Does it come as a shock to anyone who has ever heard of this girl that she decided to be a zebra for Halloween?

Originally, I bought a big wad of zebra-patterned fleece and a pajama pattern, thinking to make a costume that way, but she fell so in love with said wad of fleece that she won’t let me cut it up.

The compromise was her zebra heart-shape dress (formerly calf-length, now mini), a pair of zebra patterned tights we found on eBay (the old ones were too small), some fringe for the mane which I pinned to a french braid ponytail for maximum equine effect, and a small length of fleece cut from the whole to fashion a scarf, tail, and ears. She was most adamant, by the way, that the insides of the ears be pink, so I used pink glitter paint.

…A non-musical, non-child-is-a-genius post!

Instead, snippets about New York.

1. Among the activities in which I participated this weekend was a house-of-horrors night-clubby sort of thing which one of my business contacts was involved in creating.

It was supposed to be a combination of the frightening and the erotic.

When you entered the place, you walked into sort of an antechamber where creepy characters accosted you, including one who was supposed to be some sort of socially-deranged individual with child-molester overtones. (Already, I bet, you can see where I am not the target demographic.) This dude thought he would try to make me uncomfortable by invading my personal space. I can now tell you first-hand that it kind of freaks performers out if you react to their ‘creepy’ shtick with a benign smile and a friendly gaze. He got close enough to breathe on me, then started mumbling, “I can touch you, you know,” a warning which was printed on the tickets. I was fully committed to freaking him out at that point so I mmm-hmm’d him and he scuttled off. Which was kind of fun.

The set-up for the event had you traveling through hell, purgatory, and heaven.

Hell was fairly witty, and purgatory had some talented performers, but what the three levels came down to was girls and drag queens clad in themed, barely-there outfits. Again the question of demographics arises, because I found myself not so much admiring the dancing and more wondering if all the waxing they had to do to accommodate those outfits was painful. I think that when you leave half of your audience to ponder body-hair questions, you are not achieving your stated “erotic” objectives, let’s just say.

2. I stole away from my duties for a few hours on Saturday to run to Met and it was worth every penny of the $20 entrance fee, as ever. My usual path, when I have limited browsing time is antiquities-European decorative arts-Japanese armor-medieval paintings-renaissance paintings-Egyptian wing, but I got turned around somehow after the renaissance paintings and ended up in the Asian wing, which is separate from the armor. The thing about the Met is it’s so huge that even though I have been there a dozen times by now, I had never visited the Asian wing. Dude! It’s awesome! They stuck a whole rock garden smack in the middle of it!

The Gubbio Studiolo is my obsession. It’s so beautiful it takes my breath away every time. It’s not just that the whole thing features these stunningly three-dimensional “paintings” made of different shades of wood. I think what I respond to is the meditative craft that must’ve gone into it, the deep, focused absorption of the artists who created it. It’s a work whose journey must have been as remarkable as the end-point.

3. On Sunday I ran a race in Central Park. I’ve wanted to run there since I started running in earnest but with my stunning sense of mis-direction, I figured I’d find a way to get lost. A marked course seemed like just the ticket, and it was.

When I first started running a couple of years ago, I found that something shifted for me once I built up to 3 miles (5K). Getting there was hard, but once I got there, I was good. 4 miles, 5 miles, 6, 7, 8 — yes, I got tired, but that horrific lungs-leaving-my-body feeling that came with the build-up to three was gone. It was like my body settled in and figured out how to breathe. The first mile of a run is still the hardest for me in many ways, which is why 5K is holding less attraction. Why do all that work for such a short distance.

Speed, though, has always been a problem, and pushing faster has been harder than pushing longer. Until the half — somehow, that seems to have broken the speed resistance. That makes no sense, since that distance is all about lasting a long time, not going fast, but I find myself suddenly bored and unchallenged at my old 10-minute-mile speeds and itching to bolt. I didn’t even wear my head-phones on Sunday because I knew I cut could through the crowd more efficiently if I could hear the people around me. I ran the thing at a 9:19/mile pace, which is fast for me at that distance.

Could I actually have figured out a way to go faster? This would be good, because I need a new challenge and I can’t justify the hours of marathon training. But getting faster at the half? THAT would be fun.

Oh, also, the thing about how I was only going to do the half once, just so I could say I did it?

Ha.

Ha.

Ha.

I was away on business from asscrack-of-dawn Friday through noon today, the longest I’ve spent away from my kid EVER.

Oh, my friends, it saddens me so that I cannot tell you some of these stories because of their work connections. Let’s just say that as usual, New York City did not disappoint, both in itself and in the effect it had on people.

Still, even as I was enjoying my lost weekend, I was that dorky person dropping my kid’s name into every conversation and staring at my phone screensaver (Eliza playing drums at a music store) in a most maudlin fashion.

Jim knew this, of course, and midway through the weekend sent me the following to tide me over.

This song is apparently named Five Goats.

Getting your weekly allotment of vegetables from a farm is mostly wonderful, but it has its downside in the overwhelming mass of greens you end up with. Greens are kind of a diminishing returns deal. The more you eat them, the less appetizing they become. By March, when I was eating the mystery greens I froze because I couldn’t figure out what to do with them anymore, I was all but gagging.

We learned — we’re only eating kale, chard and arugula for the most part this year.

I also discovered that there IS a way to get the Small Person to eat greens: Crispy Kale. I adapted this recipe from one I saw in the New York Times a few weeks back; here goes:

Wash, dry, and trim your green of choice (kale and chard work equally well)

Cut it into strips about a half-inch wide

Toss it in a bowl with olive oil. You don’t want the greens dripping, but you do need enough to coat them evenly

Add salt and pepper to taste (I tend to use a fairly heavy hand with the salt for this recipe for reasons that will soon be clear, but don’t overdo — you can always add more later)

Spread the greens out on a rimmed baking sheet and slide them into an oven that’s been pre-heated to 450 degrees.

Roast for about 7 minutes, stir, let them roast some more.

They’ll be done when the strips turn dark brown-ish/green-ish at the ends and start to sound like dry leaves when you stir, somewhere around 15 minutes

If you’ve done it right, they’ll be crispy, and you can pick up wads of dried, crispy green strips. It look VERY unappealing, I’ll just put that out there right up front. The taste, though, is delicious, sort of a weird version of potato chips (that’s why I tend to go fairly salty with these).

AND! The kid will eat it.

A week or so back, Jim was startled out of a mid-drive reverie by an eery voice issuing from the back seat. We do not play that much Bob DYlan around Eliza but something about his voice had captured her imagination and she was warbling away unself-consciously in her best imitation of the trademark late-period gravelly warble.

Of course, we had to capture her doing it on film. Stay tuned post-Dylan-impression for a Beatle treat, a rendition of Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. The best part is where she stomps her foot just before the chorus, just like the drums do in the (original LP) Beatles version. And yes, she would explain which version she was doing if you asked her.

EDITED TO ADD THAT THE BATSHIT THREAT LEVEL HIT RED THIS MORNING:

This morning, when I came into her room, she was chastising one of her Littlest Pet Shop animals because he wouldn’t tell her what his favorite version of The Beatles’ Help was.