House of Prince

As Long as I Don’t Get Hit By a Car

By Kim Tracy Prince on September 14th, 2011

Oh, internet. Dare I say this out loud? (I mean, writing a blog post about something is just like saying it out loud, right?)

I’m feeling better.

Just three months ago I would not have contemplated dancing, riding a scooter, walking Kyle to school, riding my bike, swimming laps, or chasing the kids around the backyard. I would not have considered going to sleep without the aid of Vicodin or Soma. I hurt when I sat, when I stood, when I walked. I needed Stewart’s help to schlep the laundry from the garage to the second floor. Which, obviously, means I just didn’t do the laundry.

This morning I took it upon myself to conduct a full physical therapy workout in the living room – this means I did my stretches and all of my “homework” that the therapist has assigned and then I went out and rode my bike for 30 minutes. I decided to take the main road through town, which was kind of dumb because there is a lot of traffic and I was worried about getting hit by a car. It would be just my luck to take my bike out for the first real ride in years and get mowed down by some idiot who was more interested in texting her friend than paying attention.

It happens!

This preoccupation may have helped me get through the ride, because as I worried about avoiding a collision with cars, I didn’t notice (as much) the steady climb of the rolling hills. I did most of the uphill portions in first gear, huffing and puffing. I enjoyed the downhill coasting, but then I felt like I was cheating. I’m supposed to do 30 minutes of cardio. Does 30 seconds of coasting count against me?

In the last few weeks I have ridden Kyle’s scooter down the hill on my way back from accompanying him to school. Twice. It took me a few weeks to get up the nerve. Finally I decided that the only thing sillier than a 39-year-old out of shape mother flying down a hill on a scooter would be a woman who didn’t ride the scooter because she worried about looking silly.

It was fun. As the wind roared in my ears and I wobbled down the hill, I only vaguely worried about hitting a rock and tumbling ass over teakettle. Plus, it got me to this desk chair faster. All the better to complete my to-do list early.

And back in July, I danced the night away with my three BFF’s on our big 40th birthday girls’ getaway. I didn’t worry about my back. I didn’t take it easy. I also didn’t fling my big 80′s hair around like I used to, but that is because I am dignified. That part comes with the age.

Sigh. I’m sitting here all proud of myself and my freelance money that paid for all this physical therapy. I hope that writing this post doesn’t mean a piano is going to fall on my head tomorrow. You know, because I walk down city streets lined with skyscrapers every day…

Family, Food 9 comments

Massacre in the Kitchen

By Kim Tracy Prince on September 13th, 2011

Not long ago, Kyle declared an open-ended moratorium on vegetables. All vegetables. Even cucumbers, the last vegetable he would actually eat. We even grew them in our garden this summer. With ~~our own~~ Stewart’s two hands.

After a series of heated dinnertime battles that would have really interested the faithful viewers of the Ragu series I did, I finally gave up. The new rule: eat what I serve you or you don’t get dessert. I don’t always serve vegetables, but when I do, I’m serious. No dessert.

In the meantime I have been plotting to hide vegetables in his food – and Brady’s by default – using Jessica Seinfeld’s recipes from Deceptively Delicious. Since I know Kyle loves pancakes, I decided to try her “pink pancakes” made with regular pancake mix and beet puree.

Here’s the thing. I’ve always hated beets. The only beets I was ever exposed to were the canned kind, so I decided to try this from scratch. I’ve never actually purchased any form of beet, ever. At the grocery store, I realized I didn’t even know what an uncooked beet looked like. Would they be in the potato section of the produce aisle? The turnips or rutabagas? Nothing there was labeled “beet,” and I was unsure enough of this situation that I did not simply substitute it with a sort-of-like-it vegetable the way I normally would.

I finally found the last bunch of beets in the organic section. They looked exactly like this:

To make the puree, I chopped the stems and roots off, covered each beet (I had four) in foil, and roasted them at 400 degrees for one hour. The house filled with the smell of dirt.

Once the beets cooled and I peeled them and sliced off a tiny bit to taste, I realized they also taste like dirt. Why do people eat these things? Because they are pretty? Meh. To each his own.

Anyway, despite my distaste for even organic, lovingly-roasted beets, I was determined to foist them upon my children. I pureed the beets with water, then proceeded to mix some of the puree into the pancake batter and proceed as usual.

The problem, I think, is that in my frenzy of healthy-food-creating, I bought whole wheat and corn meal pancake mix, which is mealy and coarse, unlike the smooth operator that is Bisquick, which I normally use. So I wound up with fuchsia, dirt-smelling johnnycakes.

Covered with fake maple syrup, they weren’t bad. Kyle actually ate them. Here is the proof:

Brady wouldn’t even go near them, much less give them a taste. I gotta say, smart kid. I ate my own fair share of the pink pancakes, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the other whacked out pancakes I like to make – oatmeal cottage cheese pancakes from the South Beach Diet cookbook.

Plus, the cleanup was a bitch.

Out, damned spot!

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Where Were You Ten Years Ago?

By Kim Tracy Prince on September 10th, 2011

: Photo by Aunt Kathy, October 2001

I originally published this post on 9/11/06. I now have two children who will never know what life was like before 9/11/01. I’m sad for them, but they don’t know the difference.

I wasn’t going to write a post, but again I was inspired by another blogger, Jane Gassner, who in turn was inspired by, well, so many things.

: Cage around the hole in Ground Zero, July 2003

I had just started my job at E! Networks and I was up early that morning. Really early, like 6am. I don’t remember why I got up that early that day, but there I was, drinking my coffee, reading the paper. We didn’t watch TV in the morning in those days, and even now we only watch Sesame Street. Then my mother called, and said “Where is Holly’s building in New York?” and “Turn on the TV!”

And the world then was forever changed.

As I recall, I turned on the TV between the crashes of the first and second planes. When the second plane hit I decided to wake Stewart up. I remember thinking that the first plane crash must have been a horrible freak accident, but when the second one hit my stomach sank even further and I knew it was something very, very bad.

We sat in stunned silence watching the towers fall. I cried. Stewart became enraged. We couldn’t look away. But I had just started my new job, and I had to go to work. I peeled myself away from the TV and got ready to go. Once I was in the car and I turned on the radio, I realized that it wasn’t just me and Stewart sitting there, glued to the TV. The announcers on every single station were giving updates and I believe I learned of the Pentagon crash while driving over the hill.

I got to the office. It was a ghost town. The only other people there were my boss and the other guy who had just started working there. We sat in my boss’s office and watched more coverage. I called Holly’s office every five seconds. (Holly is my dear friend, a lawyer who was working on Park Avenue at the time.) As the news just got worse and worse, my boss gave up, and let us go home. I mean, how can one write about Kirk Cameron’s rise to fame when 3,000 people were just turned into noxious dust?

So, like so many others, Stewart and I sat in front of the television all day long, letting fear and disgust and sadness and despair overtake us. Our reactions were very different, but both very intense. The day turned into night. There were candlelight vigils on major street corners in our neighborhood. People waved the American flag. People were nice to each other.

The next day we both went back to work, and our lives began crawling back into a normal routine. But I was supposed to go back east that weekend, to stand as a bridesmaid in Tina and Greg’s wedding. It was the first day that air traffic was allowed to resume. I rode a shuttle bus to LAX, which was closed to all other traffic. It was eerie. No people or cars besides the shuttle buses and the inspectors and armed soldiers. Hardly any people in one of the world’s busiest airports. I checked in. I cleared security. I felt safe.

At the gate, I waited for the boarding call. Well into the night. Finally, the gate agent announced that the good news was that we had a plane, but the bad news was that there was no crew to fly it. We all went home. I waited until it was 7:30 AM in New Haven to call and tell Tina I wasn’t coming. Fucking terrorists.

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Neil Gaiman on email

By KTP Posterous on September 6th, 2011

My admiration and secret crush on him are no secret. I just caught up on his blog (well, at least the home page) and I just swooned when I heard him say his favorite children’s book is the series The Chronicles of Narnia, and of that, the favorite title is Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Of course, that is mine, too.

“I’m starting to think seriously about retiring from email. I can’t keep up with the amount coming in, and after a long day’s e-mail answering I feel like I’ve done a day’s work, and I haven’t.”