That’s what so many of my friends and colleagues want to know today. I mean, how the hell should I know? I’ve been living in Colorado for nearly 13 years now — my voter registration in the Bay State has long since lapsed, but I think it’s so incomprehensible that a Republican would be sitting in Ted Kennedy’s old senate seat that people are scrambling for meaning.

I think this is my favorite explanation of what happened: the Massachusetts electorate got drunk on its own power, had a wild time with someone who didn’t seem to be taking them for granted for a change, and will now be deeply hung over for the next several years. I’ll tell you when I knew Coakley was doomed, though: it was when I heard that she had called a former Red Sox pitcher a Yankees fan. I groaned. “That could cost her the election,” I said out loud. It probably did, but as part of a larger picture of rash assumptions.

However, I offer you this Top Ten list:

Top Ten Reasons Not to Freak Out About This Election:

Ten. The runoff election legislation was stupid, and I think everyone sees that now.

Nine. People who are Republicans in Massachusetts are no more conservative than moderates in other states. Even Republicans enact progressive legislation there. Take Republican Governor Bill Weld, who enacted the Family Leave Act, which allowed for even same-sex partners to take leaves from work to care for each other in times of illness and not lose their jobs because of it — and that was about 15 years ago.

Eight. Scott Brown looks all right naked, and apparently, has a truck. Who was the last person in Massachusetts politics who looked all right naked? Would you have wanted to see Ted Kennedy naked in the last, say, 40 years? Think of it as an upgrade.

Seven. People think that active voters, such as the Massachusetts electorate, will just make the “smart choice” for the “common good,” every time. That, my friends, is crap. Active voters also like to let the country know they’re sick of being taken for granted, or that the “smart” candidate sucks in some way. A clever mob is still, after all, a mob.

Six. The next person who says it’s a referendum on health care reform should have his eyelids taped open and have to look at recent Ted Kennedy porn. That’s not what this is about. Massachusetts HAS health care! It’s about Massachusetts voters being annoyed as individuals. They are probably just as surprised as you are, each thinking his one little annoyance vote for the other guy wouldn’t amount to anything, and they’re probably already sorry and blaming themselves personally. And they should. Next time, they’ll vote for the common good in droves, they promise.

Five. If the people of the fine, fine, superfine Commonwealth of Massachusetts think their senator is not representing their interests, he is out of there, in a process that will likely involve tarring and feathering (wasn’t the Major Molineaux Tar and Feather Emporium the first business on the Boston Common?), and will make the California runoffs look like an episode of The View. OK, bad example: The California runoffs really were a lot like an episode of The View. But Massachusetts Boot-Your-(Nice)-Ass-out-of-Office runoffs will be a lot more like WWE Raw, except not quite so civilized and candy-assed, and with sensible shoes.

Four. Scott Brown and his truck are about to be horribly aged and unable to please anybody. In two years, they’ll both look like victims of a terrible curse, or like they’ve been trying to kill Master Windoo with The Dark Side of The Force. This is a state where, when someone takes your parking spot that you painstakingly shoveled out and placed your old couch in to “save” it for you (no mean feat, considering you are probably a middle-aged Irishman who is under 5′8″ and over 200 pounds, subsisting entirely on a diet of starch and fatty meats), you call your representative about it. Think Mr. Boxer Briefs is up to that? Either he is, and folks will be OK with the choice they made, or he is SO not, and he will pay. You don’t have to do anything — the Massachusetts electorate will take care of it.

Three. Despite any ridiculous commentary we’re about to see, the kind of teabagger who is welcome in Massachusetts is not the kind currently championed by Fox News. One election does not signify a statewide shift in ideology, and the Cradle of the Revolution does not appreciate hollow Tetley mockeries.

Two. Senate Democrats have now officially pissed away their super-majority. If they’re paying attention, it should now be obvious that they really must stop worrying about pleasing everyone right away, and just ram through the legislation we need, before any more votes about frustration come up. The American electorate just isn’t that patient. Ideally, this should get Senate Democrats on the stick, and that helps everybody, whether they like it or not.

One. As Jon Stewart so aptly pointed out: Oh, no! Now Democrats only have a regular majority and not a super-majority?! It’s still more votes than Bush had when he did whatever the f* he wanted.

Indeed. Why exactly are we in a tizzy?

You are happily doing some work for an online news organization — a really good one. You like it very much, you like the philosophy, and you like the people. You think it’s really taking off, too, and there’s an exciting energy about being part of something so important and cool. You realize, though, that it’s a challenge to use the third person exclusively, and usually, passive voice annoys you (yeah, you do, don’tcha?), but hey, sometimes it’s necessary, or it’s all you can do with the text and still have it make sense. It’s also like riding a bike: you can get back into it when you’ve worked in journalism enough, except anywhere with your laptop is quieter than the newsroom where you learned to write on deadline and copy edit.

You get those events listings that say, “we” all the time in the original listing, and, recognizing that that will not stand, you must then ask yourself, “Well, who the hell is this ‘we’? Is it the ‘they’ you are always hearing about, except this month, they’re having an event where they weed local parks instead of trying to wreck your life specifically?” and then you figure out who “we” is, and edit accordingly. Or sometimes you get postings that don’t have anywhere near enough information to be remotely useful to anyone, and then you do some research, scrape together enough that people will know whom to contact and where and when to show up, and what-all is going on (you leave the “why” — and usually the “how” — to them).

Either way, you polish it up and post that badboy. This, of course, makes you feel clever and pleased with yourself. You solved something. You made a little journalistic marble out of a scratched and dented ball-bearing pile of words. Now you can go on beautifying electronic copy, with a smile on your face.

Thanks, I feel better now. I just had to get that out of my system. Or, you know, you did.

I just want to take a moment to rant about the general suckitude of No Child Left Behind. It sucks in much the same way that just about everything the Bush administration jacked with sucks. That is, it is an utterly ineffectual policy that made a bad situation far worse than anyone could have imagined, it favors rich white people, screws regular Americans for years, if not generations, to come, and is largely based on fear, and rich people getting richer while poor people get poorer (which, as you know, is the step just before the rest of us were all to just lie down and die and let Dubya and his pals have everything). I know, that’s very specific and somewhat long-winded. Now you know why I opted for the more concise and almost plaintive term, “sucks.”

Was public education in the U.S. bad before NCLB? In many places, sure, it wasn’t great. I for one succeeded in spite of my public education and not because of it. But it wasn’t great, not because our teachers suck, or because the schools themselves aren’t trying, or because our kids are too stupid; it wasn’t great because it wasn’t enough of a priority on our resource allocation list. Schools didn’t have the budgets to get what they needed and were overwhelmed with bureaucracy. Teachers had classes that were too big, and not enough hours in the day to teach how they wanted. The students that were doing poorly got a fair amount of attention (whose effectiveness wasn’t uniform), but the ones who were excelling didn’t get much reinforcement, and in some places, most of the kids in the middle didn’t, either.

So what was the solution? Standardized testing. The schools whose test scores were high would get more money, and those whose test scores were low wouldn’t. Standardized testing, though, mostly tests the size of the houses in the neighborhood where the test is being administered. So the rich schools did well and got richer, and the poor schools didn’t do as well, and got poorer. Teachers had to spend a bunch of time teaching to the test and not covering key material kids would need to get along in their educations and lives. Students got ripped off.

But that’s not the worst of it.

My father, who teaches high school geometry at a charter school in New England, has been observing that skills are declining over time. Every year, it seems he has to go back a little further in students’ basic mathematical education and get them up to speed before he can teach them what they’re supposed to be learning that year. First it was more basic algebra, then it started moving back further, to the point where, several years on, he was having to catch high school students up on fractions, and now, long division. Essentially, he observed earlier this year, it seems that students didn’t learn much math after about 2001, wherever they were in the process at that point — their mathematical educations just seem to have stalled there.

And what happened in 2001? Indeed, NCLB happened. It brought the educational process of an entire generation to a screeching halt. Now that those folks who were in grade school and junior high then are in college, I’m seeing it, too: adults who don’t know what a part of speech is, or what the difference is between first and second person. I’m filling in the holes wherever I find them, and the students are very eager indeed to have them filled — they really are thirsty for knowledge, which is great — but it really bothers me how completely the educational system in this country has failed an entire generation.

I hope there is a special place in hell for leaders who rip off their nations’ kids.

One of the sure signs that you’ve somehow become a grown-up — along with any sugar sludge at the bottom of your coffee cup or cereal bowl no longer looking appetizing — is that your weekends are busier than your weekdays and the few days before a holiday are busier still. No doubt about it: I’ve got a busy day!

At least a lot of the busy-ness is mitigated by pleasure, though: I have some class prep for the morning writing class, but it’s all short papers, most of which are the satire assignment, which should be a lot of fun to read. I have a class to teach tonight, but it’s my favorite session of the series. I have a ton of errands to run, but I can bump a few to tomorrow if it comes down to it, and they’re all either quick, or in anticipation of Thursday’s festivities, or both. I also have some work to do for Oakland Local, but that’s generally fun stuff. I get to work with neat people on a cool project, and while I’m at it, find out more and more about what has to be one of the most vibrant, passionate communities in the country. I am perpetually knocked out by what Oaklanders are up to.

One of today’s tasks is an experiment. As you well know, I haven’t intentionally eaten the landgoing since the Reagan administration. I really don’t proselytize about it, though, and I’ve been known to prepare meat for others from time to time. One of those times will be Thursday. I’m making a 21-pound turkey for 4 carnivores. I can only hope each of them wants to eat 5.25 pounds of turkey. I know, I know, but it was only 40 cents a pound and it was the last one left, so even the reasonably-sized ones were more than twice as expensive.

The last time I made turkey (and the first time, incidentally) was 15 years ago, when I was living in the D.C. area with Phillip, before we were married. Phillip had this frozen turkey from work, and in a shocking fit of domesticity and loving sacrifice, I decided to cook it up for him. It came out quite well, but the process was a total freakshow. I recall it doing a number of different things, all of them bizarre and unexpected, the most memorable of which had to be the giant, golf-ball-sized fat bubble it grew out of its armpit. I called everybody I knew whom I thought might have the vaguest clue what might be going on: parents, auntie, friends of the family… It was like an X-Files episode, complete with frantic conspiracy going on in my oven. What was that thing?! Was there something terribly, horribly wrong with the turkey? Was it part of the pop-up thermometer system? Should I pop it, or could that wreck something? What if I stabbed it or tried to pop it and it exploded, spewing hot turkey fluids all over the place, possibly burning me and the kitchenette beyond all recognition? What if I stabbed it and it didn’t pop at all? Would that be even worse? Was it plastic or actual avian tissue? Did I leave something in/on the turkey that I wasn’t supposed to? (Oh, you didn’t take the evil alien membrane off it before you cooked it? Everybody knows to take the evil alien membrane off it before they cook it…)

So I have cooked a turkey before, and I have made large Thanksgiving meals without turkeys before (someone else being in charge of roasting birds, and the guests being lovely people), but I have never done both at the same time. I don’t anticipate any problems weirder than wingpit fat bubbles, but I do need to know just how long to cook the turkey. “Until the thermometer pops up” and “about 20 minutes per pound” don’t cut it, because everything else has to hit the table at about the same time. I need that endpoint, dammitt!

There is an added wrinkle. At this altitude, cooking and baking become slightly more complex. I usually end up baking things at a lower temperature, and longer, otherwise they burn on the outside and stay raw on the inside. I couldn’t say what the exact values are for that for meat (I could only give percentages on cookies), so I was unable to come up with a mathematical or physics solution for the doneness dilemma. My dad came to the same conclusion: not enough data.

The best idea we came up with was to go ahead and use the real meat thermometer I was planning to use anyway, and take temperature readings every 15 minutes for the first several hours. Then, by the time I would have to start making all the other stuff, I should know the increase of temperature and shape of the data well enough to predict what time the turkey should come out of the oven: an engineering solution. We were predicting a likely logarithmic curve, or possibly a near-linear progression. (No, I don’t think the system, although containing feedback, would be chaotic enough to exhibit any power law scaling. Not enough variables: with four, you get chaos. Five bucks. You know who you are.) I would then slug the absolute time values into my now relative timetable and finish the job.

My dad also suggested a sort of dry run — but in this case, a wet run. Because the tissue of vertebrates is at least 80% water, he recommended baking 21 pounds of water at 325 and seeing what the pattern of data did. If nothing else, it should at least give me a minimum time.

So I’m doing that right now. I filled the roasting pan with approximately 21 pounds of water and duct-taped the meat thermometer to the side of the pan (what with not having any meat to stick it in, and thermometers generally not standing up in tapwater). The meat thermometer doesn’t start reading until 140 degrees, though, so it’s not as much data as I’d like. I tried a candy thermometer, which starts reading around 75 or so, but unfortunately, the oven started melting it before it yielded any interesting results. Such is science.

The water has been happily baking away for a few hours now. At first I thought the experiment wasn’t going to work at all, because of the lack of sub-140-degree data, and because the temperature was rising pretty quickly: about a degree a minute. Then, it started slowing down a lot: more like a few degrees every 15 minutes. Now it’s barely moving: maybe a degree every 15 minutes. Even if it doesn’t end up taking the 7+ hours I expect the turkey to take, that’s still some interesting information that helps me out. Such is science.

Sure, you know what his or her policies are like, but how does a given head of state rank as a hottie? Now we can know! Think Obama beats out some of the mere 14 folks ahead of him? (I know I do. I mean, Lukashenko? Come on…) You can leave a comment making your feelings for our fine, fine, superfine head of state known. I’d like to see Rafael Correa try to look as good frolicking shirtless in the surf. Actually, I think I rather would like to see that. Plus, Putin ranks at number 18, in a tank top in a black-and-white shot that looks like it’s about to launch a saucy pictorial, perhaps entitled: “Putin: This one’s for the ladies!” Maybe in the next shot (not seen) he’s signing bills in his underpants. Hawt!

A very groovy thing happened yesterday. Oakland Local went live. I did a tiny bit of work on this for the creators — just on the blogroll — and I was really impressed by the vibrant community and all the great stuff regular folks are doing there. If you’re in Oakland already, you’ll be glad you are. If you’re not, you may just want to pick up and move there.

Co-founder and all-around fun lady Susan Mernit writes:

As you know, I’ve been working on launching Oakland Local (oaklandlocal.com) a news & community site for Oakland focusing on social justice issues including climate change, air quality, food access, arts as activism, and identity, race & ethnicity. We have a New Voices grant from J-Lab, funded by The Knight Foundation, as seed money.

We have some great stories live and welcome your comments, ideas and feedback. The mobile site will be upgrading in a couple days, very basic right now.

Do go drop by. Everything Susan and Amy touch starts to glitter with coolness immediately.

I recently made some risotto that was pretty well-received. Some folks asked me for the recipe, which was very flattering, but I don’t really have a recipe. I barely have a procedure. I doubt any two risottos I make come out quite the same, so I’m not even sure I could reproduce any given batch. I may not be able to say exactly how I made some risotto, but I can at least provide guidelines for coming up with one’s own procedure that’s at least as good as whatever I was doing.

There a few things you need to know about risotto, after which everything else is pretty loose.

1. You absolutely must use Arborio (or Carnaroli) rice. It’s the short-grain unique starchiness that makes that creamy texture while it cooks. Uncle Ben’s or the stuff you get in Safeway in a plastic bag marked simply, “RICE,” will not work.

2. Once you get the rice home and before you start trying to cook it in liquid, you prep it a little bit. Generally that means heating and coating it so it accepts the liquid better. I like to use a few tablespoons of olive oil, an onion, a few cloves of garlic, and pretty much everyone uses dry white wine. Anything else you throw in there need only be compatible with the flavor you’re hoping for in the end. It’s hard to go wrong with leeks or scallions, fresh herbs, etc. So you throw that stuff in a pan and cook it for a little while, maybe 5 - 10 minutes, until it’s more or less cohesive (if you have onions in there, so they’re translucent or caramelized, as you like them), and then you put in the risotto rice and coat it with whatever nice stuff you put in there. It’ll start to look a little shiny and translucent. You want that.

3. The essence of risotto is ladling liquid slowly into the rice and letting it cook in. Stock is probably the best liquid to use: chicken, vegetable, beef, mushroom, whatever you think will work. Sure, bullion cubes dissolved in boiling water count. You could even use water in a pinch. So basically, you have two pots going at the same time. You have the pot with the actual risotto happening in it (simmering gently), which you’re stirring fairly frequently, and then another pot really close to it that has the hot stock in it and a ladle. Start with a couple of ladles of stock in the risotto (or enough just to cover it), and then whenever it looks like it’s about to absorb what’s in there already, add another ladle full. If you didn’t add a bunch of stuff to the pre-risotto mixture and/or you want some other stuff in there, this isn’t a bad time to add it. You can put it in the stock or directly into the risotto. It doesn’t really matter — it’s all going to end up in the same pot. If I’m making mushroom risotto, I often like to have some of the mushrooms in the initial onion/oil/coating mix and some sitting in the vegetable stock, too, that gradually end up in the risotto. If I’m putting leftover vegetables in there, I just put them in the risotto pot when it’s in this stage, so the vegetables don’t get too mushy. Play around with it. See what you like.

4. Add the cheese and stuff just before you serve the risotto. As you begin to run out of stock, and the risotto is about the creamy texture you’d like, and al dente (that is, not at all crunchy and not yet squishy, but firm), it’s time to wrap it up — usually after around 30 - 40 minutes. Pretty much all risotto recipes call for about a cube of butter, fresh ground pepper and maybe a bit of salt to taste, and some sort of grated hard cheese (Romano, Parmesan, Asiago, etc.) right at the end. Serve it right after you stir those things in.

5. Risotto doesn’t re-heat super-well. You never get back that steamy, creamy moment when it first comes off the stove. You can microwave it, but it’ll be kinda clumpy. You can reheat it on the stove with more stock, but it’ll be kinda loose and gloppy. You can make only as much as you think you can get down the folks you’re feeding right then, you can freeze it and use it for something else later, or you can just put up with not really recapturing that trademark texture.

So that’s what you really need to know.

As far as how much rice to how much stock, that seems to vary wildly depending on altitude, climate, weather, how hot you’re keeping the stock, etc. I guess I usually start with about a 4 cups of stock for every 1 cup of the rice and make adjustments as necessary.

With regard to what you can put in there, I really think you should use anything that seems like it would be good. Just keep its usual cooking time and style in mind. So for example, if you want to put shrimp in there, which cooks in about a nanosecond and has a pretty light flavor, you’d probably want to add it toward the end of the risotto procedure, and directly into the risotto pot, so it cooks but doesn’t have time to get overcooked and mealy. You could also use shrimp stock and cook them in that toward the end. If you want to add something like beef, you might want to let that hang out in the stock and stay wet, slowly joining the risotto over time. For things like fresh herbs, you may want to put those in the coating mixture at the very beginning so their flavor soaks in at every stage.

If you can’t stand winging it in the kitchen (and there’s no shame in that, really), I’d recommend Lidia Bastianich for further reading about risotto. She has a PBS cooking show, a good website with recipes, and she knows what to do with even leftover risotto.

Happy experimenting!

One of our priorities before the snow gets too deep is to get a bunch of wood prepared for the woodstove. There’s a fair amount of dead wood lying around the property — in my seasoned opinion (pun intended), more than enough to feed the woodstove through an entire winter — and probably enough left over for weekly bonfires after the snow melts. So for the next few weeks (weather permitting), I’m replacing my workouts with wood gathering. It’s decent cardio and strength training, it’s free (in fact, actually saving money), it’s outside, and it’s gotta get done anyway, so it doesn’t even make me feel like I’m taking time out that I should be using to take care of the ol’ to-do list. It’s a somewhat urgent project.

My first such outing was this morning. It was snowing, but it was more like “altitude snow” — it didn’t really mean it. The temperature was probably in the 50s or so, and I was quite comfortable with just a heavy flannel shirt over my clothes. None of the snow stuck, and it even seems to have melted off a bit in the last few hours (good news for tomorrow’s workout). I walked around the property, pretty close to the house, and dragged all the nonliving wooden objects I could find, from fallen saplings to superannuated saw horses, down to the cutting pile.

When I say “down to the cutting pile,” it’s because the property slopes rather sharply. In some places, it’s at about a 45-degree angle to the dooryard, or steeper. In those spots, I gained an appreciation for Scottish sports, which involve finding the heaviest [insert natural object here: log, stone, enemy's severed head, etc.] you can find, and throwing it as far as you can. I can’t throw a small dead tree very far, but I can drag it to where I want it and push it over, and I can heave it pretty squarely on a large pile from above and off to one side. This year, giant woodpile. Next year, Highland Games. Maybe I’ll enter the severed-head flinging competition.

When I came inside, my work gloves muddy but not soaked through, the dogs were all over me. “You have been rolling in some primo stuff! Where is it? I wanna roll in it, too! Is it all in one place? How come I don’t know where this awesome rolling pile is? Wait, I wanna smell it again! Mud, rotting wood, moss, a few creepy crawlies, a dash of random poop from the woods, stuff that’s been lying around for a long time… Oh yeah, that’s good. That must be why you’re in charge around here. It’s not just because you mastered the treat box. You really know what you’re doing!” It was very respectful and impressed, with the slightest hint of jealousy.

Tomorrow I plan to collect all the kindling and tinder I can before it gets buried under snow. There’s nothing like a wood sledge here, because it’s Colorado and people don’t do things like scavenging the forest for firewood. Even if I had some sort of draggable wood transport thingie, though, it would spill most of its load on the wild and unmanicured landscape. I plan to use a tarp with a piece of rope or bungee through its grommets like a big blue woven plastic sack and drag that around the property, filling it with little sticks and odd bits of wood. Should be a good workout.

I’ve really missed living in the woods.

Titania’s littermate Petra is getting pretty long in the fang herself. She’ll be eighteen in May, which I think means I should register her to vote — by mail, probably, so nobody will see she’s a cat, or perhaps by Acorn, which might not care. Being from Woburn, originally (a fine blue-collar suburb of Boston), she would certainly want to be registered Democrat. I just have to get her to make it until she’s old enough that she can help me commit election fraud.

Petra is still lovey and sweet and soft, and she sleeps on my head most nights, all night. She does however have some health issues that are, at the moment, giving me more trouble than they are her. She has high blood pressure, which is under control with a daily pill fragment. She also has a hyperactive thyroid, which is stable with another daily pill fragment, but not optimal. Apparently, treating the thyroid too aggressively makes it harder on her kidneys, which are also on their way out. We give her subcutaneous fluids for that, and I feed her a low-protein diet.

All in all, though, Petra is very much herself, and I would never have known anything was wrong, but for some blood work she had at the vet’s about six months back. She eats almost aggressively, like she just killed that pouch of “with Beef and Gravy” singlehandedly. (Because, you know, in the wild, felis domesticus attacks and eats cows — or whatever sawdust and retired circus animal mixture is “with” the “Beef” and “Gravy.”)

Petra even seems to have put on a little bit of weight in the last couple of weeks. When she was younger, she had a propensity to be kinda pudgy, which was fine by me, because it made her sort of plush. She has very soft, almost velvety, short fur, and likes a cuddle, so when she was a bit more plump, she was not unlike a living, interactive Gund. Although she was never hefty enough to concern the vet, we did sometimes call her “Fat Petra,” and refer to her like a mob boss (Titania was known as “Consigliere Stripes,” and then briefly “Consigliere Coconut” after she jumped up on the kitchen counter while I was setting down an empty coffee cup and smacked her head squarely on the bottom of it, making a hilarious coconut-hits-ceramic sound. Fortunately, no cats were injured in the making of the bizarre noise.) We would talk for her in a voice that was what we imagined Brando’s would be like if he were a small, female tabby cat. “I see you have some chicken there. There’s a bad element in this apartment, you know. If you give me some of that chicken, though, I’ll make sure nothing else happens to it.”

In those days, I fed the cats wet food once a day — at six o’clock — and the rest of the time, they had kibble if they wanted it. It seemed to help Petra regulate her intake pretty well. These days, though, she’s much older and stringier and I’m really pleased when she seems to have put on a few ounces. I pretty much feed her whenever she wants, and I try to pick out things she’ll tear into like a hapless Serengeti wildebeest. I was musing about that this morning. I used to say things like, “It’s not time yet,” when she would begin pestering me for dinner around 4:30 (otherwise known as “pester o’clock,”) and now it’s more like, “Here, gorge yourself on this pail of smelts.”

The next oldest quadruped member of the household is a twelve-year-old yellow lab mix named Dodger. He’s a good dog, feeling his age somewhat. He sometimes reminds me of a crotchety old man. He has sort of a howling whiney bark when he wants to be fed or let out or attended to in some way that is so very close to yodeling, I bet he could do it if he knew what he was shooting for. “You’ll get fed when you learn to yodel,” I say sometimes, but then I feed him anyway and rub his ears. Other times, it just reminds me of a canine Gran’pa Simpson: “I have to pee. Let me out. It’s cold out there. I wanna come back in. I’m bored. Let me back out. I want a treat. What time is it? Maaaaaatlooooooock!”

The next-oldest pet is A’Tuin, the Red-eared Slider turtle. He’s at least eight or nine, but apparently those can live into their mid-thirties in captivity, if nothing’s trying to eat them, so he’s still a youngster. Riff Raff the dog is six or so, and Jackie is about to turn five, so they’re about where I am: between young and middle-aged.

I think it’s feeding time. The dog is almost yodeling.

Here is a freshly tested way to freak out your mom. In retrospect, it probably shouldn’t have been surprising that that was the result, but it was inadvertent at the time.

Step 1. If your mom calls while you’re driving on the highway and you are near your exit, wait until you are safely parked off the exit to return her call. Tell her about that, just to be reassuring that you are a safe and responsible adult and that she will continue in blissful genetic obsolescence as a result.

Step 2. If you happen to have brand-new hella badass snow tires and live at an altitude of approximately 10,500 feet, where it has been steadily snowing for the last 24+ hours, ideally if there is also a High Wind Alert in your state that is being covered on the national news, let your mom know you are beginning your ascent at a responsible speed while you’re talking.

Step 3. Sprinkle the conversation with frequent weather updates as you climb a winding mountain road with a sharp elevation gain and multiple switchbacks. The road will be much more narrow, darker, more winding, not have any guard rails at all, double as a training strip for speed skaters, and possibly also be haunted and infested by bears if she hasn’t seen it yet. Don’t wonder what you did if she becomes nauseous and has to hang up. You know what you did (well, by then, anyway).

This works because your mom is not your dad. She doesn’t want to hear about you testing out your hella badass snow tires for the first time and how you’re kinda hoping you’ll be driving home up a luge track so you can see what those badboys can do. She certainly does not want to hear about the scenic snow cloud squatting on the mountaintop ahead and utterly obscuring it, and how you’re going to drive into that snow cloud in several minutes’ time, because you live there now. It is not an adventure for her. Instead, perhaps discuss what is waiting for you beyond a romantically snow-shrouded sleigh ride home: a well-sealed house with redundant heating systems and green plants and pets and warm socks and soft slippers and cocoa and what-not. Blofeld’s chalet, not the running shoot-’em-up chase down the ski slope where even James Bond gets buried in an avalanche.

Sorry, mom. (But seriously, those tires are the shiznit.)