Countdown

Two days to colon-blow time; three to up-scope!

I've been exchanging emails with a woman who's writing an article about attitudes towards male babysitters. It started with my response to her post about a couple of references in the popular media to the effect that you ought not to hire boys as babysitters, because the overwhelming majority of sex perverts are male; also, do you really want a possibly rambunctious teen age boy alone in your house with your children. I don't feel strongly about this, but I do think its probably right. Teenage boys are more likely to think about sex, and, presented with the unmonitored opportunity, might experiment. Teenage girls, of course, rarely think about sex. Yeah, right.

In our home, we've only used a babysitter about five times, and four of the five, it was a member of the family. The fifth, it was the daughter of a neighbor who was intensely religious -- not in-your-face intense, but intense enough that she ended up quitting her job to become a pastor at a local church. So if I had to pick, and I knew nothing about the kid, I'd go with the girl -- but I'd like to think that I would consider the boy, too.

Even though, as my daughter enters her teen years, I do look at every boy with a skeptical eye.

I'm continuing to read the American Food Writing book. Most of it is what you'd expect -- written for foodies, with intense interest in this extra-virgin olive oil over that. But there are gems in there. My favorite, so far, is an article published in 1865 (!) by Harriet Beecher Stowe on the proper way to handle and cook meat, laying out in some detail why French cooks tend to be better, and produce better food. It doesn't eliminate my feeling that French food is effete trifles, but it goes a long way to reducing it. Of course, this article is a hundred and fifty years old.

Not sure what to make for dinner tonight. I'd planned on what we call 'seasoned chopped steak', which is essentially hamburger with spices, but we used what I had bought for dinner a couple of days ago. I'm reluctant to go to the store just for that -- we tend to shop on Friday, simply to avoid the 'oh, as long as I'm here, let me get....' syndrome, which I'm given to understand leads to buying things you didn't really need. On the other hand, the dinners for the next forty eight hours are going to be skimpy; I'll be doing the colon-blow tomorrow evening, so no dinner at all for me, and on Thursday, I'll be (I think) a little wiped out from having the procedure done. Decisions! Maybe I'll make an exception -- I go right by the store on the way back from dropping my mother off at her senior-center activity. And while I'm at the store anyway...(g)