Greetings from Julie in Northern VA

Hello, everyone,

This is Julie Schorfheide, Florence's youngest child and younger sister to Kathy Piehl in Mankato, MN, and Doug Kracke in Tempe, AZ.

A quick update on me: My family and I live in the DC area--not too far from Mark and Liz, but you'd never know it, since we rarely see each other. My husband, Jim, and I have three children: Christine (26) is at Yale, working on a PhD in art history; Jeffrey (21), in Madison, WI, has "taken some time off" from school (U of WI) and has found out just how hard it is to earn a living at minimum-wage-and-lower jobs. He's planning on returning to his studies during semester #2 of the 2008-09 school year. When he returns to school, parental support will kick in again. THis is a huge incentive. Laura (17) will be starting her senior year in high school and has focused her efforts on selecting colleges to which she will soon apply. We (she and I) recently completed a 10-day swing through the Midwest to visit Indiana University, then head to St. Louis (in-law visit), then to Madison (Jeffrey visit), to Chicago (Florence visit and Northwestern tour), then to Delaware, OH, for a tour of Ohio Wesleyan. On Monday we fly to Minneapolis for a combined visit to Kathy and Chuck and a tour of St. Olaf. Not many kids in Northern Virginia lookivto the Midwest for schools, as far as we can tell. Laura does not believe that the sun rises and sets on Virginia schools, though her parents wish she'd consider them more seriously because it would mean a lot less tuition $$ flying out the door.

I've been working as managing editor of an association magazine in DC since May 2007, and I returned to school at George Washington University last fall to work on a master's degree in publishing. Between 2.5+ hours of commuting every day, the higher demands of the new job, course work, and trying to maintain a bit of freelancing I still do for the University of Missouri Press, my time has been pretty much taken up. Which explains why I sent out no Christmas cards last year and why Laura and Jim have become rather adept at feeding themselves in the evenings.

Now, regarding "how my mother did ... "--let me add to the "cut up chickens" thread. Mom fixed fried chicken every Wednesday night. She would buy whole fryers at the store and cut them up in the sink. Chicken bones cracked and popped as the fryer was dismembered into "parts" that had no final resemblance to living fowl. I remember searching for bits of free-floating white meat, unattached to any bones at all, and shunning the other oddly shaped pieces. I also remember the first time I saw fried chicken at a friend's house and could identify pieces like wings, legs, and so on. It was a revelation. I'm sure the horror of my mom's fried chicken has been amplified by memory and passage of time--but to this day I, like Jan, buy boneless chicken breasts.

Julie