“I don’t want to be like, a guy here, you know? Like, Stanley is the ‘crossword puzzle guy.’ And Angela has cats. I don’t want to have a thing… here. You know, I don’t want to be the ’something’ guy.”    
         
-Ryan “the temp” Howard, in The Office episode,
The Fire

I guess you never know when you’re going to become the “something” guy. Back at school, I remember somebody we called the “pirate guy,” and at church for a while we had the “Donny Osmond guy” and the “happy singing guy” (note: not the same person, but oddly in the same vein). If you’re lucky enough to have a specialized profession at which you are successful, then you may become known as “the man,” like our exterminator (aka, Bob the “Bug man”), our tree-trimmer (Kevin, the “Tree man”), or any anonymous driver who rings the bells on his treat truck (Yes, he’s the “ice cream man”). There’s also my compulsive, former neighbor, whom we all avoided…and called “Lawn man.”

In the interest of equal time, on the female side, there are the ladies: the “ticket lady,” the “cleaning lady,” the “crazy cat lady,” the “check-out lady,” the “lady with the big hat,” the “lady who cut me off in the parking lot who keyed my car because she thought it was me who cut her off.”

I don’t know why, but I always pictured my son Jake as the “guy who dances alone at weddings with a foamy drink in his hand,” but I am relieved to see that he’s carved out a place for himself somewhere else in the “guy” landscape: he’s now the homemade, video game character t-shirt guy.

It seems that Jake’s been wearing his own homemade Zelda-themed shirt to theater rehearsals (it’s got a belt drawn in with fabric markers—isn’t that cute?). The teenager who’s playing Father Christmas in the production told Jake that he liked his shirt and asked if Jake could make him one with a Mario Brothers theme. (Jake was tickled over giving Santa Claus a present for a change—oh, the irony.) Anyway, I wasn’t sure if the kid was just being nice or if he really wanted the shirt, but I figured that drawing Mario and mushrooms on a t-shirt would be an enriching Saturday afternoon activity for a Jake, so I picked up one white T and let him have at it.

Turns out that Alex (aka Fr. Xmas) LOVED the shirt, wore it under his Santa suit for the performance, and was still sporting it at the pizza parlor after-party. Also, Jake received orders with detailed specs from three other kids. He’s got himself a little cottage industry going.

Too bad that at $1.50 in profit per shirt (as long as the shirts are on sale), he will have to make about 80,000 shirts to get himself through the college of his choice. Still, I figure, it’s good that he’s starting young.

When I enrolled Jake for kindergarten several years ago, the school secretary looked at my address and said, “He’s a walker!” If I’m remembering correctly, I think I said, “What’s a walker?” Back home growing up, none of us walked to school, so it was all news to me. It also sounded crazy, as there are .9 miles and 2 streets with double yellow lines between us and the school, meaning that as long as the children were still in elementary school, I would pretty much never feel comfortable with them walking all the way there themselves.

Walking to school has never been an every day of the week thing for us, but we’d do a morning or an afternoon a couple of times a week if the weather was nice. What I came to realize, though, was that those little treks to school were perfect for kid-initiated conversations about nature, school, friends—whatever.

Neither Jake nor Hayley attend our local elementary school anymore, so we don’t walk to school, but we do use that route for exercise sometimes. Jake jogs, I jog (believe it or not), and Hayley rides her scooter. Yesterday’s walk gave Jake the opportunity to discuss his lunch money bankruptcy issues, his progress report observations, his concerns over possible favoritism in the classroom, and his assessment that his teacher is just plain mean.

At one point, Hayley, who rides up on the sidewalk, asked Jake to jog down on the street. He harshly replied, “Why? I’m behind you” to which she said, “Oh, you’re not in my way. I just want to hear the conversation.”

That just about made me cry.

So today, I’m thankful for long walks with my children, who, with fresh air and a little exercise seem to open up about things they never would otherwise.

And if it’s not already too much, I am thankful for Scott Snyder and Dario Varga, who came to my rescue when my e-mail got glitchy to the point of unusability the other day. My email service is with my alma mater, Lehigh University, and I had no qualms about relinquishing control of my computer to two guys whom I’d never met, but who were sitting out in Bethlehem, PA throwing all they had at my little problem. You guys were great, and the email’s working great! Go Engineers!!

OK, I promise that the 12 Days of Cookies will be over soon, but I just had to share the latest in the Cheryl’s Christmas Cookies saga. First, some background.

My friend Becky is involved with an organization called Prison Fellowship, which is a religious outreach to people in prison. Becky, her husband, and other volunteers in our area have forged relationships with many prisoners, and, for some of them, it’s hope-giving and life-changing to have someone “on the outside” who cares about their well-being.

So what does this have to do with cookies? Well, Becky’s husband, George, has put out a call for 35 dozen cookies for packaging and distribution to the prisoners this Christmas season. As you may expect, this was both hope-giving and life-changing for me!! Now I can bake for people who will (a) appreciate what I’ve done and (b) never have the opportunity to complain to me about the nuts vs. no nuts thing. Who knows, perhaps in prison cookies with nuts are not only tasty, but a rare, tradable commodity, something akin to cigarettes. Perhaps by baking, I’ll be giving some downtrodden, aspiring, incarcerated entrepreneur a leg up. One can only hope.

What I’ve enjoyed perhaps the most about the prison cookie connection is my daughter’s strange thrill about the possible criminal profiles of our anonymous cookie recipients. “Just think, Mom,” she said. “A murderer will be eating these cookies.” Not to burst her bubble, but I did point out that there aren’t just murderers in prison. There are drug dealers and petty thieves there too. Drug dealers and petty thieves who may receive a little baggie of cookies, see my specialty, and break down sobbing and thanking God because Grandma back home used to make those very same cookies, and this must be a sign from God spelling reform and restoration in a life that’s otherwise gone hopelessly wrong.

Then again, maybe cookies in prison are just like cookies at the Christmas table. Maybe in 2009 beggars too can be just as choosy as the rest of us, and they’ll throw the cookies back through the bars and into the distributor’s basket because they’ve got peanut butter or raspberry jelly or (heaven forbid) coconut in them. Still the way I look at it, no matter who you are or what your crime, you just can’t argue with free cookies. You’ll take ‘em, you’ll eat ‘em, and whether you like ‘em or not, you’ll know that someone, somewhere, thought you were worth it.

With that, here’s a link to my recipe for Chocolate Penitentiary Pixies, courtesy of the lovely people at Land O Lakes. Enjoy!

I’m thankful today for my neighbor Judi, who just brought me over a baggie filled with Caramel coconut brittle, which in real life translates to shortbread-like, buttery wonderfulness reminiscent of the marble cookies that I loved as a kid.

Cookies make it aaaaaaalllll better.

Judi’s the longtime food columnist for our local paper, so you, me, and the rest of the Dover reading public will have access to the recipe next Wednesday. In the meantime, here’s my very favorite cookie recipe, from The Silver Palatte Cookbook. It takes a lot of time, a good bit of work, and more butter than I’d like to admit. Believe me, though, it’s worth it!

Shortbread Hearts
Ingredients:
3/4 pound (3 sticks) sweet butter, softened
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
3 cups unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Instructions:
1. Cream butter and confectioners’ sugar together until light.

2. Sift flour and salt together and add to creamed mixture. Add vanilla and blend thoroughly.

3. Gather dough into a ball, wrap in wax paper, and chill for 4 to 6 hours.

4. Roll out chilled dough to 5/8-inch thickness [I usually make them about 3/8 inch thick and just cut down on the baking time]. Using a 3-inch-long heart-shaped cookie cutter [I like a star or moon too!], cut out cookies. Sprinkle tops with granulated sugar. Place cut-out cookies on ungreased cookie sheets and refrigerate for 45 minutes before baking.

5. Preheat over to 325°F (160°C).

6. Bake for 20 minutes, or until just starting to color lightly; cookies should not brown at all. Be careful removing from the pan–they are fragile! Cool on a rack.

Yield: 20 cookies

I used to make cookies for Christmas. Lots of cookies. Pardon me, but lots and lots of cookies. I don’t believe in freezing cookies (don’t ask me why), so I would make these mountains of cookies very close to Christmas. And I don’t believe in storing them together in containers or on trays, so the mountains of cookies were in mountains of separate containers, piled up on the basement workbench—which is where everyone’s cookies belong, right?

I kind of hate giving Christmas gifts—not because I’m stingy, but because over the years I’ve had more and more trouble figuring out what in the world all of us already overstuffed Americans really want, need, can use, or will find under the growing masses of stuff we’ve already got. So for a while I gave cookies. I’d make a list of all the people I give to, then figure out what cookie in my repertoire suited that person the best, and then I’d give each person his or her own bag of a dozen and a half baked-with-love, hand-packed, ribbon-tied treats.

Once I even jumped the tradition tracks and brought a tray of my cookies to Christmas dinner. And do you know how many disappeared that magical Christmas night? None at all.

For me, this was a most troubling development. I’m the kind of girl who is suspicious of kids who turn down cake and ice cream. I’m also the kind of girl who can barely resist a cookie, even if it tastes bad. So for me, having tray of my homemade cookies sitting on the dessert buffet staring up at me, untouched, made me feel like sweet, normal Marilyn Munster being rejected, evicted, and kicked out on her butt by Aunt Lily and Uncle Herman.

So, needless to say, I stopped making cookies. At least I stopped for a year, then went through a period of withdrawal, to the point that last Christmas I packed all of my cookie ingredients in a travel bag and dragged them to my mother-in-law’s house, where, on the day after Christmas, I baked like 12 dozen cookies, none of which I was planning on eating. Let me tell you, I enjoyed every freaking minute of it.

This year, I find myself at a crossroads. I wonder, shall I bake, or not? If I do, shall I give, or not? On my way to a party shall I bring a savory (a stretch) or a sweet (my specialty)? I don’t know.

What I do know is that Jocelyn, the lovely volunteer director for my daughter’s drama class will be receiving a thank you gift from me tomorrow night, consisting of a Polish pottery platter with a bag of Betty Crocker Gingerbread cookie baking mix lovingly glue dotted to its center. A cookie compromise? Yes. But I figure, she’s a big girl. She can handle it.

This year, I’m thankful for a little different Thanksgiving celebration.

My Mom and Dad didn’t come to us this year because they were here last weekend for my Dover Symphony concert (thanks for coming, Mom and Dad). They were only staying until Monday, though, and considering how busy, sick, and exhausted we’ve been over the past few weeks, we weren’t really interested in making the Thanksgiving trek of eternal traffic to visit them in New Jersey. Since our dear friend Sybil (aka, Scott, my brother-in-law) and his wife (hi, Beth!) have hosted the Scheir side of the family for about the past 10 years or so, we figured they’d have their hands full and didn’t invite ourselves along. Nor did we invite any of them here. Ultimately, Craig and I decided that we’d be spending Thanksgiving here at home, with the kids, alone.

We were so excited when my sister hit on the money idea of the decade: Chinese food. Chinatown Buffet (the one by Toys ‘R Us and TJ Maxx), she said, would be open on Thanksgiving Day. Crazy? Crazy enough to really work, I thought, especially since it seemed silly to make a turkey dinner with all the trimmings for 4 people, especially when 1 is a vegetarian. I trial ballooned the idea on Facebook and got all the affirmation I was looking for. My favorite response was from Connie, our pastor’s wife, who called me and said, “It’s so nice that you’re making memories for the children. Just think, someday they’ll say, ‘Remember that time Mom went crazy and we had Chinese food for Thanksgiving?’”

Amen, sister. Pass the chopsticks.

So, 4 hours after a lovely breakfast of cranberry sauce, spoonbread, and eggy/cheesy biscuits, off we trekked to the Chinatown Buffet. And it was aweSOME!!! Sushi! Noodles! Egg rolls! Brownies! Happy service! Happier customers! And no darn dishes to boot–gosh, am I thankful!!

I’m especially thankful that we could be upfront and honest with the rest of the family about our temporary tradition transition. Come to find out that when Craig called his Mom, she said that Scott and family made a tradition departure of their own, going instead to his sister-in-law’s for the day (which, in case you’re reading, is perfectly A-OK by me, Scott), leaving Aunt Kay, Aunt Bebble, and Mom and Dad Scheir on their own for dinner (again, different, but perfectly OK). So it was a low-key change of pace for everybody this year–and the Chinese option was a fun conversation piece.

Would we do it again? I don’t know. But it was the right thing at the right time for a family that bit off way more than it could chew this fall. For the rest and relaxation, we are so very thankful.

Never did I think I would be a fan of Spanish Gothic (-ish) fiction, but I just finished The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, and I think I’m hooked. Cobweb covered tower houses, graffiti coated mausoleums, bullet stopping books, mysterious locked rooms–this book has it all.

Still, I’m a little confused. Not to give it all away (and please stop reading if you don’t want me to spoil it for you), but I was pretty sure all along that the narrator had unwittingly made a deal with the devil (to riff on Ghostbusters, if someone asks you to write them a new religion, say “no.”). Then it came out that the former resident of the narrator’s Munsters-esque home had apparently also made a deal with the devil. Then, all of the sudden, any visit from the narrator became a kiss of death for whomever he’d just seen, as if, somehow, he was an angel of death working for the devil (or the Spanish version of Corleone family hit man of choice Luca Brasi–plus at least one character ends up sleeping with the fishes, if you know what I mean, so there you go). There’s sacrifice of the pure of heart, admiring views from high places, and even a line like this–”I started working on the seventh day.” With all of those allusions, could I be wrong?

Still, I’m not sure. So again, what is probably obvious to the rest of the reading world is something that I’m trying to work out on my own–not unlike English class back in high school, when the teacher would ask something like, “What is the theme of this novel?” and I’d grope in the silence looking for something earth-shattering insight that was inevitably bankrupt and laughable, or at least didn’t at all resemble what the teacher had written down on her handy mental answer card.

Boy, did I hate high school English. It ruined me for college where I took not one single English class. So there.

Back to Zafon. The jacket of the book says that it’s a prequel to Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind–a book which I read a couple of years ago. I wanted to double-check the connections (and nab some reading material for the Thanksgiving weekend) so I went down to the library’s fiction section. I looked under “ZAF.” No book. I looked under “RUI.” No book. I asked the librarian, who, for some bizarro reason, looked under neither “Z” nor “R” but under “S” (?!?!!). No book. So now, I have The Shadow of the Wind on hold and have no hope of receiving it in time for the Thanksgiving weekend.

Ironically, both Zafon books feature a fictional place called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Has the librarian looked there, I wonder? Fat chance.

I say all this to say, I’m looking for a book to read this weekend. Any suggestions?

A couple of days ago I realized that my love/hate relationship with drama, stress, worry, and anxiety has to end (see my “Drama Junkie” post from 11/19). Perfect timing, as the holiday season is nearly upon us. I’m going 45 days without drama–which should get me through to the new year. Every day I’ll be logging my near occasions of drama, and I hope there will be no direct hits to report. You can read my daily drama report by clicking on “Drama Rehab Journal” in the column to your left.

Readers’ encouragement, cheerleading, and words of wisdom are more than welcome. If I know myself, I’m going to need it.

Yup, that’s me. I just realized it yesterday. As much as I dislike drama and its accompanying tension, emotion, and no-win decision-making, I find that I also kind of dig it—not in a weird, ambulance chaser kind of way, though. Maybe in more of an “I’m stressed, therefore I am” kind of way.

Imagine this scene. My poor husband, down since Friday night with a non-hospitalization-requiring case of H1N1, had to sit through me ranting and raving Tuesday morning—before 8 am, I might add—because I just had to, had to, had to get all my Boy Scout concerns off my chest. Why? Because a Boy Scout friend of my son’s said, “Dude, you need to go on the camping trip this weekend. That’s when you get your requirements signed off!” I don’t know what requirements the kid was talking about. I didn’t even know there was a camping trip coming up. But in no time, my fear that my son would never amount to anything rose up in me, breathed fire on my otherwise sensible brain, and convinced me that the world would come to an end if he didn’t go camping—and NOW!

I’m sure you’d agree that mental priority number one for my in-bed all week spouse is cramming a 2-night camping trip into his big recovery weekend when we already have a birthday sleepover, a theater outing, Junior Orchestra rehearsal, grandparents coming, faux Thanksgiving on Saturday, Junior Orchestra performance, Mom’s Symphony dress rehearsal, and Mom’s Symphony performance already.

No wonder his fever returned.

My stress, my constant companion, the recurring theme of this blog, my universe, and everything has been with me since I was a kid. Sometimes disguised as academic anxiety, sometimes as insomnia and nightmares, sometimes as pure, classic overreaction, my stress has periodically asked me, “You seem awfully calm right now—shouldn’t you be worrying about something? There’s always something to worry about.” Then I’d think for a moment and realize, yes, there is a test coming up or there is that kid who teases me on the bus or, barring anything else, there’s always those deadly diseases and random accidents lurking where you least expect them. And then, ahhh, I was somehow comforted to know that I wouldn’t have to grope my way through an unfamiliar, disturbingly peaceful, stress-free day.

Freakish, I know.

Now here I am, all grown up, with my drama potential multiplied by three other people, a dog, and their respective pandemic viruses, mean girl issues, pressure-perpetuating Boy Scout buddies, and enormous dietary missteps. But when you’re hammering a guy with a low grade fever and grade A bedhead about how he absolutely must e-mail the scoutmaster right now to see whether we can get in on 6 ½ hours of a 48 hour camping trip, the handwriting’s kind of on the wall.

So I’m officially declaring a 30-day rehab—maybe 45: drama-free through Christmas. I’m going to try it. My higher power and my higher reasoning should be enough to stave off my higher blood pressure. In the immortal words of Huey Lewis and the News, I want a new drug. Maybe instead of drama, I’ll get hooked on lateness, the result of no longer rushing everywhere, all the time. Maybe I’ll start running addictively—for exercise, that is. Maybe I’ll start overdoing it on sleep—that’d be a switch.

Whatever it is, it’ll be better for me, my family, and everybody. Except maybe all of you. I mean, without the stress, what will there be to write about?

Dear Mom’s blog-o-buddies,

I’m 9 years old, and I have a problem. I have a friend who keeps telling me what other people think of me, and—let me tell you—it’s not good. My ‘friend’ told me that one of the girls in the neighborhood only likes to play with me because she likes my toys. And she said that another girl she knows just thinks I’m weird.

My dad says that the friend who keeps passing on bad news to me should keep her trap shut. My mom says that some girls are moody and kind of exclusive about who can be in their circle of friends and that makes them act unkindly to other people. My brother pretty much can’t stand any of my friends because once, one of them went into his room, stole his Rubik’s cube, and wrecked it.

What should I do?

Signed,

Feeling more insecure by the moment

(Insecure, that is, not unlike my mom, who had her share of mean girl medicine back when she was a kid and still gets a case of the galloping insecurities whenever someone says something to her like, “I’m so glad you stopped wearing baggy clothes” or “I’m not sure if it’s because of the way you make it, but turkey doesn’t seem to agree with me anymore.”)

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