After school one day this week, Trevor came home to a plain brown envelope marked "Challenge" on his place at the kitchen table. Pinned to the back of the envelope was an index card that read, "Build a bridge that can hold three Lego people at least six inches off the ground using only the materials in this envelope."

Inside the envelope was a stack of flimsy paper strips, paperclips, scotch tape, and a glue stick. The first two bridge attempts ended in frustration. You can see the span that finally worked in the photo -- it took about 45 minutes to finally win the challenge.

All that fun from a stack of paper strips leftover from trimming direction cards with a paper cutter.

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The work to-do list starts from the top of the page. The home to-do list starts from the bottom of the page. On some extremely busy days, they meet in the middle. On some horrific days, I have to start a second column. Too many of those days in a row and I start calling people "sweetie" in a way that doesn't mean "sweetie."

Sometimes items on a to-do list can be deceiving. Like this tiny one-liner: "try DB" which means to log onto the VPN, log into the database, determine if the access is working, when it isn't, email for advice, wait for the reply, download & install a MySQL query browser, re-login to the database again, then get on a conference call to walk through the schema. That doesn't fit on the line.

Items get listed multiple times if I have to do them more than once. I think you should get credit for two tasks if you do something twice, like calling someone back to finish planning an event. I also enjoy checking things off. (<-- A bullet point straight off my resume.)

I tend to prioritize the work items by letter and (sometimes) number, but not the home items. It would be disheartening to see all of the little C3's at the bottom of the list next to tasks like making cupcakes and reordering my Neflix queue. FranklinCovey doesn't have a letter-number combination for "I must do this for my sanity."

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We ended up with two solid feet of ice on the right half of the drainage ditch, and none on the other half. It makes a fun little waterfall that Trevor must play in.

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It's time to order our baby chicks, but their new home isn't quite ready yet. We've torn off the old, rotting particleboard and removed the old, rotting hay insulation, and taken out the old, rotting trash piles, but it still needs walls and a good power-washing.

We're getting six dominiques for eggs, which are a hardy New England breed that apparently don't wander very far on the open range. Our hope is to let them roam the field instead of fencing in a run, but I have a chicken run spot in mind in case we need to pen them.

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Trevor's Easter present was a white chef's toque embroidered in red script with the name of his restaurant, The Treasured Cheese. He was thrilled and surprised. He wore it to make a menu of sauteed baby carrots, garlic chicken and chocolate-dipped oranges. He looks just a teensy bit pleased, don't you think?

All in all, the hat was a reasonably-priced gift that didn't conflict with my sense of holiday propriety. I saw a newscaster last week interviewing teens saying things like, "If I don't get electronics in my Easter basket, I'll be pretty pissed." The reporter went on to say that items like iPods and DVD players are now the norm for Easter gifts -- which I think is misleading... if not just plain wrong.

I can't believe that most parents give expensive electronics in baskets. I can imagine that a few do. And for every teen who is going to huff and pout over the lack of iPhone in her basket, there are nine more who are tickled by a homemade chocolate lollipop and a book.

The media telling us that expensive electronics are the norm is what will eventually make it acceptable. And while I don't generally concern myself with what other families do, I think it heads down a dangerous road to encourage kids to expect a gift worth a week's wages in an Easter basket.

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Mom gave me these beautiful plates from my father's Aunt Lottie over the Easter weekend. The back of the plates are blank, but the saucer says "OVEN WARE Fire-King Made in U.S.A." which puts the date for that piece in the 1950s.



It's funny how things like this come back in style. The dishes fit in my kitchen as if they were made this year.

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This lovely vanilla buttercream cupcake came from Whole Foods on P Street. The buttercream was lighter than the one I made a few weeks ago, but the cake was drier. When cupcakes are too dry, I tear off the bottom half and throw it away. Because really, why bother eating bad cake?

One of the things I look forward to on my trips to DC are my dinners from Whole Foods. Me and all of the other yuppies line up alongside the prepared food counters and give each other self-satisfied looks.

The blog Stuff White People Like offers this advice:

"They also provide prepared foods, that single white people often purchase to avoid cooking. This is important information, as this section of the store is loaded with single white people."

I will vouch for this, having witnessed many a budding romance begin next to the hearts of palm salad. He goes to pick up a recycled paper tray and finds that a stack of ten come away at once. His other hand is full of silken tofu and greek yogurt. He smiles sheepishly. She puts down her basket and unsticks one tray for him. She picks a folding container which separates neatly. He makes what he thinks is a witty remark about her picking the "non-sticky" ones. She smiles at his pseudo-witty remark. They notice they've each grabbed a similar wedge of iceberg lettuce with blue cheese and bacon. And there it begins...

I like to stare at the Devonshire Cream and wish there was a way to get it back to Vermont. Eventually, they ask me to leave.

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We went outside after dinner with friends the other night to find everything had iced over in just a few hours. Even our car in their driveway had a 1/2" clear shell that we had to chip away to get inside. Then we were stuck in a rut of ice which had been pliable slush when we drove into it. Dave got behind the car and pushed while I revved the engine.

When we got home, we played around outside in the dark for a while. Trees crackled as the wind moved them and bits of ice showered down on our heads. The power flickered a few times, but never actually went out -- a very real possibility in a town with one electric line being stretched to the breaking point by heavy ice.



I was kind of hoping that the power would go out, to justify the purchase of the generator that cost more than our first car.

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Saturday is errand day. Each week, we make the trek into Burlington or St. Albans and spend the day filling up on gas, restocking groceries, getting haircuts, eating lunch at a restaurant, grabbing tools or materials for house projects, buying clothes or shoes, going to the movies... pretty much anything that requires you to be near civilization.

It's a long day, so we tend to stick something fun in the middle, like a trip to ECHO, or a movie. This week, we saw The Spiderwick Chronicles. I'm hoping that the next errand day will have a trip to a sugaring farm in it -- it's the 7th Annual Maple Open House Weekend. Mmmm, syrup!



Trevor climbed every snow & gravel mountain in the Shaw's parking lot post-haircut, post-movie, pre-groceries. This pile was over 20-feet high and made me a little nervous. A random male shopper, celebrating the feat of scrambling up this slippery thing, yelled out to Trevor, "King of the hill!" I bet he wanted to climb up there too.

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Mom: Trevor, where are you?
Trevor: I'm in the living room.
Mom: Are you working on your math?
Trevor: No. I'm working on my relationship with Norrin.

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The cupcake of the week is Lemon Cataclysm. They started out as Lemon Burst, but there's only lemon filling in those (and I'm not too big on the box mixes either). Then I found Cupcake Bakeshop's Lemon Curd Filled Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting. Again, the only lemon is in the filling... and I wasn't looking for a cream cheese frosting either.

To get the mouth-puckering effect I wanted, I combined the Magnolia Bakery Cookbook's basic yellow cupcake recipe with "luscious lemon frosting," which, to be accurate, is more of a glaze than a frosting. If you pipe anything onto the cupcake, be aware that it will spread out into the barest suggestion of your shape within a few minutes. After I discovered this, I started making abstract swirls instead of precise stars. These are lemony enough to curl your hair. They're more than a burst, just past an explosion... they're a Lemon Cataclysm.

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This would make a beautiful quilt -- just make each mosaic square out of a piece of fabric.

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One floor down from the top of the Washington Monument, we saw a lesson in the democratic society our forefathers built:

At the monument, you're shuttled to the top floor, where you can stay as long as you like. When you'd like to return, you walk down a flight of steps and catch the elevator back down, which arrives every 15 minutes. There's usually a wait, so the Parks Service has put up signs directing visitors to wrap the line around the elevator in a clockwise direction. Even then, it might take one or two cycles for your turn to head to the bottom. It's all very clear and orderly.

We were waiting about 10 minutes for our ride down, when a family of three arrived to take the elevator as well. Like so many people today, they believed the rules did not apply to them. The trio gathered in front of the elevator door, clearly taking notice of the queue and avoiding it.

We reached a point where the people on the line started looking at each other, as if to say, "Are these people for real?" Oh yes, they were for real. The mother looked up at the sign (Please form line this way ->) and sighed heavily. She pointed it out to the father. He chuckled, and told her it didn't matter. The adult son looked up as well, then glanced down the line with a look of triumph that said, "I am not like you, I don't have to wait."

A Park Service employee came around the corner and asked if they were waiting for the elevator. "Why, yes," they preened, so flattered at being asked, blinded by their sense of entitlement, that they were shocked by what happened next.

"Please step into line over there then," said the Park Service employee.

The mother blinked and froze for a moment before she moved. The father shook his head at the injustice of it all. The son looked everywhere but at the people in line. Right after "all men are created equal," in the Declaration of Independence, I believe there is a line about "first-come, first-served."

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Ahh, the Internet. One minute, you can read a newspaper article about a high-priced call girl for a certain New York governor, the next minute you can leave a comment on her MySpace page. Remember when we were 22 and said things like this?

"I am all about my music, and my music is all about me… It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel..."

Ten years later, we're all like:

"I am all about project management, and project management is all about me… It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel..."

I'll be downtown at the Roxy on May 13th giving a baseline review of my 2008 acquisition plan. Tickets are $10 in advance, $15 at the door. Ladies free before 6:00pm! Get there early... you don't want to miss the cash flow analysis.

One of Ashley's friends says, "A lot of people are portraying her as this monster, which she definitely isn’t. She has the biggest heart.”

And is it made... of gold?

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I took a long time reading Duma Key -- mostly because it's not what you'd call a portable book. Clocking in at over 600 pages, it's not as if you can tuck it into the sleeve of your laptop bag for travel, or whip it out while in line at the post office.

That's probably a good thing, as it's not really a story that you can read in an offhand way. There are baskets full of important details to note and remember along the way. In fact, there are so many pieces of the puzzle, you wonder if they're all going to fit back in the right places. And they do, in the end, in a very satisfying way.

Duma Key is not as violent or gory as previous Stephen King novels; it sticks more rigorously to exploring issues like frustration and loss... but it does get downright frightening toward the end. On the whole, I wouldn't advise reading the last few sections of the book at 2:00 a.m. on an island where gale-force winds howl through your broken-down barn while your husband is out of town.

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The National Geographic Museum has a new frog exhibit on display. These little guys look like toys, but they're poisonous -- the golden ones are even deadly to the touch.

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Last week, we woke up to a day of no school and a thick layer of ice coating trees, power lines, cars and rooftops. After checking that the sump pump runoff pipe was unstuck, we crunched around for a while and examined the effects. No damage, and it was warm enough that most of the ice was dropping off the trees as we watched.



I used the tractor to plow the driveway while Trevor shoveled the walkway and front porch. It was the kind of slush that turns into a solid sheet of ice once the temperature drops, so we had to get it up quickly. During the last "wintry mix," I left the slush and we had two inches of ice beneath our snowfall for weeks. Walking to the end of the driveway to meet the school bus was an Olympic sport.



It rained for a while, and then the mercury started to fall. Boots and snowshoes don't help much on ice. I think we'll need some snow & ice cleats for next year. That said, I still try to get the mail every day in my worn-out, tractionless Crocs and I slide halfway there. Trevor's nod to the upcoming spring was his attempt to play with water balloons outside. To Vermonters, 34-degrees is apparently outside water play weather.



I am particularly glad that even on a long snow day Trevor didn't turn on (or ask to turn on) the television. On the flip side, he did tie one cat to each end of a long ribbon from my craft stash and giggled as they pulled each other around the house. I don't think the cats were quite as amused. Where's that remote again?

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I made this pair of little orange crepe paper flowers following instructions from Courtney at "two straight lines." I've had the post bookmarked for a while until I collected the materials.

My flowers are not as crisp or tight as hers, but I'm totally liking the clearance Christmas wrapping paper I scored from Oriental Trading Company around the bottom of the containers.

Next time I might make the crepe paper circles a touch smaller, which should result in tighter blooms. And I need more T-pins, but I've discovered they're not cheap at the local sewing store. I must be shopping in the wrong place, because I remember my Gram having a million of those things around her house.

Finally, reusing the Stonyfield Farms yogurt cups seemed like a good idea, but they're tapered, so wrapping the paper covering around the base in a tidy way became a trick in itself. Plain ol' cylindrical soup cans would work better.

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It's so annoying when the cat gets home from work, she barely gets in the door before asking for dinner. And I'm like, "Dinner will be ready in an hour." And she's all like, "Well I'm hungry now." And then I'm like, "You know I was busy all day here. You know that keeping this house running is a full-time job, right?" And she's like, "I was in the office all day listening to Bob dance around the fact that we're not going to make our first-quarter numbers. How am I supposed to make partner if I don't make my numbers?" And I'm like, "We never see you any more. Is your job more important than us?" And she's like, "You're always nagging me about nothing!" And I'm like, "You never take the garbage out unless I ask you!"

Sometimes I wonder if genetically engineering cats to go to work for us was such a good idea.

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A sign in Washington, DC. I think you pronounce this time, "Six a. o'clock m." There were several of these signs posted at every entrance to the building.

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These lovely ladies are Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton immortalized in stone. The trio were relegated to the basement for 70 years, until 1997, when Congress suddenly remembered that women had been granted the right to vote and moved the statue up into the daylight.



I wonder what they would think of a woman running for president. And I wonder if they would vote for her.

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I've been on a cupcake kick after finding the Cupcakes Take the Cake blog. And by "being on a kick," I mean reading every post back to the beginning of the site and showing Dave more adorable cupcake photos than he can stand.

Finally, I took action. I whipped up a batch of Martha Stewart's Easy Chocolate Cupcakes, then a bowl of Meringue Butter Cream and made twelve little cakes of my own.

First, a note about these two recipes. The cupcakes came out dense, moist and almost like a lighter version of a brownie. It's the sour cream that keeps them from becoming dry and when added to cocoa powder, gives the cakes their chocolately sharpness. And the buttercream... when people ask my favorite cake topping, (a question that comes up more often than you'd think), my stock answer is cream cheese frosting. It's a fairly well-known standby that says you like a little sweetness, but you're not a high-maintenance person. But really, deep down, I'm the kind of girl who likes a fluffy not-so-sweet buttercream that takes 192 steps to make and involves temperature regulation down to a degree, double-boilers, and something called a chinoise. The kind of frosting you only get on a slice of wedding cake once a year.

Ah, but this Meringue Butter Cream recipe was just such a thing... sans chinoise. It did have a handful of fussy little steps, but the result was well worth the effort of trying to whisk a bowl of temperamental egg whites over a simmering pot of water while holding the instant-read thermometer in my teeth. I've heard that other buttercreams use corn syrup, which is not a favorite ingredient of mine. This one had just granulated sugar. Here is the finished buttercream in it's pristine white state. It's so good it will make a grown man cry.

And the finished cupcakes themselves. I colored the buttercream with a little Wilton paste that I found in the spice cabinet that had to be at least three years old. They were from whenever it was that Trevor had a planet-themed birthday party, and a little grainy. Time for a few new jars. I intended to make the cakes rose and cocoa, but I ended up with mauve and latte. Close enough for horseshoes. They're heavenly.

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While the White House tour was underwheming*, the Capitol tour was excellent. We requested it through Rep. Peter Welch's office a few weeks ago -- and one of his staff showed us around the building for over an hour. The Capitol is filled with incredible workmanship tucked into every available space.



You can find uniquely American details everywhere, like the stalks and ears of corn on otherwise Roman-looking columns and statues memorializing important people and events from each state. Vermont's statues were Ethan Allen and Jacob Collamer. I vote we replace Collamer with Samuel de Champlain. Not an American, but hey... not many people were 1609.



Cameras aren't allowed in the House gallery, but we did see some suspension bills about memorializing Iraq War veterans being heard on the floor. Trevor enjoyed the artwork hanging in the tunnel between Longworth and the Capitol Building.

*We spent more time going through security than in the White House itelf. It was a self-guided tour; which essentially meant you wandered through velvet ropes as security guards glared. We reached the exit in about 15 minutes and looked around, bewildered, wondering if we had missed something.

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Dave and Trevor had a full week of sightseeing in DC while I was working.



Apparently, you only have to bring them up 490 feet in the air before they stop tormenting each other.

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