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You really could write encyclopedias, fell whole forests and smoke bandwidth trying to do justice to the loveliness of the place where we live now.  I am East-Coast-born-and-raised; I miss Philadelphia and New England like nobody’s business; and I am resigned to the fact that if I want the kind of mozzarella I used to walk around the corner to buy, I must either make my own or take a 90-minute train trip into San Francisco to buy it; and even with all that baggage, I am still enchanted.  I could go on and on about the jalapenos still growing in the garden in January, or about buying Meyer lemons, blood oranges, pomelos and pomegranates at the Franklin Square farmer’s market in Santa Clara.  I could easily write a good five hundred pages about how Bunni came to visit for five days and found pleasure in everything from the view of the ocean at UC Santa Cruz to the grapefruit growing in our neighbor’s yard, from the soft glow of the streetlights in our neighborhood to the fact that out here, you can buy wine at the drugstore and hard liquor at the supermarket.  I could write about the day trip Lloyd and I took down 101, watching as the rain stopped and the fog burned off and we were surrounded by luscious rolling greenery, reminiscent of the landscape of the Scottish countryside, driving past fruit farms in Watsonville that whispered seductively in my ear:  if you like this now, you’ll really like it in summertime.

It has been so long since I’ve done anything around here but placeholding with angst-ridden internal monologues.  There is so much to share.  Yet I can’t share any of it.

At least I can’t just yet.  As I’m sure a few people are aware, I finished my first semester of law school last month.  I had big plans for the hiatus between the end of the fall semester and the start of the spring.  My mother and stepfather would be visiting for five days, arriving the day after my last final.  (They did, and we had a splendid time together, even though winter weather—or what passes for winter weather in Santa Clara County—arrived with a vengeance.) Bunni would be visiting the last week of break.  (She did, and we had a bang-up time.  Her photoset of her trip makes me smile.) I would write the letters left unwritten, get the house in order, get some practice driving our new Scion, update my resume, look for summer work, apply for fellowships to pay for my summer work (since it looks like any summer work I garner will be unpaid), pursue some other moneymaking opportunities, and, first and foremost, I would write.  Finally.  There would be no more curtailing my food crank impulses.  I would sit and write like I did in December 2003, when PTMYB was born.

You can guess where this is going.  What I did was sleep in past 7 every morning, change into a handknit sweater that grows increasingly ratty with each wearing, and knit.  I tried to read, but my attention span was shredded, and I couldn’t get past five pages without thinking that I should be doing something else.  The few times I sat down to write, the same horrible thing that happened during my year of unemployment happened again.  Two, three, four hours would roll by while I stared at a blank screen, writing a few lines, erasing them, looking at other people’s work for inspiration, feeling not inspired but depressed that I had fallen so far, so fast.  I knew that our current circumstances would not support seat-of-the-pants planning:  I would need to budget my time as assiduously as I budget money, making a plan and sticking to it, but I had no idea how to do it.  I began to wonder if my inactivity since December 2007, my lack of a full-day schedule, had destroyed my last tenuous shred of initiative, or worse yet, caused me actual brain damage.  I wondered if I would need Ritalin just to get through the Sunday New York Times.  I wondered what it would take to get me out of this, and if Lloyd would want to remain married to me after I was done with school. 

Now I know what it takes.  As shameful as it might sound, it takes feedback.  Specifically, it takes grade-based feedback.

That was indeed a coy way of saying that my grades were posted last week.  The good news is that I am not failing out of law school. The bad news is that while I’m not failing, it’s obvious that my fall methodology of Reading, Panicking, Weeping and Reading once more is not doing me any favors.  My grade spread ranges from the excellent to the worrying.  Fortunately, I have an opportunity to put the worrying grade right, but it’s going to take work, and help, and effort—the kind of effort that precludes staring at a blank screen for four hours, flouncing away tearily and temporarily hating the president who you helped elect because he took all the same first-year classes that you did, and you just know he aced them, hell, he probably ran practice exams for fun, and we HATE that in an incoming president.

(That was a joke.  Please don’t send me hate letters pointing out where the lack of academic rigor in a Commander-in-Chief has left us.  Believe me, I’ve noticed.)

At any rate.  It may be counterintuitive, if not ironic, to start writing more frequently now that my free time is over and the demands of school are rearing their ugly heads, but I’m keen to try.  Even if it means just weekly posting, or lots of placeholding interstitial folderol, it’s better than three months of silence.  I miss the foodish conversation, and I want it back, even if it means I only have two hours on Friday afternoon, or Sunday morning, to partake.

I did get one thing accomplished during break.  One day, Lloyd and I went out to the garage and brought in six boxes of my books, mostly cookbooks.  The boxes are in the bedroom, waiting patiently until our cash flow allows for a new set of bookshelves.  “I’m just going to pull a few things out that I want to look at right away,” I said to Lloyd. “Knock yourself out,” he replied.  He didn’t even blink when he saw what I consider to be a few things.

Dear friends, I can’t tell you how it feels to sit in this new place and hold my old books in my hands, the ones that got me through biting New York winters and sweltering New York summers.  I have my old points of reference back, the source of gingerbread and cold soba noodle dressing, baked cherry tomatoes and pickled greens, onion pie, buttermilk biscuits so tender they fall apart at a cross word, other buttermilk biscuits which are sturdier but no less toothsome.  To have them all back is a tonic, and with any luck—and with work, help and effort—they will take all that worry I’ve been carrying around, and they will peel the skin off it.

Postscript: It is a topic for another day—hey, I have homework —but I figured a little cheesy product endorsement would get the year off to a rollicking start.  My adored friend Sharon gave us this superb cookbook for Christmas, and from the day it arrived, I have been unable to stop cooking from it.  If you are a fan of The Splendid Table on the radio, you will eat this up.  (Not literally, of course—I mean, you want to keep it around so you can cook from it.) If you are unfamiliar with it, this might be the book to make you a fan.  Details will follow—maybe even next week.

Dear friends,

To borrow a phrase from my Art Hero, Rene Magritte, Ceçi n’est pas une blog post.  I am less than 30 hours away from my last exam, and it’s a lulu, featuring an hour-long essay and 53 multiple-choice questions on a staggeringly complex body of law—and unlike our other exams, it’s completely closed-book, which means we can’t use the outlines we’ve been preparing all semester, as we could in our other exams.  I have my work cut out for me until then.

Nevertheless, the time comes when you have to step up and acknowledge the moment where a sea change has occurred.  Since school started, much has happened, and I’ve not been able to discuss any of it here.  I didn’t write about the election, or about Thanksgiving, or about the melting economy, or about the enormity of change that started on August 13, when I started law school and never looked back.  I missed it all, but I won’t miss the chance to say this:
What a difference a year makes.

See you Friday, dear friends, when I shall be able to think clearly again.  Hopefully.

Heaven help me for showing up for the first time in over a month, with the only new content being a “no new content” advisory.  Heaven help me further for uttering not a peep on this space about the presidential election.  In any other year, such a post would have been my karmic reward for the post I wrote after the 2004 election—and yes, for the record, I voted for the winning candidate, and yes, I am thrilled, and yes, I held it together until he started talking about the 106-year-old lady waiting to vote, and then I cried like the big baby I am. (I also voted no on Proposition 8, which, again, should have had a post dedicated to it long before now.) But by now I’m sure you know what’s coming, namely that Law School Changes Everything (feel free to start singing that to the tune of the Brains’ “Money Changes Everything,"), and I just couldn’t blog about it and keep up with reading and outlining and career counseling and everything else.

All of this prevaricating is my way of saying that unless something spectacular (and unforeseeable) happens, I will not be free to write again until after 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 11, when I take the last of my final exams.  (The other three are on 12/1, 12/4 and 12/8; the take-home final for our writing class was 2 1/2 weeks ago, and was a special brand of hell for us law school whoosits.  I never want to live through something like that again, but since we have another semester of it in the spring, I will.) We’re not doing anything special for my birthday on Tuesday, nor will I be roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving.  It’s all finals, all the time, baby.  Well, okay, we’ll probably go out for Thanksgiving, and I’ll bet that I snap and make a Shaker lemon pie from the lemons off our tree, but otherwise, I will be living contract remedies, the major bodies of tort law, various ways to prosecute or defend man’s inhumanity to man, and more Federal Rules of Civil Procedure than you can shake a stick at.  (Disclaimer:  Please do not shake a stick at the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  They work for you, not against you, even if you’re the poor bastard being sued.)

Dear friends, with any luck, the next new content here will be written on Friday, December 12, from that nifty deck, while I drink my coffee and watch the hummingbirds.  I will have a few hours to kill until my parents arrive from Philadelphia to celebrate early Christmas with us and visit our new digs for the first time.  I won’t even be hung over.  Probably.

Oh, fercryin’outloud, ‘mouse...that is to say, hello, dear friends.  It’s true.  I am not dead.  I even have proof—blurry, ill-shot proof, mind, but proof nonetheless:

That is in fact myself, at my new teeny desk—I have a desk!—in our sunny kitchen, which I’ve found to be the best place in the house to study, except for the late afternoon hours.  Somewhere between 3:30 and 5 p.m., the kitchen gets so bright and so sunny and so warm that study becomes impossible.  When that happens, I screw up my courage, open the sliding door out of the kitchen and sit on the deck, remembering that those Cadillac-sized bumblebees drinking at the morning glories really don’t bother themselves with me:

From here I can peek out at the garden we were lucky enough to inherit from the previous tenant, surveying the zucchini and peppers and string beans and herbs, offering silent thanks to him for providing us with this good stuff.  I can remind myself that soon I will be able to order seed catalogs and make plans for our own garden—because as much as I used to love looking out our living room window at our landlord’s garden (and at the Triborough Bridge looming overhead), and how much I appreciated his sharing the garden’s bounty with us, there is nothing in the world like looking at a garden at which you can call your own shots.  Next year, we will have lime basil and graprao basil and good old-fashioned sweet basil; we will have oregano and marjoram (no more fighting wiry little line cooks for the last bundle of marjoram at the market!); we will hopefully have some sorrel and wild arugula and some form of cowpea or another; and you had better believe that we will have tomatoes, in a riot of colors, so many that I will be unable to leave the kitchen between August and October.

I am aware that I might sound a little boastful now, and I apologize for being so.  Contrary to what the words would suggest, I am not living in the sun, baking myself to freckly pink goodness while I pull oranges off the tree in the front yard and suck them dry.  There is the small matter of law school.  We are now nine weeks into the first semester, five weeks away from the end of classes, six weeks away from final exams.  This time last year, I was still at LuthorCorp, not knowing that I would be cut loose two weeks before Christmas, seeing nothing but long, glutinous failure on the horizon.  Being here, in a bright yellow kitchen, struggling to pull the key elements of law out of a case, boggles my tiny little middle-aged mind.  It is shocking and familiar, enchanting and disorienting, terrifying and thrilling, all at once.  I am biting my knuckles, trying not to make the easy and obvious joke of David Byrne hollering, “well...how did I get here?” Except...I guess I just did.

Before I had even made a final decision on which school to attend, ‘mouse had warned me that law school would rewire my brain, literally change the way I processed information and turned it into cogent thought and applied knowledge.  Kids, he wasn’t kidding.  Even as I write this, I am aware that I have fallen far from my old bloggy glory, which was never really all that glorious but was at least linear, and understandable, plain-spoken where it needed to be, multilayered where layers were both allowable and welcome.  Now, though, now things are different. It is all I can do to take subjects and verbs and objects and turn them into more than the sum of their parts.  I am no longer the same person who used to have conniptions over thousand-dollar frittatas, or the political hijacking of the events of September 11, 2001, or the silly and unnecessary maligning of English food, or the crime against humanity that is the value-added, shrinkwrapped russet potato.  In time, I hope I can be that bakerina again, but until then, I am left with subject-verb-object, subject-verb-object, almost like Hemingway, only without the evocative genius or the gaggle of adoring women.

What I can do, though, is thank everyone, every single blessed one of you, who called or wrote or sent care packages, wishing us well and asking us if we were okay.  Dear friends, it is good to know that you are out there, watching our backs, transmitting love with every word.  I can also answer a few FAQ’s, because even though people do frequently ask questions, I’ll be buggered if I can put up an actual FAQ page.

Without further ado:

1.  How is Lloyd?  Does he like his job?

I’m happy to say that Lloyd is the same brave, goodnatured dreamboat he has always been, and I am awed by his willingness to remain married to me while I turn into a keening, school-obsessed lunatic.  His job transfer did indeed come through, and he is now working at his company’s client satellite office at a certain Big Deal Computer Hardware Company.  Said satellite office is in Palo Alto, which leads to our next question:

2.  Are you two really sticking with that lunatic plan to have Lloyd commute to Palo Alto by bus every day?

Oh, sigh.  God knows we tried.  God knows we came to California with our environmental hearts on our sleeves, planning to continue living the mass transit-based life we lived for so many years in New York.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many buses the local transit authority runs if the shuttle bus from the Palo Alto transit center to BDCHC’s office stops running at 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.  So we sucked it up.  We bought the cheapest car we could find, a 1994 Honda Accord with 270,000 miles on it.  Lloyd drove it to Palo Alto every day, trying hard not to worry about those weird rattling noises it made every time he accelerated, braked, turned a corner or did just about anything else.  We had a mechanic look at it and he gave us bad news about the timing belts, i.e. These Things Are Going To Blow Any Minute, And If They Do, Your Engine Will Explode.  After a week or two of profanities and handwringing, we decided that as much as we hated the thought of more debt, we hated the thought of exploding engines even more, so we crossed our fingers, applied for a car loan, received the loan just minutes before the economy collapsed, and used it to buy this:

Yes, it’s a Scion, the station wagon for Gen Y.  Yes, I know that I have forever surrendered my Little Miss Eco-Friendly Mass Transit tiara by buying this car.  I’m still glad we have it.  It gets great mileage and it has a short turning base, an important consideration for someone who hasn’t parallel-parked in 20 years.  Moreover, Lloyd can drive it to work and I don’t have to worry whether the engine will explode on the way.  I’d say the car is worth it.

3.  How do you like law school?

If I had better coding skills, this is where I would insert the .wav file of Gir saying “I...don’t know.” Okay, that’s not entirely true. For the most part, law school is terrific fun, but it’s not easy terrific fun.  For the first three weeks of school, I wanted to cry after every class, wondering why they had let me in, if I would ever understand the material presented to us, and just what I was doing trying to make friends with younger, brighter, cuter, more optimistic and just plain overall hotter people than me.  (I’m trying to decide what was worse:  realizing that during the summer I lost my virginity, one of my best, smartest classmates hadn’t even been born yet, or realizing that one of the smartest professors on campus graduated from college seven years after I did.)

Before I go on much further with the silly neurosis, I do have to address a serious issue, a moment of real pain for all of us.  During the second week of classes, we lost a classmate, a terrific fellow named Timothy Pramer.  Tim fell from a third-floor balcony at the new undergraduate library.  The investigation is still ongoing, and we probably will never know what happened.  Based on conversations I’ve had with some of Tim’s friends, including his roommate, who I count among my friends, he loved his new life in California, he was excited to be in law school and he was hungry to learn, so I’m thinking that what happened to Tim falls closer to the “accident” side of the spectrum.  What I do know is that he was always friendly, chatty and amiable with me, and I wish I’d got to know him better, and I wonder—and miss—what he would have contributed to our in-class discussions.

So it’s been a complex nine weeks, to put it mildly, but I can’t say I’m sorry to be here.  Those bright young kids who terrified the living saliva out of me during the first week have become friends:  funny, kind, sympathetic, interesting friends, about whom no assumptions can be made except that we are all smart kids, and on bad days we wonder just how we’re going to get through law school—the answer being, of course, by being there for each other.  We are also lucky enough to have a really good group of professors showing us the way.  They are all funny, smart to a degree that makes me suspect they all get together and bend spoons with their minds during off hours, and, wonder of wonders, they want to help us become that smart.  They are teaching us the ways of criminal law (in which we learn that we *have* to be able to argue both sides of a case, no matter how open-and-shut the case may be, but the plus side is that class discussions are so much better than anything I’ve ever seen on Law & Order—and I love Law & Order); contracts (in which we learn that contracts scholars are, frankly, full of beans—fascinated by a subject that doesn’t fascinate too many other people, and just itching to crack wise about it all); torts (in which we learn that, contrary to what some politicians might tell you, tort law is about much more than slip-and-fall cases; at its best, it provides avenues of redress for civil rights violations, among other forms of relief for people who genuinely need it); civil procedure (in which we do our “grunt work,” learning what steps we need to take in filing or responding to civil complaints, trying to keep rule numbers straight all the while); and legal writing (in which we learn that everything we know about writing is good knowledge to have in general, but not necessarily useful for writing office memos or trial briefs).  More often than not, I’m glad to take a break at the end of an afternoon and watch Keith Olbermann for an hour, because frankly, this stuff is exhausting.  Having said that, I’m starting to feel the first stirrings of applied knowledge, and I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might be learning after all.

4.  Why are you telling us all this when you *could* be talking about what you’ve been baking?  Sheesh.

Ah, honeybunches. I hope I don’t horrify the lot of you when I tell you that I can count on one hand the number of things I’ve baked.  Most of this is due to time constraints, but some of it is also due to our keeping our books stored in the garage.  It’s a roomy garage, but it’s not that roomy, and usually by the time I find the box that has the book I’m looking for in it, there are boxes spread all over the driveway, and I’m sweating, sunburnt and in a bad mood, never good states of mind for baking.  I have done a little baking, though, and as time passes and we get the garage organized, I’ll be back on my game in no time.  To date, though, I have made two raspberry pound cakes, two loaves of chocolate zucchini bread, a focaccia and a loaf of rice bread.  There is more to come, you bet.

5.  How about knitting?  Do you still knit?

I don’t know what I was thinking.  Even though I have four enormous Rubbermaid tubs of yarn in the garage, even though I haven’t finished the socks I started on the flight from New York to San Jose, even though just days before we flew out, I went to Philadelphia for a yarn crawl with Momerina and bought even more yarn, even though I’m still boring away on the Alice Starmore wrap I started after our return from Connecticut last fall, I still felt compelled to visit the sweet little yarn shop in San Jose, buy four skeins of Euroflax and use them to knit curtains for the kitchen window.  Let’s just say that they’re going slowly and leave it there for now.

6.  Are you eating properly?  Are you getting enough exercise?  Are you doing something about your considerable hinders?  Aren’t you going to talk about the election at all?  You do know that there’s a presidential election, right?  And that the Phillies have made it to the World Series for the first time since your wedding day?  Anyone in there?  Hello?

This just in:  Generalissima Bakerina is still dead. 

When your friends call and write and ask, sweetly, if all is well, that’s a sign that you’ve been gone too long.  When the people who have been where you’ve been, and know what sort of enormous change has been wrought upon your life, write and ask, sweetly, if you plan on sharing the details of that enormous change any time soon, that’s an even greater sign.  But when the comment spammers show up and post gibberish seven times a day, well, that’s when you know you have to send up a flare.

Dear friends, all is well, really well.  I have landed safely at law school, where I’ve been a brand new 1L for seven days, dancing with the usual suspects of a first-year law curriculum:  Criminal Law, Contracts, Torts, Pleading & Civil Procedure, and the timorous beastie known as Legal Analysis, Research and Writing.  I have made some friends, many of whom were in middle school when Lloyd and I got married, but they don’t hold that against me.  I won’t lie about the workload:  it’s been confounding, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to manage it.  It seems that I either read too quickly, and thus miss a lot of nuance, or I read too slowly and overparse when I could be getting a lot more done.  Fortunately I have a study group, and once we get together, I’m sure we’ll all have a lot to learn from each other.

On a happier, or at least more familiar note, our month of living in hotels is almost over.  Tonight we take a walk-through of our new apartment and receive the keys from our landlord; over the next couple of days we will bring carloads of stuff from our storage space—oh, wait, did I mention that we have a car now?—and on Friday we will check out of our scary hotel, and, after my last class, we will get the bed out of storage and move in for real.  Our new sofa and our cable/internet hookup arrive on Wednesday.  Between that, the unpacking of the kitchen utensils and the arrival of my orders from King Arthur and Penzey’s, we’ll *really* get something done around here.

Thank you, dear friends, for being so patient and kind at a time when I’ve been so spacy and disconnected.  It’s not been an easy process, but overall, it’s been a very, very good one.