Shannon Phillips

Well, the morning news hasn’t been this much fun to read in about a year. Seriously, I’ve been peeking through my hands at the headlines for the past few months, boggled at the very notion that Dems, with majorities in both houses, might actually simply cave to the demands of an increasingly fringe-driven minority party and just abandon the signature legislation they’d spent an entire year putting together.

But in the end they did the only sane thing—the only thing that would not once and for all have confirmed them the party of weakness, impotence, and disarray—and followed through on the promises that got them elected. The satisfying part is getting to read articles that conclude the Republicans’ just-say-no strategy is not only immoral, but ineffective: “By rejecting any deal with President Obama over health reform, conservatives and Republicans set the stage for their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” Or here’s another one, simply titled How the GOP Made It Happen.

But I’m not sure I buy it. The Republicans’ refusal to give an inch on anything has seemed an almost terrifyingly good strategy over the past year. So much of the Senate rules, in particular, are based on the assumption of two parties working together in good faith, that when one party chooses to abuse the rules it seems they can just about prevent the government from working at all. The Republicans are invoking filibusters at an absolutely unprecedented rate, holding up even uncontroversial legislation and nominees—and it’s worked.

So no, I don’t think the GOP made health care reform happen. Increasingly, I think Nancy Pelosi made it happen. There’s a spate of articles out this morning about her key role in passing the legislation: headlines like The Real Hero of Health Care Reform: Nancy Pelosi and Heroine of the Hour and Pelosi Overpowers Stupak, Path Is Cleared. A few days ago I read a San Francisco Chronicle piece on her “mastery of the inside game“, and I was astonished to read in the New York Times that Pelosi was the one who urged Obama not to walk away from comprehensive reform.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that I’m also reading this: R.N.C. Rallies to “Fire” Nancy Pelosi.

The R.N.C.’s goal is to raise $402,010 (read, 40 seats in 2010) in 40 hours. And it appeared to be well on the way: By 10:40 a.m. Eastern time, the site said it had raised $279,429.

Well, speaking as one of Pelosi’s actual constituents, I think I can safely say that the people who sent her to this job are pretty delighted with her this morning. In fact, as one of her “bosses,” I think she deserves a performance bonus and I’ve already made a contribution at SpeakerPelosi.com. (The contribution goes to the DCCC, not Pelosi directly, but she’s got no credible challengers here anyway.) I’ve sent e-mails and made phone calls to Pelosi throughout the health care reform process, and this morning I sent her one more: Dear Madam Speaker, I believe the relevant phrase for this morning is “You Go, Girl.” With admiration, Shannon Phillips.

…but while I was falling asleep last night, I thought of a caption for this picture on Unhappy Hipsters:

“He collected the implements of travel–suitcases, motorbikes, once a whole jet engine–only to disassemble them in his elaborate ritual. He wanted a world where nobody could ever leave him again.”

Well, tonight, it’s corned beef boiled with cabbage, potatoes, and carrots; I’m baking soda bread, too. We got the carrots and potatoes in our veggie box, along with Russian red kale, green and red chards, collard greens, three thick leeks, three spring onions, four bulbs of green garlic, a small head of cauliflower, a little bundle of cilantro, and six kiwis.

Tomorrow we’ll have corned beef sandwiches with collard greens as a side; I’m also saving the broth from tonight’s boiled dinner for a beef and barley stew, which will incorporate the leeks and the spring onions, along with whatever remains of the corned beef. I might do that on Saturday, though, so that Friday night we can have a break from corned beef. I’m thinking a veggie dinner of artichokes with green garlic aioli, along with creamed chard.

Sunday I want to try out two new Cook’s Illustrated recipes, one for a vegetable curry with potatoes, cauliflower, peas, and chickpeas, and the other for a cilantro-mint chutney to go with it. Monday will have to be something with kale: Capay Farms has a recipe for kale risotto that I might try (though I’d leave out the pumpkin seeds). Then Tuesday will be reserved for leftovers, as usual.

Those of you who use Google Reader to read this blog may notice that I managed to blow up the RSS feeds last night.

This post is mostly just a ploy to get Google to refresh its feed.

My father-in-law sent me an issue of the new Urban Farm magazine, and I can honestly say that I haven’t been this excited about a magazine since I first subscribed to Dragon in seventh grade.

(It came wrapped in brown paper, maybe because of the Clyde Caldwell covers: I didn’t even know enough to realize that the brown-paper-wrapping was a sign that something shameful might be inside. I haunted the mailbox every month waiting for the new issue to come. When I first started writing short stories, Dragon was the only market I submitted to. The first stories were really bad; some of them were actually Dragonlance fanfic. But I kept writing them and sending them in. Then-editor Wolfgang Baur replied with form rejections at first…followed by encouraging, personalized rejections…followed by actual letters with suggestions for revisions…and then at last in my senior year of high school he actually bought one of my stories and it ran in the magazine. It was one of the high points of my life, and Wolfgang Baur—with his willingness to help a naïve teenage girl churning out the dragon fanfic mature into a real writer—remains one of my models for what a great editor can be.)

Anyway! Urban Farm! The issue Dave sent me has articles about backyard chickens, various composting techniques, self-sufficiency (for the really committed), and some basic stuff like community gardening and CSA boxes. I immediately looked for a subscription card, but they’re so new that they aren’t yet offering subscriptions. I’m following them on Twitter, which I guess is the next best thing! I want my backyard chickens so bad.

This series written for Salon.com by Andrew O’Hehir does a good job of summing up the reasons why increasing numbers of liberal, educated families like ours—families that tend to start from a strong pro-public-education position—are now choosing to homeschool their children, at least for the first few years. There’s nothing new in these articles, but they explicitly lay out the assumptions and perspectives that underlie the modern liberal homeschooling movement.

In related news, “the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.” Because Texas is one of the largest educational markets in the U.S., this will have a big impact on the textbooks available to public schools in other states as well—possibly even in California, which due to the budget crisis won’t be buying new textbooks until 2014.

News like this makes me glad the homeschooling option exists. Of course, one argument that’s often advanced against liberal homeschooling (and one that O’Hehir acknowledges in his piece) is the idea that, by opting out of the public schools, affluent liberals are making themselves part of the problem. Rather than arranging superior educational opportunities for their children, this argument goes, resourceful and well-educated parents should instead engage with their local schools and boards of education, and make them better.

And in fact, a large number of the liberal homeschoolers do re-integrate their kids into the public school system for middle school or high school, or in earlier grades: O’Hehir says he finds it “unlikely” that his kids will be homeschooled through high school, and I’d say it’s unlikely that my kids would be homeschooled even that long. Still, I think the you’re-part-of-the-problem argument makes for a pretty tough sell. Telling any parent that, yes, you could arrange superior educational opportunities for your children, but instead you should deliberately send them to an inferior school, for the public good: even very liberal parents often don’t find that idea terribly persuasive. We’ll sacrifice our money, we’ll sacrifice our time, but we’re not going to sacrifice the well-being of our kids.

Of course, some public schools are just fine. And some parents are willing to engage with an underperforming school, and try to compensate through their own efforts for whatever the system may lack. I certainly admire moms like Sandra Tsing Loh who commit a hundred percent to their local public schools. But I think there’s a pretty telling passage in Loh’s article:

So I, Pushy Type A Mother, went into overdrive, working a tricky combo of cell phone, Internet, and a level of public-radio quasi-celebrity that enabled me to at least get information-seeking phone calls returned. (In the public-school world, accurate and up-to-date information is gold, and often surprisingly hard to come by.) Less exotic weapons included the “You go, girl!” permission of an open-minded school (not all are) and the ability to write standard English (helpful for laying grant-writing groundwork for overworked teachers). Our reward was a generous gift of 36 brand-new stringed instruments from the VH1 Save the Music Foundation…

The thrust of Loh’s piece is an attempt to shame the “NPR-listening, Bobo, chattering class of white people, back into public school.” But not every NPR-listening parent is Sandra Tsing Loh: most of us don’t have celebrity status to call upon, or a directory full of policy-makers’ cell phone numbers. For the non-pushy, non-Type A, decidedly-non-celebrity parent, taking on the local public school bureaucracy single-handed in order to effect a “Lady Bountiful” miracle of orchestras and free violin lessons simply isn’t a realistic option.

O’Hehir’s conclusion—that public school alternatives are neither a cure nor a toxin for our ailing educational system, but rather “viable and valuable” venues for experimentation—seems reasonable to me. After all, even those who choose to homeschool or send their kids to private schools remain invested in the public education system, as it’s creating the world our kids are going to have to live in.

A couple more photos from the California Academy of Sciences:

My mom took this picture of Robin admiring the pupfish. And here she is with Mark on the Academy’s “living roof”:

Using our vegetables this week will be a challenge, as we’ve been eating out a lot with Nanita and Marqueño. But our box this week was super exciting: after the long winter weeks of endless chard, kale, squash and leeks, we’re starting to see the first harvests of spring. Not that we didn’t get chard and kale—in fact we got chard and two different kinds of kale—but we also got some things we haven’t seen in months: cauliflower, and asparagus, and shallots. We also got carrots, kiwis, and a bag of lovely little red potatoes.

Wednesday night I made chicken pot pie for everyone (I didn’t make that last week, which is good, as then I was able to use the carrots and shallots from our box), but last night we went to eat at the new Yemeni restaurant that opened up down the block: I wrote them a good review on Yelp. And tonight my mom and Mark have offered to babysit Robin so that Sam and I can have a “date night.” We have reservations at Rue Lepic, a little French bistro that I’ve been interested in for ages—and one that’s a bit too nice for a two-year-old. So that’s exciting.

Tomorrow Nanita and Marqueño are going home, and I’ll be out for my D&D day with friends. I think we’re wrapping up early, though, so I might have time to cook afterwards. I think I’ll buy a flank steak today and put it in the fridge to marinate, and then when I get home tomorrow I can pan-roast it quickly, and roast the asparagus in the oven at the same time. (Mmm, roasted asparagus! I’m so ridiculously happy about the asparagus—my friend Robyn who gets her CSA box from Full Belly Farms mentioned a while ago on Twitter that they were getting asparagus, and I’ve been seething with jealousy ever since.)

Then Sunday I want to try the recipe for blue cheese macaroni with kale that Molly suggested: if I up the proportions just slightly, I think I can probably cram in both bunches of kale. And Robin’s good about eating strongly-flavored cheeses; he loves dairy fat in pretty much any form.

Monday we’ll have a veggie dinner of roasted potatoes and cauliflowers with sauteed chard, and then Tuesday can be leftovers night as usual. So despite two nights of eating out, I think we’ll get to all the vegetables by next Wednesday.

Nanita and Marqueño are in town, and Robin couldn’t be more thrilled. It breaks my heart a little bit every time we’re able to visit any of the grandparents, to see how strongly and eagerly Robin responds to their presence and attention: he’s a lucky little boy to have three sets of adoring grandparents, all of whom he loves to the very limits of his little heart: but as I’ve written before, it’s one of my enduring regrets that we haven’t been able to settle closer to any of our far-flung extended family. Robin gets very upset every time we say goodnight to my mom and Mark, obviously because he knows very well that the day will come when they say good-bye and don’t come back again for months.

Anyway, despite my apparent ability to inject mom-guilt into even the nicest of situations, Robin has been having a wonderful time. Yesterday we all (all except for Sam, who has this thing called “work” that sounds like a real bummer, man) went to the California Academy of Sciences for the day. I took my camera and then forgot to take any pictures at all, except for this one of Robin walking along sweetly hand-in-hand with Mark:

For the Buffy fans, I think of this outfit as Robin’s Riley Finn costume.

Anyway, we’ve been to the Academy of Sciences before, but Robin was too young to take much in then. He didn’t respond very strongly to many of the exhibits. This time—was different.

We walk in the door and Robin (after initially getting a bit scared of the big T-Rex mold by the entrance) spots a fish tank. “Fwee!” he cries happily (fwee means fishie), and runs up to get a better look. “Oh, kiddo,” we tell him, “this is nothing, let’s go show you the aquarium.”

We made very slow progress, as to get to the downstairs aquarium you pass by several tide pools and swamp-habitats with fish in them, and each time Robin wanted to stop and gaze at them for apparently indefinite lengths of time. It struck me, as we cajoled and dragged him forward, as pretty funny that his attention span was apparently so much longer than ours. Anyway, eventually, we got downstairs to the “Water Planet” exhibits.

“Fwee! Fwee!”

There were a lot of fishies. So many glass tanks for Robin to run up and press his nose against. So many fishes to be counted and catalogued (“yewwow [yellow] fwee!”). Again, we had to chivvy him along, because we knew what was waiting:

The Philippine Coral Reef. This is a sunken auditorium with a floor-to-ceiling glass wall holding back 212,000 gallons of water and literally thousands of tropical fish.

Robin took this in and rendered his verdict: “Whoa.”

He said that again and again over the next twenty minutes: “Fwee! Whoa!” It was pretty hilarious, because he so badly wanted to talk about the fishies, but his vocabulary is so limited that he was basically just exclaiming the same few words over and over and over again. “Whoa! Fwee! Fwee, Nana!” (Fishies, Nanita!)

He would have stayed there for hours. It’s possible that he would still be there if he had his way. I thought, of course, of Robin’s uncle Jesse the marine biologist—he sent Robin a pop-up book of ocean life, which has apparently taken deep root in the kid’s little brain.

Eventually we dragged him off to see the penguins, and those were a delight as well: Robin loved running back and forth as the penguins swam by, trying to give them kisses through the glass. It was very cute.

Today he’s wearing his penguin shirt that his Pappy and Nonna bought him the last time we went to the Academy of Sciences. He doesn’t have a word for penguin but he did point to the picture and smile. We’ll definitely have to go back soon.

Yesterday in our veggie box we got: kale, two different kinds of chard (white and gold), collard greens, broccoli, a pound and a half of leeks, six kiwis, and a bag of fingerling potatoes. Last night we had boiled potatoes and peas along with a salad (incorporating the broccoli); tonight I’m doing yet another run of that polenta-with-chard recipe. I’ve been making it a lot lately, but Sam always seems happy to see it, and by modifying the recipe very slightly I can use up both bunches of chard and most of the leeks.

Tomorrow I think I’ll do another retread, this time the bulgur salad with kale and salami (and I’ll throw in the collard greens too). That’ll take care of all the veggies, and then I can branch out into fun stuff for the rest of the week: I think Sam would be pleased with chicken pot pie on Sunday, and maybe homemade pizza on Monday.

Breaking News: What I had taken for a bunch of skinny leeks turned out to be only half leeks, and half narrow stalks of green garlic. I used them all in the polenta and it was delicious. That is all.