Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

You’ll remember that I wrote about my confusion over the disparagement of “Ma’am” as a form of address.  Well, in England I’m apparently “Mrs. Erin Penner,” a term that I find really confusing (either Ms. Penner or Mrs. Sydney Penner, but Mrs. Erin Penner?).  As far as personal tics go, “Mrs. Penner” always makes me feel a bit like a kindergarten teacher (always amusing), and I like “Ms.,” just because it has some of the simplicity that “Mr.” does, though I realize other people read this as a strong feminist streak coming through; in truth, I like “Ms.” because it means no one has to guess about my marital status or wonder whether “Sydney” is my name or my husband’s.  My English bank cards read “MRS E PENNER”; who knew that banks cared about your title?

At any rate, I liked this recent post from Miss Manners on the subject:

“You cannot imagine — evidently — how weary Miss Manners is of hearing idiosyncratic interpretations of female terms of respect: “It makes me feel old,” ”It’s disrespectful to my husband,” ”My husband doesn’t own me,” and so on.

“These are courtesy titles, ladies (and no, please don’t tell Miss Manners how bad “ladies” makes you feel). They are not intended to characterize you, other than as a female who is due respect.

“The trouble is that there are too many of them. Uncharacteristically, etiquette has offered a choice.

“Bad idea. It has only led to squabbling when no insults were intended and declarations of feelings when no such outbursts were required.

“Funny — gentlemen just have “Mr.,” and yet most of them manage to open their mail without carrying on about how the envelope makes them feel.

“You are right that people should address you as you wish to be addressed, and that it is ridiculously complicated to find out, in each case, how that is. So a lot of tolerance is required when people guess wrong.

“Chances are that if the message isn’t insulting, the address is not meant to be, either.

“That’s why we prefer standardized etiquette rules, folks.”

As a side note, it appears that even “Mr.” can have its problems: when Sydney gets things addressed to “Mr. S. Penner” it often looks a lot like “Mrs. Penner.”

Erin

After giving Katherine’s winter hat up for lost we discovered it neatly draped over a fence post in the parks this morning.  Someone had apparently reclaimed it from wherever Katherine had thrown it on a recent walk with Sydney, and it was waiting for us several days later.

We’ve been wondering what to do about beds for both baby and Katherine, since we hesitate to take Katherine’s cot away from her just as we’re changing lots of other things in her life.  And, to be quite honest, it’s still quite handy being able to put her in a bed from which she cannot remove herself, since she will never sleep if she can be up and about instead.  But this morning I got an email through a newcomers’ list I’m on: a biology prof’s toddler has just outgrown her crib, and the professor is wondering whether anyone could use a crib, mattress, sheets, and changing pad.  Oh, that would be us!  So next week we’ll be fully outfitted for our new addition–and everyone but the adults will be safely behind bars 🙂

Erin

I’m a sucker for new pizza ideas, and the other day Sydney and I stumbled across one that sounded great.  For those of you who are in the Ithaca area, it comes from Hazelnut Kitchen, a great local-foods restaurant in Trumansburg.  I had to guess at how they did it, but it turned out really well: small chunks of squash roasted with olive oil and sage, topped with blue cheese, pecans, and sauteed leeks.  I think we’re going to be full until morning . . .

Erin

My first appointment with the midwife was, to put it mildly, confusing: lots of terms I had trouble translating, lots of confusion about what’s standard both here and in the States.  And she frowned and said, “you’re small” when measuring my stomach.  That is, ladies and gentlemen, probably the first time in history that I, good Midwestern stock, have been called small!

But the most recent appointment went much better.  She had good advice for getting my body ready for delivery and is going to meet me at the hospital for our next appointment so that she can show me around and make my care options clearer.  When it came time to measure me again, though, she once again frowned and said, “Hmm, quite small,” and was just getting ready to suggest an ultrasound when I asked if the results from my previous ultrasound, a month ago, weren’t useful.  She took a look at them and started to laugh: apparently the baby not only measured normally then, it was on the big side of normal.  So she looked at me and told me that she didn’t know where I was putting it, but that the baby seemed to be growing just fine.  She confirmed that it’s dropped down a bit, as I suspected, which allows me to eat and breathe a bit more easily (thank you, baby!), though it does give me the uncomfortable sense of impending doom . . . I’m due one month from today.

Erin

I thought that maybe this time around we could do away with most of the gadgets that come with children.  We already worked through the trials of finding a stroller (my workhorse!), and we have no need for a carseat (for which I am forever grateful).  But with a house that is spread out over three floors we’ve conceded to the need for a baby monitor.  So we find ourselves once again digging through descriptions of batteries, static, and sudden kaputing of electronics.  I was naively hopeful that phone, laptop, and printer would be the only electronics of our home (I know, I know, they’re plenty awful even on their own).

On the other side of things, I was just reading an article on school districts’ blossoming fascination with the iPad.  Apparently they’re buying them (at roughly $750 a pop) by the dozens to give to schoolchildren and teachers.  Here’s hoping that that craze is over by the time Katherine gets to school, or my husband may just get his homeschool-inclining way.

Erin

With the unwieldy slush gone and the worst of the flu behind us, we’ve reemerged from the house.

Sydney made the mistake of going out birdwatching without cleaning up (he’d been holed up on the top floor, working hard for a few days) and found himself meeting colleagues out on the meadows in his disheveled state.  He promptly put in a request for a haircut, which I happily gave him, and he now looks a bit less insane today.

Katherine, though still interested in learning new words, has also started giving us instructions in return.  She is particularly fond of her word for birds and tries to convince me that the butterflies are also “Caw caws.” I easily resist her commands, but it’s pretty hard to hold out when she tries the big-eyed, hopeful approach.  Sydney loaned her one of his bird identification books and she’s been happily screeching her bird word with every turn of the page.

I just missed my goal to finish up a chapter by the end of the year, but I did so largely because I just found some new and interesting stuff to cram into it at the end.  Sydney’s been very patient with me as I prattle on about talking corpses in poetry and angry dead women, and I’ve been happily adding to the monstrous chapter that is now a bit over seventy pages.  Tomorrow I get to start revising it and, presumably, paring it down before I send it off to my advisors.

For anyone who’s counting, we’re six weeks away from the arrival of the baby.  Mom and Dad are making plans to come out and I’ve organized the house to the hilt.  I also ordered several months’ worth of laundry detergent and toilet paper.  I’m into being prepared.

Erin

Katherine’s favorite thing in the world seems to be birds.  First it was “quack quack” and “duck duck,” but she’s since expanded (or confused) her world to include all manner of birds.  When she and I sat down to play with blocks today she pulled out these three and spent the rest of the hour lining them up and handing them to us, one by one, announcing with each one “Ka ka!”  (She’s been learning from the gulls at the park).  Katherine’s handiwork:

Her father, I might add, is very proud.  The two of them spend a good deal of time poring over Sydney’s bird guide, with her shouting “Ka ka!” at every page.

Erin

When I was in the stationery store the other day the young man at the counter suddenly asked, “Do you get a lot of mood swings?”  Answering “no, not really” before I remembered that I’m pregnant (and not just female!), I only belatedly began to wonder why he asked.  He followed it up with, “You seem quite calm.”  I have to wonder what kind of screaming banshee he had been expecting.

Erin

Sydney looked around our house and complained about the lack of good reading material for sick days.  When I started to protest, he made it quite clear that I would be a fool to suggest my Woolf and Faulkner novels as good reading material.  I’ve tried not to buy good novels since we got here, since I should be reading for work right now and waiting until the baby arrives to indulge in anything else.  But after he offered a few helpful hints about wanting something that will distract him, something with a compelling story, I set off for the bookstore.  I bypassed two “classy” bookstores on my way out and went straight to WH Smith, which had lots of popular books grouped in helpful categories like “Bestsellers,” “Thrillers,” and “Fantasy.”  They made it hard to find anything that wasn’t a page-turner; simple “Fiction” was drowned out by saucier categories.

But I had a problem: I couldn’t bring myself to spend money on junk we wouldn’t want to read when not sick, and I didn’t want to buy a book I’d already read (and thus knew to be a sure-fire page-turner), since it would kill me to buy a duplicate of a book I had stored away in the States.  I’m not terribly up on “true crime” novels, but I worried that Sydney wouldn’t be enamored with chick lit or biographies of celebrities, which were things I had at least come across reviews of recently.  Oh, and I wasn’t allowed to buy anything terribly fat, so good histories, biographies, and Victorian novels (not that the store would deign to carry old books) were out.  So I bought some pretty good fiction and slunk home.

Sydney looked at my selections and broke the news: I am apparently just not a good person to pick books that have a good, compelling plot, and that run along in a gripping manner.  The kinds of current fiction I like are ones that are slow, or that jump around in time, or that imply a lot more than they move.  As in, I like books to be a little too close to my work for other people’s comfort.

So Sydney’s stuck reading decent novels and has to make do with being less distracted than he’d like.

Erin

Sydney had been planning to fly out to Boston tomorrow to give a paper at the philosophy association’s annual meeting.  But he’s now fighting his own round of the flu, and it looks like condition at the airports in both London and Boston will be messy, so he’s decided to cancel the trip.  Now we just have to extricate him from all of the plans he’s made to get there!  As glad as I am not to have sole charge of Katherine and the house for a week, and not to have to wonder whether my husband will join the hundreds of people sleeping in the terminals at Heathrow, I have to wish that he could remain here in better shape.

Erin