For those of you who don’t read my Tweets, the Economic Sword of Damocles has fallen — Jim was laid off today. We have been expecting that he would be laid off sometime this year but were taken by surprise that it happened today. He just bought new work shoes on Saturday, too.

He’s OK, we’re OK for now. Oddly, this makes thing logistically easier, since we won’t be playing our traditional game of Eliza-hot-potato for the next little while and I imagine he is really going to enjoy that quiet time while she’s at preschool camp in July (although, don’t let that stop you if you hear of someone in need of a good writer/editor).

So many people were laid off, though, that it was shocking.

As my mom said when I told her: “Oh, and the paper is now going to be written by the squirrels and rats that live around the building?”

Ah well.

Here, have a pretty picture of a firework. It cheered me up.

Eliza’s teacher had a little party for her class today, and somehow, neither Jim nor me figured out exactly what this meant, because we sent her merrily off to school with some banana bread she and I made for her classmates yesterday and thought nothing further of it.

Then I showed up to pick her up and was handed a report card, a diploma and a graduation picture in which she posed in cap and gown. With only her teacher, because her parents did not show up.

Whoops.

I am not too horrified because we’ll be back next year — in the same classroom, no less. Also, The Small Person does not have the slightest clue that she is supposed to feel slighted.

“We had a party but it wasn’t even anybody’s birthday!” she told me in wondering tones when I came to pick her up, hopped all the while thanks to the sugar rushing through her bloodstream.

And I wish I could remember what it was she was talking about when she informed me, “Wow, that’s really going gangbusters!” as we walked through Target to the toy section. (We were there so she could pick out a new Littlest Pet Shop toy as a reward for good marks on her report card.)

I was trying to explain to my mom today that I am really enjoying 4 right now because in many ways, it is even more batshit crazy than what has come before.

It’s like now she has the motor skills to follow through on all of her nutso impulses. And then when you ask her why, for god’s sake, she felt it was necessary to tie the bathroom blinds to her potty ring and wrap the whole thing plus the toilet seat in toilet paper, she gives these explanations that start off all reasonable, “I was just trying to…” and then somehow plastic unicorns are invoked and there are indoor snowstorms and magical creatures that need toilet-paper-wrapped potty rings in order to live and you’re still back on “dude, but why the whole roll?” while she’s scampered off bare-assed to her room because she forgets to put her pants back on half the time and man…

Is this what it feels like to take hallucinogens?

For the past month or so, it has been my privilege to be witness to a blistering war of culinary words that has stretched across several platforms, including email, facebook, twitter, blog posts and comments, between two of my friends, Leslie and Meredith.

These two had never met in real life but crossed paths on this blog, and then one thing let to another and somehow an innocent comment about cooking led to a gauntlet thrown down: Which one of them made the better matzo ball soup. And somehow THAT led to the three of us convening at my house today so the two of them could finally meet in person for a matzo ball soup cook-off — which I was to judge.

My qualifications are the following: I like to eat. Soup. Lots of it!

Also, I like an excuse to get together with friends for laughter and conversation and kitchen talk, particularly if I can then also subject their husbands to cat dander (sorry B!), smoosh some babies and/or catch two-year-olds who are attempting to pull a runner down the street and carry them around upside down and/or sideways (In case you get confused, they are very helpful about letting you know that this is NOT the right way to carry them. Right side up is much better. Thank you for clearing that up, T!). And I am not even going to tell Eliza that K and LM were here because she will be too sad to have missed them.

Anyway!

This is Meredith’s soup:

This is Leslie’s soup:

The two obviously share a few key elements: broth, matzo balls, duh. But each put her own spin on the stuff, as I was soon to learn.

First, like any snooty culinary judge worth her salt, I poked and prodded and sniffed. So as not to show favoritism, I did so to both soups at once:

Then I tried one soup:

And then the other:

Delicious!

Both, it turned out, used the same matzo mix to make the balls, but clearly each has a different aesthetic — Meredith’s were firm and round, Leslie’s looser and more free-form. Hard to pick a favorite, because both had their advantages — the texture of Meredith’s was very satisfying, but Leslie’s seemed to have taken on more of the savory background flavors in the broth.

While both had celery and carrots, Meredith’s had more celery and parsley. Leslie, meanwhile, had added some dill and some root vegetables like potatoes, turnips and parsnips.

From the back and forth between them and my own experiences with similar soups on my cultural background (pause here for a moment to acknowledge yet again the irony, or whatever you want to call it, of the culinary similarities between the Jewish, German, and Bohemian-Slavic cuisines) my impression is that Meredith’s was an expert rendering of the more traditional interpretation of this soup, while Leslie’s was a bit of an innovation on a classic.

Since both of them have the means to sic their minions on me via the power of the internet, I was not all that keen to call it in favor of one or the other to begin with. Thankfully, the soups were both excellent and different enough that I could call a draw with a clear conscience. I would happily turn to either one for my Passover/comfort soup needs.

Which one of you is inviting me over next year??

I love smells. Indiscriminantly so; there are very few smells that I cannot stand. For example, I would not like to WEAR eau de skunk, but I like it just fine when it wafts through the neighborhood. Something about the sharpness of it actually reminds me of coffee, which is one of my favorite scents. (I am not saying it coffee smells like skunk, just that they share an edge of something.)

The honeysuckle that I planted a few years ago has taken off with a vengeance this year, and the butterfly bush is finally blooming — and every day, I walk through my backyard and smell the blossoms and touch the plants in acknowledgement of what they give me.

I have a lot of memories tied up in smells. There a men’s cologne that I’ve yet to ID, but whenever I pass someone on the street who is wearing it, I am instantly transported to this sweaty cavern of a club in Belgium in 1993. All the gay boys who hung out there were wearing the stuff at the time, and the crush of dancers gave me a cologne contact high that I remember fondly 16 years on.

There are certain smells that can only be smelled in Germany, or in South Carolina, or in Italy. I walk over subway grates in New York City on purpose so I can get a blast of fetid subway air whooshing out; I haven’t really been there if I haven’t had a noseful that smell.

One of the unanticipated joys of running has been scent. I started running in the relatively smell-sterile environment of the health club.

When I first ran on the street, I had anticipated the added value of changing scenery, but what nearly stopped me in my tracks was the way the journey was marked by scents — the thick fry smell near the Dunkin Donuts, then the heavy breath of the cars, the sharpness of the gasoline station. Then, as I moved away from the busy intersection and onto a quieter road, how those scents dropped away and the bouquet of mulch and milkweed and greenery came through, and even a quick waft of crisp river air. I run the reservoir to smell woods, mud, geese, pine needles; past the cemetery to take in the stone-and-cut-grass odor. I ran in Virginia to smell the heavy decaying smell of southern plants on a humid day, and in Germany to smell the grass-and-manure scent of old-fashioned small-town farms.

I started this morning with a run alongside pines and flowers and mulch, and ended the day with a walk through my yard darting from plant to plant with Eliza to see which ones smelled the best. It has been a good day.

Look who’s been doing too many vampire books/songs/movies!

This marks the first time since my child was born that I have successfully applied AND dried nail polish.

Jim came over and said, “Uh, why did you use that color?” He forgets about my Goth proclivities sometimes; I think it’s important to remind him every so often.

Taking this picture reminds me to tell you about my pinkies.

Take a look up there. See how my pinkie looks crooked? That’s because it is, or rather, they both are. They always have been — at the last knuckle, my pinkies take a sharp turn inward toward my ring finger. It doesn’t hurt, nor does it bother me. It occasionally annoyed me in ballet as a kid because the crooked fingers ruin the line of the hand, but in karate, it doesn’t really matter.

So, in high school, we had to take health, which was a catch-all that included, beyond sex ed, lessons on tolerance. On a regular basis, someone with some sort of “challenge” would paraded before us so we could learn to be tolerant of said “challenge.” I’ll leave you to conclude what I think of this ham-fisted strategy for forcing empathy on a bunch of teenagers.

But this is not about that.

This is about the day the deaf lip-reading mime came to class, and I mention the deafness not because it is germane, but to give context as to why my health class had a mime in it. He was going around doing his mime-y thing with various people, and when he came to me and waved, I waved back politely. His eyes lit up when he spotted my crooked pinkie, and he held up his own and waggled it. I waggled back.

He waggled in a manner that said, “hey, your pinkie is wicked crooked!”

I waggled back, “uh-huh.”

He waggled, “What happened?”

AM: “That’s how it is.”

Mime: “Seriously, ’s up with that?”

AM: “Dude, give the pinkie a rest already.”

Mime: “Whathappenedwhathappenedwhathappened?”

AM:…

Mime: “It’s broken, right? Did you break it? Huh? Huh?” (This was accompanied by a gruesome-looking miming of things being snapped in two.)

Finally, I broke the code of mime, held up my hands, and snapped, “I was BORN with them!”

Sadly, he did not respond by miming the removal of his foot from his mouth.