Shannon Phillips

Robin has made the leap from babbling “mama” to saying “Mommy” quite clearly when he wants my attention. I was delighted by this for about half a day, until it became clear that he doesn’t just say Mommy. He also cries it, wails it, sobs it: Moooommmeeee, Moooommmeee, with a quaver in his voice and tears shining in his sweet face. It’s a devastating weapon he’s developed, the nuclear option of the toddler world, and he unleashes it at the very slightest provocation. Are the fig bars gone? Moooommmeee, Moooommmeee, as if his little heart were breaking. Have I refused to put in a movie for him? Moooommmeee, Moooommmeee. Is he getting sleepy? Does he want a bath? Will the kitty not let him pet her? Moooommmeee!

He’s a little bit sick—I am, too: it’s just a runny nose and a sore throat. I fear it’s making us both whiny.

Of course just as I decide I’m going to barricade myself in the bedroom he goes and does something weird and cute, like licking me, which is apparently the new game du jour. When I go “ewww!” he laughs like a fiend. And I’m willing to be licked for hours if it means I don’t have listen to the piteous wail of Moooommmeee.

Nanita sent two pictures from her recent visit—the first one she calls “Train Guys” because it’s hilarious how Robin is standing around just like one of the men:

And the second is from inside the train:

Sam and I took Robin to the beach over the Labor Day weekend, and we got some pictures of him there:

It’s hard to notice changes in his development, as it’s happening so gradually now, but he’s definitely taller and his face is becoming less babyish. He plays with other children at the park for longer periods and in more complicated games (he likes to do something resembling tag, although he’ll change his mind abruptly about who is “It”). He bestows hugs and kisses freely on everyone who crosses his path. He tries to pull up his own pants, sometimes when he’s already wearing pants. He also likes to tromp around wearing Sam’s or my shoes.

He enjoys playing in the bath, but hates to get his hair wet, and was terrified of the surf when we brought him too far down the beach. He likes to be read storybooks every day: he’ll most often bring us Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are or Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman, but he also likes That’s Not My Dragon, a Pat the Bunny type textured book. He sings and dances to recorded music, but he doesn’t like it when Sam or I sing; I find this highly weird and can’t wait until he can talk well enough to explain it to me.

His main focus in play still consists of taking things out of containers and putting them back into different containers. He also very much likes pouring liquids from one container to another. He’s also fascinated by electronics and loves to push buttons of any sort, especially elevator buttons. He loves escalators too and would ride them endlessly as far as I can tell. He still loves Sesame Street and his favorite movie is The Jungle Book. He’s getting pickier about food, preferring pasta and rice to vegetable dishes—some days he doesn’t eat much at all, and other days he finds something he likes and wolfs it down. He seems to get enough variety that I’m satisfied.

And I think that’s pretty much the State of the Robin!

I found this picture on Sam’s camera: it’s a vegetable torta I made weeks ago. Wasn’t it pretty?

This week seems to be going better than the last one. My cellphone actually revived itself after a few days, and we got our vegetables yesterday. I have to admit I had a pang of sadness when I saw chard in the box. Is summer over already? Not that I don’t like chard&#8212I do—but I know from last year that it’s going to be chard and kale all through the winter.

There were still tomatoes, though, so that’s nice and summery. Our late summer vegetable box included, in full, a bag of grapes, a bundle of thyme, a bunch of chard, a pint of figs, a pint of cherry tomatoes, six heirloom tomatoes, a small eggplant, three zucchinis, four peaches, and five yellow sweet peppers.

Robin has already eaten all the grapes, and we had the cherry tomatoes for lunch yesterday, mixed into a box of macaroni and cheese. For dinner last night I made shrimp-and-sausage gumbo, using the big tomatoes and the sweet peppers (and okra, of course; I’m still craving okra and I guess I’d better start shoveling it in for as long as it’s available).

Pros: The gumbo was delicious. I think I’ll put up the recipe in another post, maybe after I get Sam to take a picture of it.
Cons: There is enough gumbo to last us the rest of the week, if we eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

I think we’ll have it again later this week and then I’ll freeze whatever’s left. Tonight we’re going to have baked potatoes and sauteed chard; I need something quick and easy since we’re going out to look at houses tonight (SIGH). I’ll make fig bars during the day today.

Tomorrow night, leftover gumbo; Saturday, glazed chicken breasts and rice; Sunday, baba ghanoush, pita bread, and dolmades; Monday, a big salad with roasted beets and ears of fresh corn; Tuesday, spaghetti bolognese.

The house deal fell apart and our vegetable box was stolen. Robin poured a glass of water over my cellphone and now it’s a nice paperweight.

I’m reminding myself that at least we all have our health. Somebody at Sam’s work came down with swine flu, so “at least we don’t have swine flu” makes a pretty good refrain. For now.

This week in our veggie box we got a pint of figs, a big bag of small red grapes, a pint of cherry tomatoes, three yellow summer squash and two very leetle zucchinis, four medium-sized heirloom tomatoes, four nectarines, a whole bunch of red gypsy peppers, and also what I think are a few smaller chili peppers—although it’s hard to be entirely sure: they could just be very small sweet peppers.

I haven’t made one of these posts in a few weeks, but the box content has been mostly the same, except that we’ve been getting eggplant for the past several weeks, and sometimes pears instead of the figs or peaches. I’ve mostly been making ratatouille or caponata, and one week I made a beautiful vegetable torta—which I took a picture of—but I lost it along with my camera. Instead you can see the lovely whole wheat bread I made to go with the caponata a few weeks ago (I got the picture off my camera before I lost it):

Tonight we’re having halibut baked in foil with squash, zucchini and tomatoes; they had locally-fished halibut at the fish counter, so I got it even though it was more expensive than I usually buy. You’d think that living on the coast we’d get plenty of fresh local fish, but the environmental regulations are so strict around here that you can almost never get local fish. I think it’s short-sighted: shipping our fish in from halfway around the world has a deleterious effect on the global environment, after all. So, I sprang for the local halibut just to be supportive.

Tomorrow I’ll make pasta with cherry tomatoes, arugula, and goat cheese; Friday, I’ll put all of the peppers (sweet or hot as they may be) into a beef chili. I might make cornbread to go alongside. And that will take care of the veggies, so I’m not going to plan out any further than that.

As for the fruit, the nectarines and grapes will be eaten raw, but I found a nice recipe for fresh fig bars that I think I’ll use again this week. For that recipe I get to use the honey that Sam’s father harvests from his own backyard bees! It’s wonderful, wonderful stuff, and Pappy always seems to have another big mason jar full of it waiting for us whenever we run out. You might say that I married into honey. Hee hee hee.

We had a great time in Nevada celebrating Robin’s second birthday with Nonna, Pappy, the Anti-Sara, Nanita, Marqueño, and Great-Grandparents Elsie, Betty, and Wayne. I took lots of good pictures…and then somehow I lost my camera.

My mom sent me a couple of shots, though. Here, just on the edges of the picture, you can see the outskirts of the giant pile of presents that was brought for Robin. You can’t really see many of them, but you can see that he was happy and enthusiastic about investigating his gifts:

And here’s a shot of the Phillips menfolk, all together:

Mostly since we’ve gotten back we’ve been wrestling with the 203k process for our house. It’s unbelievably complicated and stressful. I wouldn’t recommend these loans, except that there really is no better way (at least for people who aren’t very skilled in construction work) to buy an older house and fix it up. DIY really wouldn’t be sufficient here—in fact part of the problem with the house is that it has suffered somebody else’s DIY efforts, all of which need to be ripped out and redone. And since lending standards have tightened, no bank would fund a conventional loan on a house in this shape anyway. So the 203k program is the only recourse for people like me who love older homes, but aren’t rich enough to buy one that somebody else has already renovated and is looking to “flip.”

Here is just one little part of the story: because these loans are funded through HUD, we are required to hire a HUD consultant in addition to our contractor. The HUD consultant basically gets paid for sitting around with his thumb up his butt for weeks, until the very last moment when he decides to throw a spanner in the works by insisting that our planned repairs will not satisfy HUD’s requirements. He says we have to get a very expensive soil engineer out to inspect the house’s foundation. This obviously causes more delay. Finally when the foundation inspection is complete, the soil engineer basically says “Well, yes, there’s some foundation cracking, which you would find in all older houses. It’s not about to fall down or anything.” HUD consultant insists that we repair the cracks. This adds $35,000 to the proposed scope of work. Sam and I weep and gnash our our teeth.

I don’t even have the stamina to recount all the other crap we’ve been dealing with in trying to close on the house. Suffice it to say that what started out as a $131,000 home that needed $25,000 worth of work is now a $131,000 home that needs $110,000 worth of work.

Obviously with each increase in cost Sam and I have been re-evaluating our commitment to this house. But the truth is that even a $250,000 home in this area is a very good deal (a one-bedroom condo in downtown Oakland goes for $375,000): and after all the work is done, it will be a lovely older home meticulously renovated, with the surface bits done to our exact taste.

There are still lots of things that can go wrong. The appraisal could come in low, requiring us to renegotiate the purchase price with the sellers. Also, the delays caused by the HUD consultant are going to force us to ask for an extension on the closing date: the sellers could refuse. Unexpected fees (like the soil engineer) are piling up, eating into our savings and making me worry about our ability to manage the closing costs. So, this thing is by no means a done deal and every day brings a new storm of stress. This is why I’ve been dodging questions about the house: I don’t really want to talk about it. I’ll let you know if something final happens, one way or the other.

We skipped a week of veggie delivery while we were on our brief vacation, but this week they’ve apparently decided to make up for it with (deep breath): a bunch of grapes, a bunch of basil, an overflowing pint of red and yellow cherry tomatoes, three pounds of mostly golden heirloom tomatoes, a bag of peaches, four “Krimson” pears (they look like this), one really big eggplant, six gypsy peppers, seven pattypan squash, a small bunch of carrots, four funny little round yellow cucumbers (I remember these from last year, they’re tasty), and a partridge in a pear tree. No, I mean, and five pods of okra. I can’t really complain about such overflowing bounty, but I’m going to anyway: what am I supposed to do with such a scant handful of okra? It’s just enough to be tantalizing but not nearly enough to satiate my okra cravings. Next year I am going to grow my own okra in my own back yard, hooray, and I’m going to have scads of it.

Tonight we’re eating green chile caldo, because I’m eager to try some of the recipes from the New Mexican cookbook that Nonna sent our way. But tomorrow I’ll make a start on the vegetables, in the form of homemade veggie pizza (topped with squash, peppers, and goat cheese), accompanied by a cherry tomato salad. Friday we’ll have gazpacho and a green salad (with the carrots), and Saturday I’ll buy a loaf of crusty bread and we’ll eat it with Sicilian caponata.

Sunday I’ll make bhindi masala—I’ll have to buy more okra—and Monday, something with fish. I dunno. I’ll keep you posted.

The fruit that Robin doesn’t devour will go into Sam’s lunches. I like fresh fruit for dessert, too, so I’m glad we got so much of it this week!

We’re back from a brief visit in Las Vegas to rendezvous with the Cochrans, but dunderheads that we are, we didn’t take any pictures. Still it was great for Robin to get to see his Pops again (Mo, sadly, couldn’t make it) and enjoy the company of his uncle Taylor and aunt Masie. Masie especially was the hit of the trip, as she was willing to play endless rounds of peek-a-boo, tickle wars, and hallway racing games.

We’ll be back in Vegas in a couple of weeks: this time because Sam’s been asked to give a talk (about data visualization using Splunk) at a VeriSign conference there. We’re planning to drive instead of flying, so that on the way back we can take a detour to Reno and celebrate Robin’s second birthday in the company of the Phillipses, and also Nanita and Marqueño, who will be flying out for the party. So that’ll be fun for him. I hope he’s as good in the car as he was on the plane!

The house-buying process is proceeding. We’ve got a contractor (Keith Bupp) lined up to do the work the home needs: he was recommended by a friend and I came away from our first meeting impressed by his easy-going competence. He also confirmed, to my delight, that the original fir flooring is still in place throughout the home (under some ugly Pergo): and while we were inspecting the subarea of the house we found the French doors that originally stood between the living and dining rooms wedged into a dark back corner. They’ve suffered a bit of water damage from being left against damp earth, but they look salvageable. So, hooray!

The biggest news lately isn’t mine, but it’s been occupying most of my thoughts: my BFF Nina delivered an adorable baby boy last weekend. Congratulations and blessings to Silas Archer Karp O’Hanlon: the world feels nicer for having him in it.

So, you all didn’t visualize asteroids hard enough, because we didn’t get that lovely bungalow that we wanted so badly. In the meantime, however, we noticed a little two-bedroom on High Street, only a block away from the first house we tried to get.

It needs some work, but mostly pretty routine and/or cosmetic stuff. It doesn’t look so hot right now, but I can see very clearly how cute it would be if cleaned up just a bit, repainted, etc. We’re expecting to get a federal 203(k) loan, which provides up-front rehab money for renovating older properties, so we’d be able to do all that right away. In general I really like the idea of taking an older, somewhat rundown house and doing the renovations exactly the way I want them, instead of paying a premium for someone else’s “remuddling.”

Besides the fact that it hasn’t been kept up so well, the main drawbacks to this house are: it’s on a busy street, and it hasn’t got a driveway or garage: street parking only. Since we’re used to living in the city the traffic doesn’t bother us, and the street parking thing just isn’t a dealbreaker for us.

I’m putting the drawbacks first so that you can make some sense of the price we’re paying for this house, which is a crazy-low $131,000. That’s the lowest of all the offers we made. (It was actually listed for $109,900, but there were four or five people bidding on it, and we wanted to win.) Even with the work it needs (about 25K—we’ve already got most of the inspections in) it will still be a ridiculously good bargain for the area. Also, it has a nice big backyard; there are cute built-ins; it’s intelligently laid out; and we like the location.

Here’s a link to the listing where you can see some pictures. Keep in mind that these are the “before” shots!

We’ve finally had an offer accepted on a house! I have to make dinner so I’ll post more later.