How To Make A Non-Smoking Teenager, Maybe

It's pretty safe to say that at this point Zane is not going to be a cigarette smoker. I know this because I asked him. He contorted his face to imply that I was asking the most ridiculous question imaginable and slowly said, "Yeahhhhhhh." If you know any teenagers, you will know the face I speak of and the tone his answer was given in.

I believe him.

Can you imagine this person smoking? No way.

I won't start celebrating yet, but I'm pretty close to allowing myself to feel giddy and super proud. Being a non-smoker was not at all a given in Zane's life. I smoked (until I got pregnant), his father smoked, my mother smoked (Can you imagine? So weird). Smoking is more prevalent at his high school than in others and in between the ages of 13 and 16 his personality and boredom made peer pressure a powerful and scary presence in our lives. Not that he ever did anything really terrible, just that the possibility was always there, right on the edge of his daily life. 

The prospect of Zane getting trapped in a cigarette addicted reality makes me insane with rage.  It's true - you should see the inside of my mind when I think about it. It's scary and messy and red.

So here's what we did: in additon to creating a general culture of discouragement using standard techniques like guilt, shame, and fear, and in spite of how much I want to believe Alfie Kohn and his Punished by Rewards book, we offered Zane a ticket to anywhere in Europe if he got to 18 without becoming a smoker. Not only did this give him a bit of internal motivation (the kid really wants to get to Europe) but it gave him something to say in response to, "Want a drag?" that was way more cool than having to say, "No, because my parents will kill me." 

I'm not sure that he would attribute his non-smokerness to this dangling carrot, but we don't care. If it played a part in any way it will well be worth it. Of course, he could go to Europe, the land of smokers, and become a smoker.

Crap.

Kitchen Conundrum and Floor Indecision

So, we took out the kitchen on a whim.  We promised ourselves that we wouldn't settle for something just because it was there (within reason - we're not moving the stove or moving sky lights), and to be honest, the kitchen had seen better days.  Much better days.  I have decided that I am committed to keeping the sink and finding a better spot for the eventual refridgerator, and have thus created a little headache for myself. 

On one hand, moving this kitchen around is a breeze; no plumbing! But on the other, we have to design around a gravity fed water tank, the slanted walls, the fireplace, and the ladder that will go up to the loft. So I spent a lot of time last weekend playing with blue tape and random pieces of furniture trying to feel out what would work. I'm not sold on any of my solutions, but since we have no money left, I really don't have to think about it until next spring anyway.

Of much more concern is the floor. I had a vision of a shiny deep deep blue and have been running with that. I can see it with a huge flokati rug popping out of it, the wood of the furniture looking gorgeous, and any accent color I do in my decorating will look gorgeous, but there's something about deciding to paint a floor that's freaking me out. What if I'm wrong? I found a photo of a ceiling that is similar to the floor in my mind on Pinterest (I have rotated the image- ignore the furniture on the ceiling!):

Matthew, my sweet sweet absent A-Frame partner, walked me through our floor choices and had me make a case for all of them and by the end of it he said it was clear that we need to paint the floor blue. Anything else would be safe and out of fear, and the A-Frame is not about being safe or keeping things the way they are out of fear. Gosh, I love him so.  So I guess we are going to paint the floor blue, unless any of you tell me right now that it's a terrible idea.

We'll leave the floor in the dining room and bedroom wood.  They're in much better shape and pretty pretty.

Here is a slideshow of kitchen layout taping and floor paint samples:

Teenager Says: "Stupid Good"

Classic Everyday Biscuits

(adapted by me from the New York Times Magazine)

So, I don't really care about food. Or, I don't really care about food the way people who blog about it do.  I love the social act of eating with others, and I have spent my fair share of time in the kitchen - I've even owned a cafe - but I don't fawn over food the way most people do.  That said, I truely love discovering recipes that are so simple and so good that I put them to memory and never look for another version.  They are like a perfect little black dress or the movie Once - why bother with anything else?

Since this dough will rest awhile, wait to preheat your oven.  I'll tell you when.

In a bowl, mix together:

2 C flour (I only had cake flour when I made these and they were fine, but try to use all purpose)

2 T baking powder

a little less than 1 T sugar

1 t salt

Put flour mixture into food processor and add to it (or not - use a fork or pastry cutter):

5 T cold cubed butter (salted or not)

Pulse or cut the butter into the flour mixture until it looks like little pebbles

Add:

1 C milk (whatever kind you have - I used 2%) and mix with a fork until a loose dough comes together

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and pat it out into a rectangle about an inch thick.  Fold it over and pat down. Repeat. Cover with a clean cloth and let sit for 30 minutes.  At 15 minutes preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

Pat or roll out dough so it's 10" x 6". Cut into whatever shapes you want (I used a round biscuit cutter) and put them onto a cookie sheet.  I got 6 uniform biscuits, plus one crazy scrap pile biscuit that Zane loved.

Bake for 13-16 minutes.  They should be light golden brown.  Serve warm. Duh.

A-Frame Update

Spent the weekend in NH.  Got desperately sick of painting.  Played with kitchen layout using random furniture. Lots of floor decisions to be made. Dining table/door moved in. I love my dining chairs. Tired. Oh! And I found a wicker elephant for a third of the price of this one.

Video of where we are as of September 2011:

Video of where we were in November 2010:

Sentiment vs. Aesthetic, Round One: The Dining Room Table

This is the only photo I have of the table. Sorry about that.

Several friends have recently remarked to me that they are impressed with my ability to let go of things that have sentimental meaning for me but that don’t fit in with my design of a room. After convincing myself that they did not in fact mean, “You seem like a heartless bitch,” I pat myself on the back and thought, “Thank God.”

Objects have always held a sentimental hold on my heart. Some of my earliest memories are of my relationships to Things; the hours I would spend with my grandparent’s Disney record collection from the 40’s and 50’s, the bright yellow spines of their complete National Geographic collection, the wonder of discovery in their attic and creak of the old wooden chests stored there. I simply do not remember a time when Things didn't have some magical pull on me.

As a young girl I made it clear that I expected to inherit everything, and as an only child I didn’t find much resistance to the demand. Now that I have indeed inherited most of our family things, I find myself constantly figuring out how to honor the past and to make a new and unique future.

Case in point: I recently received a letter in the mail, handwritten on paper, from my grandmother, the very much alive grandmother who’s A-Frame I am renovating/destroying (depending from where you are looking).  It started out innocently enough: “I want to tell you a story...” She then proceeded to give me the full and complete history of the dining room table she kept in the A-Frame and that I have since moved into a barn.  “Nice to know,” I thought; it’s always good to know things about your families stuff. But then she ended the letter with, “Now that you know this story, do you really not want the family dining room table?” [emphasis mine]

Ugh.  

No, I really do not want the family dining room table.  And here’s why: you can live your material life according to any number of value systems.  Whether or not you consciously know it, you are doing it right now.  And I have decided that my material value system is topped by design aesthetic and not sentimental attachment.  It’s a huge shift for me, and a hard one to enforce sometimes, especially when my very much alive grandmother would so obviously like it to be the other way around.

The table is a huge round one and the room is a long narrow one.  Trying to keep the table would literally be like trying to fit a round peg into a rectangle hole. It doesn’t look good, it doesn’t function good.  It’s just not good. No designer in the world would walk into the A-Frame and go, “Ah yes, a round table is what we need!” And you know what? I want to be a designer in this A-Frame first and a granddaughter second.

Before you think, “You are a heartless bitch,” remember! I am putting photos of my grandparents on prominent display in the living room, I am using many of their other objects for decoration or function, and I kept two huge and profoundly heavy boxes of National Geographics.  So what if it was for their yellow spines?