Green Potatoes

Lily sang in her first concert on Thursday night. One small-town thing I've noticed is that everyone assumes you know where something is located--and me too, once I know where it is. Case in point is Smith's Helen Hills Hills Chapel (yes that's the name, two Hills). The choral instructions said, meet there an hour before the concert. No address, nothing. And ditto with the next concert, at a nursing home in town. Just, meet at the Calvin Coolidge Nursing Home.

Not a big deal to google it and all, but it's an interesting phenomenon. And also interesting to note that yes, I do it too, as I say, if I know where something is. "Take a left at the Y." "It's just past Serio's." And there aren't a lot of places to learn, so yeah, you do figure it out pretty quickly.

I remember being 19 and going to a theater in Chelsea with my sister Bondi. We were meeting beforehand to have dinner and she said, let's meet at the corner of 23rd and 8th and see what's to eat on that block. I love love love that about New York City.

Anyway, the concert was really fun, lots of groups doing just a couple of songs. The kids went first and they sounded great. Adult and school groups sang, including several a capella groups sang. Last was a hilarious rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas sung by the boys group from a local private school. Here's the University of Michigan doing a version of it:



Hilarious. As usual we saw people we knew who we weren't expecting to, including my friend Peter's from Milton's son. Thank goodness Lily didn't do the local Nutcracker this year, she'd have had to race out of that performance to rehearsal (this was the big performance weekend).

Those of us in Northampton seemed to be okay with the awful rain and ice this weekend, but just five miles out of town it was really bad. People all over western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire don't have power. One woman I know in Colrain, Mass., has no heat and says she can get her house up to 50 or so with the fireplace. Yikes! Her street has only five houses on it so even though they lost an entire telephone pole they are not a priority.

And my poor boss! The ceiling caved in on our top editor's desk, right above her computer and all. She wasn't in, thank god; several of us spent an hour early Friday morning carting everything and trying to find places to dry it out. I have no idea the final damage total but at least her photos seemed okay, and other memorabilia. We've had a terrible time with our roof, which is flat, and apparently one of the drains must have frozen and the water built up, eventually leaking in and soaking her ceiling tiles. Of course those are essentially made of sawdust and paper and when they get wet, yuck.

Oh, the other yuck of the week: On Tuesday Dave made us a lovely dinner with homemade chicken fingers and oven fries. The fries tasted weird, but we ate them, unfortunately. Note to self: If food tastes bad there's probably a reason. These were green under the skin. Second note to self: Do not eat green potatoes. I mean, I knew that, and we couldn't tell that the flesh was green because we didn't peel them. We were sick, sick, sick. We didn't throw up but the two of us writhed around all night, passing each other on the way to the bathroom (no further details, I promised. Suffice to say we were miserable). Thank god Lily didn't eat them.

Today we did house chores, which typlically includes cooking for the week now, so we have lunch and dinner covered--or at least thought of. I did three or maybe four loads of laundry, cleaned the bathrooms and changed the sheets. Dave vaccuumed and made two soups, butternut squash and turkey chili. I made chicken paprikash yesterday and a beets vinegrette today. And we always make enough for leftovers. Tomorrow I have to cook a pot roast because it was out all day by mistake. But yes, Virginia, there is life after green potatoes.

Oh, one last thing: We saw Slumdog Millionaire and were blown away. Go see it.