I've been pretty upfront here about my general lack of enthusiasm for television viewing. In fact, I'll admit to being the worst kind of TV watcher - the PBS, snot. Yep, it's true...a little middlebrow Ken Burns documentary, with all the re-enactment and cheezy special effects, and I'm a picture of concentration and knitted brow seriousness. Our penchant for living far beyond the signal reach of even the tallest rabbit ears has also ensured there's never been all that much to watch.

So nobody is more astonished than I to find that lately our television in powered on for many more hours weekly than the poor thing has ever before endured. The reason? The New House is (supposedly) out of reach of the DSL service to which we have become accustomed and the best remaining option for high-speed connectivity is cable modem. So cable modem it is, and a pricing quirk has provided us with basic (i.e., non-subscription) service and Internet for ten cents a month less than the cost of Internet alone. So, basically, in exchange for allowing the cable company to give us a dime back every month, we let them run a cable down our 800 foot driveway, string it across several trees leading up to the house (including a ginkgo - tree of the poop-smelling berries! yum!), thread it into the house, between two very heavy and fully-loaded bookcases and into our television. So.

So I've been watching a bit of HGTV. I still can't tell all the shows apart - they do kind of run together after a while. But I know now - or rather can admit to myself - that matter what we might have been able to pull off in the Old House, it never would have been transformed into a place in which I would feel comfortable in my own skin. The architecture was all wrong for me, it's aspect entirely too utilitarian, with no charm, no character and precious little in the way of anything house-wise that says home to me.

I feel I can let myself off the hook for feeling as if I had failed to bloom where I was planted. Over the last two weeks I've watched junkyards become formal gardens, 4 inch leopard-print shag carpet give way to golden oak boards, wet basements transformed into swank entertainment spaces and high-end playrooms. But I have yet to see a house with fundamentally poor bones become a comfortable living space. There have been no quick and cheap fixes presented that could have saved the oh-so-red kitchen, no way to put closets in a house with no wall space between rooms or even stories. Basically, I've come to feel o.k. that even if I do possess - as I suspect I do - a lower than average home design sense, that what I had to work with was probably a less-than-average canvas.

As we head into the settlement scheduled for late this week I am at peace. Too much television in the form of HGTV has given me the insight I needed to leave behind the feeling of having failed, of showing a regretable lack of imagination and an inability to feather my own nest, to fashion a lovely (in addition to loving) home for my family.

I am home.

This just in:

- Brainiac is hunting and gathering some cheesesteaks and pizza for dinner. God, I love that man.

- I found my canning kettle! Sure, in a box marked "XMAS" but still.

O.K., whatever's going on with me, health-wise, it sure isn't a cold. As yesterday progressed I felt increasing yucky and by the time Brainiac returned home at about 8 p.m. I was a wreck. Wearing two (ill-matched) sweaters and three pairs of socks, I shivered as I asked him for a back-rub to alleviate the aching. He tucked me into bed with a Tylenol PM and a glass of Sprite, electric blanket set to "7" around 9 p.m., where I tossed and turned until about 2 a.m., when finally I fell asleep. Along the way, I spiked a fever of over 102. And this morning's headache, well, let's not even discuss it.

But now, after liberal applications of coffee, Excedrin Migraine and Day Quil I feel as if I might live. I'm grateful, but also puzzled - the trip into sickly despair and back has been fast and what I thought was going to be an impossible day is turning out to be just a garden variety mommy-doesn't-feel-well howaboutmoretv kind of thing. Much better than I had anticipated.

The Sunday before Christmas we had a gingerbread house decorating party. Five of the Boy Wonder's friends came over and festooned little pre-made (by me) graham cracker and royal icing houses with all manner of sugary goodness. As we said our good-byes to the hyped-up cohort, for just as much sugar went into the boys as one the houses, I noticed a little tickle in my throat. That tickle grew up to become the cold that knocked me sideways for a full six weeks. That's 42 days, more or less, of congestion, coughing unrestrained by any currently available medication and the intensity of which causes a nearly constant headache, sneezing, aches, the works. All this on a new Nyquil formulation that does not contain the ingedient that actually relieves these symptoms - you know, the one you can distill into a meth ingredient if you have, say, and oil truck's worth and a lab in the back yard. Which I do not. Dammit, I want my pseudoephedrine.

And now I am bitter because I've had, what?, three weeks cold-free. Monday as I tucked Entropy Girl in for her nap I felt another little tickle. This is apparently the evil twin of December's because just 48 hours later I already feel wretched and want to crawl into the nearest bed to be plied with tea and biscuits. None of that will happen, of course, and I can't even rely on Nyquil anymore without that one key ingredient (and forget the formulations with alcohol - what's the point? ETA: I meant formulations without alcohol - that's the medical travesty) and now feel doomed to another several weeks of tubercular-style coughing and the ever so attractive spitting gobs of golden goop into tissues.

Dammit. I want my pseudoephedrine.

We've just returned from a week away, during which time I was more or less news-free. So I've arrived home to discover that Edna Lewis has died. I am very, very sad to hear of her passing.

I first learned of Miss Lewis through Laurie Colwin's essays and it would be impossible to overstate her books' influence on my growth as a cook. She was once considered one of the best chefs in the U.S. in a time when women seldom found respect in professional kitchens. I do not think it hyperbole to say that without Edna Lewis, the grand-daughter of freed slaves homesteading in what is now Orange, Virginia, there would be no Alice Waters - at least as we know of her today - and the entire "return" to seasonally-based eating might have been delayed decades if it ever arrived at all.

Rest in peace, Miss Lewis.

More researching on the pineapple jam front.

I've found several recipes that might work. Of course, I won't use any of these but will most likely combine them into some kind of recipe Frankenstein and then complain that I hadn't thought to write down what I did (self-awareness is a beautiful thing, is it not?).

Anyway, based on a few recipes I've found at Indian recipe sites, I'm thinking that the addition of lime and/or clove might be fantastic. As a bonus, the lime could allow me to reduce the amount of sugar for which most American recipes seem to call. We'll have to see, but I'm hopeful.

Today the kids and I are meeting my sister-in-law for lunch at an Indian place (newly in her second trimester, she's craving mango pickle...all the best people do) near a Trader Joe's, where I'll pick up a couple cans of crushed pineapple to have ready to go for when I find the box that holds my canning stuff (don't get me started on the movers...really, nothing good will come of that). We've got a bunch going on over the next few days and then there will be a visit by the splendiferous Alisha but after that we should have everything in order for some pineapple jamming.

Just a few things today:

1) As I type this a backhoe is putting a large hole in the front "yard" about fifty feet from where Entropy Girl is napping and I am hoping against hope that she will sleep through the work. Girlfriend needs her sleep.

2) I am anxiously awaiting a phone call from a client with whom I am having communication challenges. I don't know if she has a phone phobia (telephobia?) or is ignoring me, spitefully or not, or is just simply busy but my ability to get my work done is now hinging upon hearing back from her and history tells me not to hold my breath. An uncomfortable place to be.

3) We've accepted an offer on the Charlottesville house and I am increasingly frustrated with the buyer. We're having a culture clash over things like signed agreements and trust and I may have to go full-on Yankee with her if she doesn't stop assuming that she can have unfettered and unsupervised access to the house without actually purchasing or renting it.

4) Today I found a bunch of Entropy Girl's clothes at the bottom of a box marked "MBR - Decorative", under a jumbled pile of sheets and shoes. Do movers amuse themselves with these mindgames or are they merely indications of an industry-wide problem with ADHD?

5) Some time ago the Boy Wonder expressed an interest in helping me make a batch of pineapple jam. I adore pineapple and thought that it was an excellent idea. In scoping out recipes, though, I've discovered that most require three or four cups of sugar added to one single can of crushed fruit - which is already fairly sweet, in my opinion. Too sweet jam is horrendous so I'm going to have to do some tweaking to see if I can't get a good jell point with lower amounts, perhaps by using a non-standard pectin or something.

6) I need a vacation.

Perspective

Sometime in the early 90s, an exchange student from Germany who had lived with my family for a short time in the late high school years returned to the States and he made his way to Philadelphia to stay with me for a couple days. Most of his experience in this country had been in the wilds of affluent suburbia and he was anxious to see how my life in the big city had organized itself. Being a hostess par excellence I took him on all kinds of outings to see my favorite bar (the now late great and much lamented Chestnut Street Bar and Grill, known informally as Cheese Bags), South Street, the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall. As we toured the last of these I became a little self-conscious of the "President Kennedy Stood Here on a Tuesday"-type plaques that dot the sidewalk. Inside we suffered from a very poor docent whose disdain for her patrons could not possibly have been more obvious. But the pointlessness of the exercise was thrust upon me when the docent pointed out a chair (with obligatory don't-sit-here gold braiding across the seat) and remarked with great reverence that said chair was "nearly two hundred years old" at which point my guest leaned into me and whispered that the town in which he had grown up had recently celebrated its, like, 1,375th anniversary. I rolled my eyes and took him back to Cheese Bags.

I share this story with you only because I had a similar, if more literary, experience this afternoon and I am feeling the same sense of, well, I don't know what to call the feeling. Perhaps you can help name it.

I'm reading this book by a woman named Judy Corbett called Castles In The Air and within the first pages I am completely engrossed and embark on a plan of maternal neglect and excessive video for the kids so I can spend as much time reading as possible. The book is a wonder, a memoir (yikes!) of time spend by the author and her husband purchasing and renovating a 450 year old mansion (described as a "castle" by some) in Wales. Along the way there are ghosts, roast peacocks, entire rooms of ornament to track down - all the way in America! - and all manner of interesting characters. In some ways, the tale is no different than any one of hundreds of recountings of restoration of some grand country house outside some quaint village populated by colorful townies who behave in uniformly inscrutable fashions. But that's not my point.

My point, which I promise I am rapidly approaching, is that Brainiac and I have a long and storied history together of causing whisper, concern and consternation among our friends and family with our general preference for the old, worn and used. I haunt thrifts and Goodwill, he knows every junkyard from here to Pittsburgh and which specializes in just the kind of gear he needs to do whatever project he's got underway. From cars to books to clothes to, well, just about anything, we go for used much faster than new just about every time. And, unlike Second Hand Rose, we like old and used just fine. So when we announced to all that we had taken a lease in this quite rundown and recently abandoned, but with fabulous potential, 200-some-odd year-old farmhouse there wasn't much surprise. Sighs, perhaps. But no surprise.

And there's been little surprise, either, as I report that we've identified the places in the floor where we really shouldn't walk because a complete breakthrough threatens, that Brainiac replaced some of the rubberized wiring, that there's an add liquid dripping from the fireplace in the kitchen. Just more sighs, mostly, and a quiet encouragement to look into the new builds going up along Route 100. We let such comments roll off of us, because people who aren't old house people can't be made into such and people who are seldom change.

So when I read in Castles In The Air that Peter, the author's husband

would be happy to fall in with anything, provided the house was pre-1670 and had held Royalist allegiance during the Civil War; living in a Parliamentarian house was out of the question.

I felt that not only Judy Corbett is a kindred spirit, but also that I was way out of my league old house-wise. These people are restoring a house that dates to 1555 and which housed some of Wales' most influential families. By the time they had found it, the house had become a kind of nightclub-flophouse with a plastic skeleton chained in the basement and more than one ghost in residence.

Once again I am reminded that old is entirely a matter of perspective.

Two years ago this this moment (10:15 Eastern) I sat cross-legged (to the astonishment of the nurse who brought me a Tylenol) in a half-reclined bed in Charlottesville's Martha Jefferson Community Hospital staring into Entropy Girl's unexpectedly alert, wide eyes, half-listening to some brouhaha about Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl bleating from the television, and wondering when Brainiac would be arriving with my post-birthing calzone and diet soda.

My labor had gone well and smoothly and my daughter arrived into the world squirming and mewling, eyes open. Her first night I had hoped to rest for a few hours but the nurses brought her to me explaining that her fussing and sleeplessness was keeping the other babies awake. And so I cradled her into my arms not realizing that her fussing and sleeplessnes would indeed keep her family awake for the better part of two years. She is still all-seeing and incredibly kinetic. New friends and acquiantences require only about 15 minutes before stating, as if we had not heard so before, "Wow, she's really active!" It's funny now, a joking comment that we can easily appreciate.

Her first months were difficult for all of us. Brainiac spent weeks battling pneumonia, was hospitalized for a time and not more than physically present for weeks on end, K. died, J. died and C. died within six weeks of each other, only the last with any foreknowledge. I confronted the same sort of gloomy haze of post-partum depression I faced after the Boy Wonder's birth, only this time hundreds of miles from friends and family and without the ready support of a healthy partner. Only now are we experiencing the sort of bonding that I wish for every baby and my only enduring regret around my memories of Entropy Girl's infancy is that I was so ill-equipped to do anything to change the course on which we found ourselves.

But that is the past. Today Entropy Girl is funny, sly, exuberant, fascinated by tea sets, stuffed bears (most especially of one, formerly pink and now grey, that she calls Dee) and sparkly shoes. She adores her big brother and her daddy and the other day when she called out to me while walking up the stairs to bed "I ruv oo, mama!" I knew that just as much as I gave birth to her that blustery cold mid-winter night two years ago, she has also given birth to me. I can't wait to meet the woman she grows into. She is going to be awesome.