part at the booty for a little more coverage.

The photo below is technically my muslin, although I have a Depression-era fear and loathing (thanks, Mamma and Pappa!) of wasting fabric, so I got the teenager to choose something on clearance that she would still reluctantly wear. She's got those October Saturdays pinned down now!

I did alter the pattern quite a bit in length after sewing this muslin, which is why you should always sew a muslin. Fortunately, the saving grace of this thin, slippery, asshole fabric is that at least it doesn't ravel, so I could just trim the bottom to my preferred length and didn't even have to hem it, hallelujah.

That spiderweb fabric also worked out perfectly when turned inside-out to make the black waistband on this, the most glorious of all ballet skirts:

My teenager and I are absolutely enamored with this skirt. To be honest, she's probably not gonna wear any of the others as long as this one is around. It's a sheer black mesh with these flowers and sequins appliqued on it, and it. Is. Stunning. Now imagine it in motion!

I'm just going to show you a few more close-up photos of it, I'm so proud of it:

Y'all aren't going to believe this, but over winter break the pre-college ballet department reorganized the levels AGAIN, so after having all the kids in my kid's class wearing black leotards all semester, even the ones who were technically supposed to wear burgundy, and me thinking that my kid was going to be wearing black leotards six days a week for the next two years and therefore buying her even more black leotards for Christmas, now they've decided that everyone should go back to... BURGUNDY. You know, the color that LITERALLY NOBODY WORE LAST SEMESTER. BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL WEARING BLACK. A CLASS FULL OF KIDS WHO NOW OWN SEVERAL BLACK LEOTARDS THAT FIT, AND THEY WANT THEM TO BUY SIX DAYS' WORTH OF BURGUNDY LEOTARDS INSTEAD. JUST FOR THE SECOND SEMESTER OF THE EXACT SAME CLASS FULL OF THE EXACT SAME CHILDREN.

I participated in the Great Burgundy Leotard Scramble of 2019, and I am not going back to that nightmare scenario of battling every other parent in the class for the, like, five burgundy leotards, total, that exist in the world--burgundy is not a popular leotard color for the ballet world at large!!! They can put whatever they want on their dress code, but they have pushed me, personally, too far. I bought my teenager a shit ton of black leotards back in August, and a shit ton more black leotards over Christmas, and two shit tons of black leotards is what she will be wearing to class next semester whether they like it or not. 

Sigh. Do you want to make bets on how many classes until I cave?

The Second to Last Time That I Ever Rode the Carousel

The last time the kids and I hung out at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, we volunteered at one of our favorite stations, Build Your Own Carousel Animal:

My coworker is going significantly off-book here, tempting fate that she will not soon have a cluster of first-graders around our table clamoring to stack paper straws instead of building their nice carousel animals. 

We had big afternoon plans of driving up to the only dance supply store in driving distance that sells the specific make and model of pointe shoes that my teenager prefers, then hitting up Trader Joe's on the way home for their many delicious seasonal products (ah, the varied joys of visiting the Big City!), but first, we loitered around our favorite exhibits, seeing the dinosaurs and moseying through Greece and mooning over the hockey gear--

The Indy Fuel is our nearest minor league hockey team. We went to a game last year and it was an absolute circus; I LOVED IT!

--and, of course, riding the carousel one thousand times. Y'all know how obsessed I am with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis carousel and its bloody, bloody history (seriously, though, read this book! It's bonkers!), and on this particular day I beelined, as usual, for one of the notorious stags, then got Syd to take my picture with it:

Will loves the carousel more than anyone--

--and when she finally got off after a number of rides that I did not even count, I said to her, "Hey, this was the last time you'll ride the carousel for who knows how long!" Because, you know, she was off to college in January, and we don't usually volunteer at the museum over the summer break. 

The kids think that I am cheezy as hell whenever I say crap like that, but I'm glad that I called her attention to that last precious moment and made us acknowledge it, cheezy or not. Because that was the last time that She Who Loves That Carousel the Most will ever ride that carousel:

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You don't usually know when it's the last time that you're going to do something that you love, or the last time that you'll experience some particular precious thing. It's a gift to be able to acknowledge it and say goodbye, even if you didn't know at the time that it would be goodbye forever.

Syd and I actually happen to be volunteering at the Children's Museum again before this change takes place. I usually just ride the carousel once to Will's dozen, but this time I might have to take a page out of her book and ride multiple times. The giraffe! The antelopes! The black horse AND the appaloosa! 

And, of COURSE, my precious, notorious stag.

December Favorites: Miss Marple, a Crow Who Thinks He's a MoFo, and a LOT of Jukebox Musicals

So, this might have been the best Winter Break of my life to date. 

It's been long enough since pandemic lockdown stuff ended that our two-week mostly staycation felt AWESOME. For a while, I was kicking myself that we didn't go on a quick pre-Christmas trip like last year's super fun New York City adventure, but you know, I think the extra downtime was worth it. No packing, no figuring out pet sitters, no travel stress, no sightseeing must-dos... just plenty of relaxation and plenty of time with each other. We tried a couple of new-to-us restaurants, Syd played the best Cards Against Humanity combo that I have EVER seen, we watched a ton of movies, I read so many books, the kids and I got a lot of work done on our respective farms over in Stardew Valley, and we just did absolutely nothing notable or interesting, and it was perfect.

Here's a few of my favorite things that I read, watched, or listened to in December:

READ

A few months ago, I complained on my Craft Knife Facebook page that I'd read a couple of Poirot novels but didn't like them, didn't like the character of Poirot, and couldn't figure out what the big deal was. A very kind and gracious reader commented that what I should be reading was Agatha Christie's Miss Marple books, as she's far superior to Poirot and has a much better knowledge of poisons.

Y'all. Miss Marple is EVERYTHING to me now. She is FAR superior to Poirot. She has a MUCH better knowledge of poisons. She is SO good at all the machinations involved in figuring out murders and luring the murderers into revealing themselves. One time, she pretended to be choking to death just so a murderer would stand over her in just the right spot that someone whom she'd already machinated out of the room on an unrelated errand could enter the room at exactly the right moment to be presented with a tableau so similar to a murder she'd fleetingly seen that she recognized the hitherto-unrevealed murderer and he was arrested. 

Also, she has the best garden in the village.

I've taken to bringing a Miss Marple with me when I sub once a week for teachers in the local high schools. They're easy to follow and pick up and put down, easy to jump right back into, and they're short enough that I can often, if the classes aren't completely feral (which sometimes they are...), finish the book before the final bell rings. 

Here are my favorite Miss Marple books so far:

• A Murder is Announced
• Murder at the Vicarage
  
• 4.50 from Paddington
• At Bertram's Hotel
• A Caribbean Mystery

I'm stoked that I still have a few more novels that I haven't read yet, as well as all of her short stories. And the same delightful commenter told me that I should also try Tommy and Tuppence, so hopefully that will keep me in Agatha Christie until the end of the school year!

BookTok is my jam, and a few weeks ago, a single TikTok gave me a whole list of new TBRs that I requested from the library and read over Winter Break. They were all good, but OMG I could not put Hollow Kingdom down until I finished it, and then when I did finish it I I immediately found Will, put it into her hands, and said, "Read it right now so we can talk about it!". We have spoken of nothing but that and the running of our Stardew Valley farm since:

I love myself a good zombie apocalypse, so that was my original draw to the book, but wow it's so much more than that. It's tender and beautiful, and has a lot to say about how precious and valued we are, to ourselves and to others, even when we're absolutely only average and definitely not that special. Trigger warning for pet death, but even then it's not pet death the way it's usually used just to make us sad so we feel like the book has emotional impact, but pet death that's treated with all the love and respect and grief that it obviously ought to have.

And while double-checking the author's name, I just now discovered that there. Is. A. SEQUEL!!! I emergency requested it so hopefully Will and I have time to read it together before we move her into her out-of-state college dorm.

I languished in my public library's Holds queue for I'm Glad My Mom Died for MONTHS before I finally received it a few weeks ago. I wasn't even that excited to read it, but, you know, the hype! And also I felt obligated to read it as fast as possible because the line behind me was just as long (I just checked, and my library currently has 15 copies of the book, with 49 people still in line to read it). 

I can't say that I enjoyed the book, because the author is very forthright about some really tough stuff, but I was absolutely fascinated by it. I highly disapprove of the use of child actors, especially the ones who seem to spend their entire childhoods working instead of being children, so I'm generally up for any memoir by a former child actor trashing the experience. But this book is also really well-written, and I know I already said that McCurdy is very forthright, but she's SO forthright about her experiences that I had a knot in my stomach reading her vivid depictions of abuse and trauma, but also, I'm super proud of her for how she powered through and the way that she hopefully seems to be doing a lot better now. The only thing I was left wishing was that we could get even a brief recap of the hours and years and types of therapies that she's surely undergone to be as healed as she is.

WATCHED

Okay, I know I'm the last person on Earth to see Everything Everywhere All At Once, but I also had to wait for it to be my turn to check it out from the library (current count: the library has eight copies and 31 people in line!). I'm not super into movies in general so I wasn't anticipating it, but Matt is a bigger movie buff and requested it, waited patiently for it, checked it out as soon as it was his turn, and wheedled me into watching it that night.

And, um? It's WONDERFUL! He didn't tell me it was sci-fi, or I'd have been moderately more enthusiastic about the prospect. But if you don't like sci-fi, it's not sci-fi enough to turn you off. But I am in just the right place right now to watch an emotional but not syrupy movie about mothering your grown daughter and worrying that you're doing a terrible job at it. Also, there was a tiny little moment early in the film that I laughed out loud in delight about. And then later, they took it a little further and I was again delighted. And then later, it happened again. And then it became part of the tangled plot, every time getting more ridiculous and wild, and I was so there for it I can't even tell you. 

In other news, I'm usually militantly vigilant about avoiding lifestyle creep (as befits a middle-aged, underemployed woman with not nearly enough retirement savings, sigh), but December was a perfect storm of lifestyle creep. First, the teenager who will shortly be attending college out-of-state needed her first very own cell phone, which means that we finally had to upgrade the crazy-cheap, crazy-old AT&T account that we'd been grandfathered into a billion years ago and managed to keep this entire time because we rarely upgrade our phones. But y'all. Have y'all ALL had unlimited data ALL THIS TIME?!? If you'd told me this, I might have upgraded our phone plan years ago!

Okay, I wouldn't have, but I would have been very, very, very jealous of you!

Around the same time, we went to renew my ESPN+ subscription, a piece of lifestyle creep from last year that I cannot bear to give up because that's where the hockey games live, and ugh, you guys, it only cost another forty bucks for the entire year to add Hulu and Disney+ to our subscription. Do we *need* a full year of Hulu and Disney+? No, no we do not. But do I *want* to watch that latest season of The Handmaid's Tale? Yes, yes I do. Do I want to watch Moana every time I'm feeling sad? Why yes, yes I do! Was I thrilled beyond measure to sit down to the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special? Also yes! 

And then. Y'all, and then! We're near the end, and I've been having a marvelous time because the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special is for some reason WAY better than it needs to be, when Kevin Bacon takes the microphone to sing with the alien band that had made a brief appearance earlier. He starts to sing, and I'm all, "OMG he's singing an Old 97s song!!!", and Matt, who has not said a word about this the entire time even though he knew this information already and also knows that the Old 97s are one of my favorite bands and he, himself, has seen them with me twice at a local bar and witnessed me freak out with excitement both times, just casually throws out, "Yeah, I think that alien band is the Old 97s." 

And that, my friends, is how you subject yourself to watching the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special twice in a row with me, because obviously I have to watch the entire thing again right away to make sure I don't miss a single scene that the Old 97s appear in. 

It was, like, two scenes. I was nevertheless vibrating with high-key excitement the entire time.

LISTENED TO

Did anyone else spend a huge amount of their teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, or was that only a Gen X thing? I spent a HUGE amount of my teen years vibing to The Joshua Tree, something that I had forgotten about completely until a teenager asked if we could watch Sing 2, which prompted an emergency visit to the public library's online catalog (a site that I literally have bookmarked on my phone, because you would be surprised how often emergency visits to the library catalog are called for around here!), and then just a couple of days later (the library currently has six copies of Sing 2, with two of those copies on the shelves) a Sing movie marathon. I don't normally love jukebox musicals, but for some reason I do like Sing, and at the climax of Sing 2, I had the exact middle-aged mom HOLY SHIT WOW moment that the producers hoped I would have, when the reclusive lion finally comes out of hiding to sing his song with the porcupine, Scarlet Johansson, and halfway into his first verse I was all, "HOLY SHIT WOW DID THEY ACTUALLY GET BONO?!?!?" 

Like, I'm not quick on the uptake, because they'd been doing U2 songs the whole movie and saying they belonged to the lion, but whatever. Now I'm listening to The Joshua Tree on constant rotation again and it is just as incredible as it was when I was fifteen:

We obviously couldn't have a sing marathon without also marathoning our other favorite jukebox musical series, Pitch Perfect! Will is even less into movies than I am, and I think Pitch Perfect is the very first live-action feature that she actually genuinely loved. It hasn't aged well, because we spent most of the first film marvelling over how just plain mean the main character is and why does everybody even like her at all oh it's because she's nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs right? BUT the first movie also has a beautiful scene in which Ben Platt (back when he was genuinely amazing and soulful and hadn't ruined his reputation by cramming himself into a movie in a role that should have been played by someone a decade younger, and also we've come to realize that character is actually a sociopath and we just didn't notice earlier because his songs are so great) achieves his dream and it's so sweet and well-acted. 

If, as soon as the credits to Pitch Perfect roll, you're not switching to YouTube to check out the actual competitors in the actual International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella, you're nerding incorrectly and you should let me help you. Just... the music! The choreography! The punny names of every single group!

Here's Pitches and Notes:

The Nor'easters have the best outfits, though:

And just like that, we're somehow practically halfway through January! I'm currently still binging The Joshua Tree, I finished a new Miss Marple while subbing yesterday, I can hardly stand to put down Will's latest fantasy rec, and speaking of Will... well. I left a big part of my heart in Ohio this week and now I'm watching Moana and crying.