Doings at Useless Ranch

Knit went wrong

2012-02-13T10:06:00.010-05:00

As this is almost my first post of 2012, let me say happy new year & all that. 2011 ended pretty much the way they say the universe will end, things just kept getting faster & faster. Then as our first act of 2012 we bought a brand new home heating/air conditioning unit; the old unit died 72 hours before the first hard freeze of the season. If "bullet dodged" is the theme for the upcoming year, I can live with it.

It has taken a bit but we are now more or less where we were in mid-December in the house torn-up, chores to be done arena. & as an extra the utility closet that housed the old & houses the new air pusher thing-y (& the hot water heater) has now been cleaned & re-organized, new shelves & that was a bear of a job.

Which means I can finally get back to my regularly scheduled time wasters, especially now that the problem of why-the-pictures-won't-upload-anymore appears also to be resolved. Did I forget to mention that? I want to say mid-December I suddenly could no longer upload photos from the computer that has the MyBook that has all the photos. It is just as well I did not start loading photos to my laptop because right around the second week of January the hard drive died & a recovery was unlikely & then lo (or is it hark?) most of her came back to life. In the end, my laptop had a screw loose (apparently, that is a real thing) & points of contact were not making contact & when the she was opened up (to harvest her organs errrrmmmmmmm hard drive) to bring what I could to the not-yet-purchased replacement, it was clear there was a screw loose. Like I said 2012 is shaping up to be the Year of the Bullet Dodged.

I thought I would begin my new found & no doubt temporary return to a quiet life by doing a little more clearing...kinda. Specifically, last year I failed (FAILED) to make a red scarf for the Foster Care to Success gift baskets. I cannot send the completed scarf off until ?September? but I thought it would be good to get it on & off the needles, ready & waiting.

As it happens I have still failed because the scarf I made was too wide to be a scarf. Also it is a little mohair-y which they frown on. That wrong scarf went to C****** as I mentioned in an earlier post...I think. Anyhow, it went so fast that I cast on another, finished it & shipped it off to my mom.

Cast on as many stitches as you think a scarf should be wide. This will depend on your gauge using that yarn & whatever needles you find blah-blah-blah; I usually trust the yarn label for gauge/needle size & aim for nine inches or so wide (something went horribly wrong this time & I decided early on I didn't care).

Knit for seven (7) rows -- although I think the one in the picture was more like TEN rows

For the rest of the scarf, up to the last seven (7) rows -& I bet you can guess how those will go- repeat the following three rows:

Row 1: Knit
Row 2: Knit five (5) , purl to the last 5 stitches, knit five (5) -- & again, the one in the picture was more like first&last SEVEN stitches
Row 3: Knit

Pay some attention at the end if you want the side that begins with an all-knit rib to end with an all knit rib. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it.

I think it would be safe to say with adequate yarn in your carry-on you could start & finish this scarf on a flight to your holiday destination, so long as it included a stop-over &/or was a trans-Atlantic (or Pacific) flight. Or you could work on it during a Sunday marathon of House or Law&Order. Or a few weekends of early season football. What is adequate you ask? I used six skeins of Sensations Angel Hair & made a very wide, plenty long rectangle & had most of the last skein left over.

They say the best scarves are not more than 10 inches shorter than the wearer. I am 5'2" & I tend to prefer nothing longer than 4'6" & often shorter but you should decide for yourself. This thing alas while a good length was almost double a workable-scarf width. When folded over it is quite thick, too thick really to wear comfortably as a scarf. You can avoid this problem by accurately reading the needle size & gauge printed right there on the yarn label, a skill that was apparently beyond me.

So what to do, what to do. As it happens, for the red one, C****** liked it that wide but she also liked the idea I came up with, which was to lay the scarf (for at that point it is still a scarf) & then fold one corner to the other edge, making a right triangle. Then shoot maybe two inches worth of stitches in there to hold it, repeat at the other end & you have sort of kimono-looking shrug/shawl thing. My mother called it a shroooooog (all 'o's after the 2nd one are mine).

It is really really reversible. You can wear it inside out & upside down &, while fitting slightly differently (it all depends on how big your shoulders are really), it doesn't look wrong. I think if you made it long enough, you could even throw a button in the front & maybe with an I-cord loop & have something a bit more formal.

Two yogurt makers: Part III

2012-02-05T11:08:00.003-05:00

Not even a year ago I got Gertie my first new yogurt maker, well ever, since my first yogurt maker was in fact a hand-me-down from my Mom. Last November, Gertie went to live with my Mom.

It is not that I didn't love Gertie, I did, mostly. But it was one of those relationships that happened so fast. There was an empty place in my life where a really really old yogurt maker had been & things were fine until one day, a new cow arrived & then I was up to my eyeballs in milk & that is when I realized my old yogurt maker was just too old.

Gertie was a beauty (& still is, I didn't just dump her; she has actually gone on to live with my Mom--yes, all my life's a circle). She was the first yogurt maker I ever met who could handle a full two quarts. She was enchanting & we were very happy...at first.

But Gertie had some flaws. She has a curved lid, making it very hard to find a place for her in a rather full kitchen cabinet. I have lost track of how many times the top slid off when I was moving here & it was just a matter of time before it cracked. Also, Gertie came with only one canister for making the yogurt itself. I tried to get more but it just was not possible. Finally, that canister was not the best design anyone ever thought up; in order to get it out of the yogurt maker itself, I usually ended up flipped the lid off. Even with my small strong fingers, I had trouble getting a good enough grip.

Then I saw May (that's right, my new yogurt maker is called May. Her full name is Yogourmet, but I call her May). May has a flat top, it is possible to buy extra canisters (I bought three), but more than that, May works on a different heating idea. Inside May, the canister rests in a water bath, making a nice even heat throughout. No more much cooked milk at the bottom & runny sludge at the top. Because of the water it is possible to make yogurt from irregular sized batches of milk (which is how they come out of the cow; I am still stunned by people who think she has a spigot & a scale).

I hope to be happy with May for many many years. But I am also glad the others have all gone to good homes. Recycling & all that.

Not even a whimper

2012-02-02T10:12:00.000-05:00

So my laptop is still dead, the computer in the tvroom is still sketchy & you would think with all of this not-on-line time I would get so much more done but I think I am actually accomplishing less. This year did not start with a bang.

I did manage to baste & quilt a quilt top from last year but then it sat & still sits unbound & unfinished. The binding is stitched but not pressed. I seem to be stalled an arm's length from the finish line.

I started a scarf for the Red Scarf Project, finished it too even though I had missed the collection deadline by about a week & a half & would of had to keep it safe & clean for another ten months except it turns out it was too wide & too hairy (they frown on mohair-y-ness because people say it ?itches?). Not having a computer to check & treble check the guidelines was a problem. In happier news, C****** liked it & took it home last week & the pattern I sort of doodled out is easier enough that I have already made another (not in red, not for the Red Scarf Project, but whatever).

I finished the February book club book Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin. It went fast, didn't make much of an impression or so I thought until I found myself really wanting cake. Enough to bake one.

I missed another month of Block Lotto, tried again to drop out of the Quilt Block Swap & generally just kept my head above water chore&household-wise.

It seems in the absence of dumping my brain out onto a page I get rather clogged. This week-end I think it might be laptop buying time.

Boiling water 101

2012-01-25T07:44:00.001-05:00

C****** has been coming by Tuesday evenings & getting some cooking insights. I will wait while you all stop laughing because yes I would agree I am not the best person to teach anyone how to cook. Not that I am a bad cook, more that I am a spot cook. I am prepared to prepare some foods & not others & there are large gaps in basic knowledge (I learned what Crisco was when I was in my 40s; I deep fry NOTHING & make crusts with real butter) while I have worked at areas most other cooks avoid (a souffle rising has more to do with whether or not your bowls, utensils etc. have hard water stains than how well you whip those eggs, trust me).

But none of that mattered last night, because tonight it was pressure cooker basics. & what could be more basic than boiling water?

Sooooo, first we boiled water with a regular (not pressurized lid). Then we boiled black eyed peas with the pressure cooker sealed. For whatever reason, the cooker WAS under pressure but did not give the signs the manual said it would (we knew this though because we knew how long it would take to boil that water..see how that works?) & when we opened the cooker (after doing all the groovy safety stuff) we found that ten minutes had brought us roughly where soaking for 10+ hours had done. Did I mention I soaked black-eyed peas for comparison?

We re-pressurized for another ten minutes & had black eyed peas mush (YAY). Also, this time the signs of pressurization were there. I found this with my own pressure cooker the first time I used it; it just didn't tick or steam like it was supposed to that first time.

Then we took the whole thing apart, cleaning as per the directions & C***** went home with a bag of garbanzo beans to repeat on her own stove. Next week, an actual food; this week the black eyed peas will go to the chickens.

I am not dead!

2012-01-19T10:58:00.001-05:00

That's right, I am not dead. But my laptop is. Hopefully I will be back on-line sooner rather than later (A is very willing to buy a new laptop but I think I might want an iPad-y type thing instead, as we do have a home computer it is just not super convenient to use).

In better news, the photo uploading problem with same inconvenient computer seems to be resolved.

What would Munro do?

2011-12-21T10:52:00.083-05:00

1936 was a funny year.

Hitler was elected 4 years earlier so by '36 he was well into his, well, stride I guess you would call it. This month in 1936, he made Hitler Youth membership compulsory (which flash-forward to earlier this century is how we ended up with a former Hitler Youth Pope). Ireland saw their chance when Edward VIII stepped down & moved quickly to limit the powers of the next British monarch, so far as it pertained to them. In Flint, Michigan auto workers walked off the job (or rather sat down on the job) in their first UAW strike, the results of which (collective bargaining rights) remain under fire today. December 1936 was an upsy-downsy sort of month.

In not-news news of December '36, Munro Leaf celebrated his 31st birthday today in 1936. Not usually one of the big milestone birthdays, but I am guessing this one stuck with him. Earlier in the year he sat down & by his own admission in under an hour sketched out & then finalized the text of the book that would define his career. & it was not a small career, he wrote virtually a book a year for 40 years, but none so big, so controversial as this one. This 1936 book of his was burned by the nazis (always a good sign), banned by Franco's government in Spain (not-coincidentally the setting of the book) & lauded in Soviet Poland (I know, right?). A movie version won an Academy Award in 1938 & the book itself has never gone out of print. Ever. People have plonked down their hard earned cash for brand new copies of this book year in & year out through wars, depressions, more wars, counter-culture wars & so on. Multiple musical compositions have been written to accompany live readings of this book. Today it appears in print in I-don't-know-how-many languages.

I should mention, that in addition to being written in less than a day, it was written largely for the purpose of showcasing the talents of the then-almost unknown illustrator. Robert Lawson went on to illustrate many other things, but it is this book remains his best known, although You could argue though that there is a better known piece not often attributed to him; during WWII Lawson was a camouflage artist.

Back to the book. In an afternoon Munro Leaf wrote a subversive manifesto & within the year it was being burned in fascist capitals throughout Europe. The book? The Story of Ferdinand of course.

The new office

2011-12-12T07:14:00.007-05:00

Last week (the week before?) I was listening to either an American Public Media or a National Public Radio phone-in show & the guest that people were phoning in to speak with was a woman who recently wrote a book, an egghead book not a mainstream book, about how many of the jobs that have not returned as the economy turned around are just plain not coming back. Her theory was that technology had changed so much in the preceding ten years that the way business is conducted had also changed, specifically no one needs the kind of office support staff that was the norm. While these jobs had been slowly falling away as people changed jobs or retired & the chairs went empty, the massive belt tightening meant a lot of them went all at once.

First let me say "duh". Earlier this year we had our septic system pumped. We used the same company we have used since we bought this house & it had been less than 4 years since the last time we did this. The experience was night&day. Last time I called on a ?Monday? & got the office manager/administrator/secretary/whoever & an appointment for the following week (it wasn't an emergency & that was fine). The owner, an older man, arrived, dug out the two tank openings (we have two unconnected tanks, weird & yet very useful), pumped the tanks, hand-wrote a bill which I paid by check. He was here maybe 3 hours total. At the beginning of the following month, I got a typed statement in the mail which reflected a balance of $0.

This time I called, got the office manager/administrator/secretary/whoever & she said they could be there later the same day. Both she & the owner (a younger man who had worked with the other guy for years; he had been out on previous jobs in previous years) arrived. They had a laptop with the layout of our property & where the tanks were (I could have told them but they tell me this is not the norm). While he dug one, she dug the other. While he pumped, she went back to the truck & made & received phone calls & printed my bill from the printer in the truck. The bill had ALL my previous calls on it & a notice of when they were likely to be needed back for a routine job (3-5 years). She offered to make the appointment for five years out with the understanding it might change. They were here exactly 1 1/2 hours.

I realize it sounds like there are just as many people in both stories working just as many man hours, but there aren't. In the previous visit, there is another guy in another truck also working alone & checking in with the office. Now there is one guy doing all the driving himself, but becasue he has a n extra pair of hands when he needs them he is covering just as many places as two used to.

All of this hinges on the reality that in the second story there is no office. The office works all gets done on the road except for once a month, once a quarter, once a year stuff which they handle at home. That is one less full-time job than there was five years ago with no loss in service. & it doesn't stop there.

This elimination of offices generally has eliminated quite a few jobs: no office means no once a week cleaning staff to come in & clean that office, driving the office around means no more delivery guy with office supplies coming out to the office every month or so. That is another three jobs poof & gone.

I have a friend who cleans offices for a living, or rather she used to. She used to clean seven offices a week & a public area on weekends. Now she has two cleaning jobs during the week & the public area every other weekend (that one irks her actually because it is the same amount of work & now she gets calls on the off-week that the garbage cans are overflowing & when is she going to deal with them). The offices she doesn't clean anymore are still there, empty & at least one of the businesses still exists. Ironically they are the cleaning company she still works for except now the manager handles scheduling etc. in her car between cleaning jobs.

Last Monday I had my sewing machines cleaned & serviced by the same guy who has taken care of them since I bought them (trust me, it has been years). I used to bring them to his shop & wait a week. & I can still bring the machine to him & wait a week if I want, but mostly he just comes to the house. His shop is now a room in his own house & he has maybe 2 or 3 machines there at a time, most afternoons he is on the road & although his travel expenses are higher, they are more than offset by the reduction in overhead.

Last night I accidentally tuned into a presidential candidates speech (I flipped the tv on & then went into the other room where I can still watch it but forgot the remote). The gist of the speech was how when he is president he will bring these jobs back & the crowd went wild. I wonder if they will be as pleased when they realize that bringing these jobs back will mean commuting longer to get to work (the average commute is a fraction of what it was ten years ago, by the way & generally it is longer commutes to lower paying jobs) & taking on all that expense (deductible if you are the CEO & the company send a car but not for the average worker), as well as giving up their cell phones & a slew of other conveniences we really do take for granted. Maybe it's time to consider we just don't live in that world anymore. & unemployed or not, most of us don't really want to go back.

Panama, a homecoming

2011-12-11T03:08:00.020-05:00

Recently (& not so recently) a handful of rock bands have been on the news quite irked that their music was being used as, dare I say it, an instrument of torture. Apocalypse Now aside, that musical torture was largely incidental (the soldiers just happened to like it that loud), the first time I ever heard of it was those 15 days Noriega spent holed up in the little piece of the Roman Catholic Church that was the Vatican Embassy while outside US Troops blasted the Rolling Stones (if memory serves-wait let me look it up...yup The Rolling Stones, & Hendrix & Bon Jovi & others) to make life just that much miserable for those holed up inside.

There is a lot of fodder in that whole story: the church really will shelter anyone at all if they think anyone might find out they didn't & we apparently have no problem considering what we enjoy to be a plague on others. But I'm not going there today. Today I am going to France.

In 1990 Daniel Noriega did finally surrender to the rock'n'roll army & was shipped off to a US trial & US prison & that's the end of the story. Well actually it isn't. After the US was done with him...did you know the US was done with Noriega? I missed that story last year, on April 26 2010 precisely. Turns out between the Gulf Oil Spill & the 20th anniversary of the Hubble it just never came up. Anyhow, so Noriega went to Paris & to prison & maybe even brought is Legion of Honor medal with him.

Wait, you didn't know that (me neither)? Noriega was awarded the highest decoration in France in 1987 although his name was not on the list of recipients when I checked just now so apparently they can take that back.

Why am I going on & on about Noriega? Because a judge in France has ruled in favor of yet another extradition & this morning he should be heading back to Panama. Panama has been trying to get their hands on him for awhile & I for one am happy to know he is going. The Panama he left & the country he returns to are like different worlds. There have been elections, no doubt imperfect ones but still much improved. Crime is hardly eradicated, but the police force are no longer just a thuggish arm of the current president-for-life. Best of all, there is no such thing as president-for-life.

As for the Rolling Stones, they will probably be playing somewhere, but Panama has had quite the cultural revolution since Noriega left & now he will be treated to the not-so-smooth stylings of Panamas biggest musical export: a kind of sort of reggae hip-hop mosh. What can I say Mr. President, the times they are a-changing.

Agatha Christie & another lost week-end

2011-12-08T10:14:00.068-05:00

Earlier this year, I was talking with my mom & told her I had begun working my way through the Miss Marple catalog & she said she always thought of them (the books) as kind of henny & her (Miss Marple & Agatha Christie) also kind of henny & without disagreeing (I think they are actually meant to be henny) I said "did you know Agatha Christie went AWOL in December 1926 only to be found in a hotel under her husband's mistress's name after he had come this close to being arrested in connection with the disappearance?"

Doesn't it make you like her better?

This is not the first lost weekend I had ever heard of. I knew a lady accountant whose husband was let's say reluctant to believe that staying home with their new baby was nearly so taxing as his day at the office. He gave long speeches about how she had to pull herself together when he came home & the house was a mess, the baby was crying & she was both a mess & crying. Among other problems she was having was a complete inability to breast feed, she & the baby just never got the hang of it. As a result, they were on a merry-go-round of formulas as some did not agree with him some of the time, etc.

Yes, it sounds bad, but it did make it that much easier when on the Thursday before Memorial Day Weekend 1995 she met her husband at the door of a clean house, with a clean baby in her arms, handed over the baby & said I'll be back in time for you to go to work on Tuesday & took off. C******** & D** were a particularly private couple but alas I was the office manager for the company C******** worked for when not on maternity leave & so I was in the unique position of receiving D**'s phone calls. Did she go to a client? Is she staying with someone from work? Has she called in? Has she called in? Has she called in?

All I know for sure is she did not stay with me; as to the rest I have my suspicions, mostly formed after the fact. There was not much he could do; she timed it perfectly. Memorial Day in east Texas is a big deal & that Friday morning I was the only person in the office & on-call through the weekend. Both his mother & mother-in-law were also out of town, as was pretty much everyone else he knew who might know what to do with a permanently colicky baby for 100+ hours. All I could tell him was she never phoned in for messages, no client ever said they were expecting her & it wasn't until a week later that it occurred to me that someone else who was unlikely to have any messages at all kept checking in regularly.

I have no idea what happened when she got home; I don't know if the house or the baby were still clean. I do know they hired a nanny & she cut short her maternity leave & came back to work early (the first & only time I have ever seen that happen, by the way). They are still married & they never had any more children.

Agatha's lost weekend did not end so nicely, Unless you are Archie Christie, I suppose. He had said he requested a divorce (that's what prompted the fight that ended in her flight) & a divorce he got. He married the mistress at the heart of it all & that's all I know. Happily ever after? Maybe.

FKA Santa Maura

2011-11-30T13:41:00.002-05:00

Lots & lots of saints today, including Saint Andrew (not the patron saint of golf) & Saint Trojan (not the patron saint of condoms). But enough about them & what they are not. This afternoon, lets get to know Saint Maura. Don't worry, there isn't much to know.

First let me say that a friend of mine wanted to choose Maura as her confirmation name but the priest would not let her becasue there was no saint named Maura & she chose Margaret instead. There are slews of Margarets. As it happens in this post-google era we can all know there is indeed a Saint Maura. She was a virgin (so much more appropriate than a few of the Margaret-ilk I would think but there you go). She was martyred. End of story. Well not quite.

Apparently a kinda-sorta cult sprang up around Maura & for a while there she was very big in the east. We don't know why exactly because one of Emperor Constantine's brothers (1/2 brothers? I get confused) divided his time between being emperor & putting down christians generally, & when he had a little extra time on his hands he would go round repressing devotions to Saint Maura specifically. & that was more or less all I could find about Maura until....

It turns out there is an island named after her. Originally I couldn't find the island, even with google but eventually I learned it was renamed Lefkas (in English). I'm sure they had their reasons.

Naturally I got curious what those reasons might be. While trying to find out (I never did but I did not look that hard) I learned it was the birth place of that well-known Greco-Irish writer Patrick Lafcadio Hearn. Don't worry if you have never heard of him, apparently he was mostly big in Japan.

So there was a Saint Maura, not too much remains known except they named an island for her & then they renamed it & then a guy who was named for the island went on to change his name. Which brings us to the end of this story & the end of November.

The young lady with the flying lizard body art

2011-11-29T23:21:00.012-05:00

Last, year, not far into the year, I decided I had really had it with nazis. I don't (just) mean in the usual way a person could get fed up with nazis, I mean I was fed up with people talking about nazis. It started with an unswerving impulse to change the channel the minute one person referred to a person of opposite political affiliation as "hitler-like". It progressed so that I could no longer even take a chance of watching Secrets of the Dead (which I L*O*V*E, also Liev Schreiber's voice is the voice in my head I always attributed to Eben Strauss who I also love) because every season SotD does cover at least one nazi story & now I just cannot shake it, which is breaking my heart because I would pay to listen to Liev Schrieber read my grocery list aloud.

But somehow all these things had gotten wired & cross-wired in my brain & I just could not take nazis anymore. Soooo, I declared a nazi free for the rest of the year. As a result I did not read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

//SIDEBAR: many people who hear this have tried to tell me the Millenium books are not about nazis, that is just one little part & to read them during a nazi free year would not be a violation. More on this later.

Mostly passing this book over was easy, I had the discs on hold at the library forEVER & I finally bubbled to the top of the lending list just as we were packing for Hawai'i last December. & I knew I wouldn't be able to read(listen) in the few days after December 31st but before the discs were due back (I am not so obnoxious that I would ask to renew a book other people were waiting for, even though I do have the connections; that's right I am library book hooked-up). So, back it went into the pool to drag down someone else's solstice observance.

Flash forward four months & a handful of days & it seems I am once again at the top of the list. But now, also on my bedside table are Harry Dresden, Waking up in Eden, & Naguib Mahfouz. So back to the library they went & this time I did not put them on hold again even.

Flash forward to late last month when someone asked me how I thought the books ended. Well, there's a question. I have a very particular belief about how many books end (Smilla's Sense of Snow being one of them) that almost no one I talk to finds reasonable (my mother-in-law got quite adamant & a bit upset when I said how I thought what happened at the end of Smilla & I swear that time I really was not trying to yank her chain. I don't think I said more than two sentences & they weren't even run-on sentences, that I recall). This time, though I did not have to put anything on hold. Multiple formats of the book were readily available.

I plugged away thru the first 1/3 or so of the first book & my only thought was this girl better be quite something, because I think I have forgotten why I ever wanted to read this book. The contrast between details that are glossed over & details that are not, as in detailed lists of computer hardware... Don't get me wrong, I L*O*V*E a good list. Nevil Shute's passages about airplane part inventory can make me teary eyed, no really. & I was not kidding about Liev Schrieber & my groceries. But these lists told me more about the author than any of the characters (seriously, there are more or less detailed descriptions of everyone's computer hardware but what color is any car, any car at all?)

So I am glad to have an audio version, even if it means the names all sound a bit samey. & as for it not being about nazis: do you think the Great Gatsby had anything to do with WASPs? Dante's Inferno Catholics? Yea, me too.

Gimme a "J"

2011-11-16T09:20:00.074-05:00

I have received a few messages about the December Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group block (which is the word JOY). Most of these are from people who have never seen examples of letter quilts, or quilts inspired by Word Play. Those that are interested (& it is perfectly OKay if you are not) mostly want directions for making the letters.

Pieced alphabet quilt patterns abound on the internet (just google it), can be found in all kinds of quilt books (your local library is bound to have at least one) & you can always embroider or machine embroider or foundation paper piece or applique if you prefer anyhow.

But because I keep getting asked (& because some of these questions were being asked by a person standing in my own kitchen) I went ahead & documented these specific directions for this letter J. The reason I am limiting myself to J is it is better if the words are all a bit different & most people can manage an O on their own anyhow. As for Y, you will see that it can be made of the same pieces more-or-less & shuffled around, as the J. For those who saw the original JOY post, you will notice this is NOT the same J. It is the same J as in the photo on the Facebook Group page, but that should not be taken as a direction to use this J; this is just the J we came up with that could easily be chain pieced (yes chain pieced, my student -let's call her mom- made nine blocks; not the correct number for swapping but we were just using up each chain; we are still swapping in sets of FIVE).

Begin with a 3.5" strip of the background fabric & a 1.5" strip of the letter fabric; in this case the background is purple & the letter is teal. Stitch them together, press one way or the other (it does not matter) & cut into 4.5" segments. This means they will be square.

Next, to make the little hook of the J, take a 1.75" square of letter fabric & sew it corner-to-corner in the lower left hand side opposite the other part of the J. When you iron it back on itself, it will create a corner triangle.

For the base of the J we made flying geese. The letter fabric piece was 4.5" by 2.5" & the two background squares were 2.5". I include a link to flying geese directions, in this particular case I used the second method (Speed Piecing Method A), but you can make them anyway you like. Or not. There is no rule that says you need a flying goose in your J.

& finally here is the assembled J:

& here it is JOY. Yes, it needs to be squared up & maybe bordered to make it neater, but you get the idea. The Y is the same width for the stem (base? what do you call that part of a Y?) with background fabric on either side, a flying goose to make up the bowl (again not sure what else to call that) & then a strip with a hooky-bit on each end & voila!

As for the O, well I forgot to write that down. I can tell you it is the same width letter fabric (1.5" strip) as the other two & that's all I remember.

March 1995 to November 2011

2011-11-08T06:47:00.001-05:00

JOY for the shortest days of the year

2011-11-07T10:14:00.008-05:00

We are down to the last Facebook Quilt Block Swap Group swap of 2011 & it is....JOY.

You can find the directions (more guidelines, really) here, but the gist is make a quilt block (make five, we swap in sets of five) of the word JOY. They do not have to be the same fabrics, they do not even have to be the same technique. They can be appliqued, embroidered, pieced whatever it takes to make JOY.

So far, no blocks other than my demo blocks are in-house so I am making the decision not to do a 6th block quilt for this swap. That means make six & keep one yourself & send the five. I realize there is a possibility no blocks will ever arrive but c'est la vie. In general, I get more messages about the December block/deadline than all the others rolled into one. I hoped that posting the block six months early would help, but maybe it hasn't; I also realize maybe this block has not caught fire with anyone & hey, that is allowed. One of the primary rules of this swap is no pressure: swap when you want to, when you can, when you are inspired & sit out the others.

This block will need at least one fabric, two if you are piecing although you can use more if you like. I would suggest one of them be a read-as-solid so that the letters stand out, but so long as there is contrast between the background & the letters, the word will still be legible. It should be 6.5" unfinished/6" finished by 6.5" unfinished/6" finished OR LARGER. The block does not need to be, almost certainly will not be, square.

One of the December swap queries has been why I we are making Christmas blocks to swap December 31st. I would like to float the idea that there are other kinds of JOY. Baby joy & garden joy & patriotic joy &...&... there are lots of ways to make this block without getting bogged down in just the one holiday.

Holiday cookie swap guidelines

2011-11-05T11:53:00.004-04:00

Yup, it's that time of year when we start thinking about cookie swaps. Last year was intended to be...better than it was. But Farley-boy dieing right there in the middle of the planning made it all too much for me to deal with. I know he was a smelly old man who loved only me, but that was kind of what I loved about him.

This year I WILL have my act together. & this is how it will go. I think.

Anyone can participate, you do not have to show to win. You can send your cookies with another person who IS coming (Tuesday, December 13th, 7:30 pm) or drop your off anytime from Monday on (although if they need to be refrigerated we need to talk beforehand) or mail ahead of time (USPS flat rate box is $4.95...I'm just saying).

You need to bring at least 2 dozen cookies. & you need to package them somehow in units of 1/2dozen OR 1/2dozen-equivalents. I say 1/2dozen-equivalents because some cookies are just less than others. For example, I make these very popular, very easy nut balls every year. They are a kind of shortbread rolled with walnuts & have maybe five ingredients, aren't really decorated & 1/2dozen of them would not overfill the palm of my hand. I would consider a dozen of these to be roughly equal to 1/2dozen of any normal cookie.

For every 1/2dozen you have to trade, you walk away with 1/2dozen made by some one else. If you like a good variety for the holidays, the way to go make a lot of the one or two cookies you really like making & know you won't be stuck eating them all (because there is no punishment like having to eat extra cookies).

I know some people will be bringing 1/2dozens for people who cannot attend which is perfectly OKay. if you think you might be interested, let me know....

In which the devil builds a church...or not

2011-10-31T16:26:00.070-04:00

You might have noticed there were more saints than usual this month. That was, in part because I can write the saint posts when I have time & then queue them up. It was also because October, being that month of spooky-ookiness just lends itself to saints. I don't care who you are, most of those people are downright not-quite-right in the head. I mean no disrespect, crazy people are pretty much the only people who get big things done (big goods things & big bad things).

For Hallowe'en, it seemed only right to end the month with a guy I had never heard of (although his miracle runs on a very popular theme), Wolfgang of Regensburg. C'mon, how can you resist a Hallowe'en saint named Wolfgang? The only thing that could be better would be Saint Vlad.

Wolfgang was a person, a child & then a man in the usual way. He was a scholar, an educator & the ultimately a bishop in his own part of the world (my guess would be greater Regensburg). Eventually he retired from his bishophood & went to live as a hermit (shocker!) & so on in so forth in that bishop to hermit to canonical candidate way. Despite being a hermit (seriously, I am beginning to think that word does not mean what I think it means), he had an active political life, did a bit of traveling & some light construction work (he built his solitary cell where G*d directed his axe to fall; seems an impractical method to me, but the axe remains a relic in the town of Ste. Wolfgang). He was known locally as a man of great goodness & after his death many churches adopted his name. All very standard stuff. But you know there had to be something to catch my eye (or more accurately my typing fingers) & that was the story of how Wolfgang of Regensburg beat the devil.

I think we are all fond of stories of beating the devil, even if you don't believe in the devil, even if you believe the devil is in all of us. We all like to beat him, in Moscow or even Georgia. When I was in school I remember loving the Stephen Vincent Benet story "The Devil & Daniel Webster", maybe in part because I spent a lot of my youth up in Daniel Webster country & have visited his birthplace on more than one occasion. I have just learned there is a movie that I somehow missed completely, but scenes still look familiar. I cannot tell if I saw it once & forgot or of all movies from that period look a little bit alike.

Either way, there is no movie about Wolfgang of Regensburg beating the devil (actually there probably is...in the tourist kiosk of the Town of Ste. Wolfgang, but whatever) which is a damn shame because Wolfgang beat the devil & got him (the devil) to build a church. The story itself, without further ado:

I could not find it. I looked & looked & looked & all I found was this painting which some sources say is actually Ste. Augustine being presented with a book of vices (how handy!). How Wolfgang came to meet the devil, no idea. What the devil offered him, not a clue. How Wolfgang roped the devil into doing good works, great big mystery.

& so I leave you with this, a man who pulled a Tom Sawyer on Satan himself. Then somehow got assigned October 31st as his feast day.

Little cedar tree

2011-10-30T11:04:00.012-04:00

Phew. So. Well. I guess I don't have to say "I am way behind" although "I'm sorry I am so behind" would not be out of line. The bad news about being behind is that the deadlines keep coming, washing over me & moving on. That is also the good news, because there is something liberating about admitting I'm going to be late.

Yesterday was the deadline for the Facebook Quilt Block Swap 10-2011 swap block. It was one of the deadlines that rolls on up whether I am ready for it or not. Not only was I not ready, I had not done most of the prep work either on-line or in my own house. Samples of the block were made eons ago; I put up three swaps worth at a time, which is six months worth of swaps & I do this at the end of the previous swap soooo pictures of this (& the next & the previous) swap block went on-line in June. Good thing, too because there is no way I could have cranked them out between the end of the last swap & in time to get them here today. I didn't even get the packages that have been arriving all in one place until this past Friday, which is BAD.

One missed deadline does not seem to have mattered so much. There was no last call for the block(s), but we got plenty anyhow. I have been calling this "one cut of the cut glass dish" because, well, it is one component of that more complex & much larger block. It is also a block in its own right, which I had planned on noting but....but...

Among other inconveniences of this whole remodel business was that we decided to put in the same new floor throughout the kitchen, dining room (which is effectively now part of the kitchen), the front room (which was the living room/tv room but has been sort of drifting in purpose since we made the old florida room a year-round part of the house & moved the tv etc. in there), & hallway (which is still a hallway, no real change there). This meant packing up the books in the front room (maybe we could start calling it the library, hmmmm) & that meant packing my Brackman & that meant I had no idea what this block on its own was called.

Well, the Brackman came back out early last week & now I know. It is called Little Cedar Tree & it is Brackman #1311a. .It is a charming little block really. & with five of it's fellows & three "blank" squares, makes one of my most favorites. Good thing, too because you would not believe the pile of envelopes waiting to be swapped!

Broken dishes from years ago

2011-10-28T00:02:00.054-04:00

I thought about sitting out this Blogger's Quilt Festival, mostly because we have been in the throws (& I do mean throws) of a kitchen remodel & I have nothing new & nothing I have not already blogged about &....&...

I was wrong. This month, over on the Block Lotto, I submitted three Broken Dishes blocks for the October Sampler Lotto. & then I went hunting through my blog for photos of the Broken Dishes quilt I made my step-father. It turns out I have no blog entry & no complete photos of it at all, YIKES!

This quilt hung in a Veteran's Day 2006 quilt show before it went on to it's final home. For reasons I am not clear on, it was hung upside down, so that instead of the label being in the lower right corner (& oriented correctly when folded up in the usual way of looking at quilt labels on hanging quilts), it was folded over itself. No other quilt in the show was hung this way (including another I made with a similar label right-side-up when you lift the corner type deal). Anyhow, it means the only picture I have does not show the whole quilt top.

Trust me though, it is the same all over, Broken Dishes alternating with Snowballs to make a woven sort-of criss-cross pattern. I used the same fabric for the center of the Snowballs, the corner squares of the outer border & the narrow inner border. All the others were scraps in shades of blue, light & dark meeting in the center.

This quilt was made especially for my step-father & happened to coincide with a quilt show honoring veterans, so I made a label with photos of him in the service & more recently fishing & a blurb of how he spent his time, specifically building quonset huts during the Korean War. I don't usually go in for such elaborate labels, but this was a special case.

Nowadays the quilt lives in my parent's den, over the back of the rocking chair he sits in every night to watch Pardon My Interruption, college basketball & what-have-you. I see it every time I visit & have never thought to take a better picture.

Adopt a Shelter Dog Month

2011-10-21T14:15:00.024-04:00

Yes, I get kind of tired of these faux-holiday months: eat a pig month, don't beat your wife month, take your rabbi to luinch month, & so forth. Hmmmm, that was a complete accident but maybe you should almost slap your spouse & then take the rabbi for a pork chop...? No, probably not.

Anyway.

All these months can get stoopid. What I think I like most about them is how stoopid they are. Until I am just fed up & then they aren't even stoopid-fun anymore. But the thing about these months is there is always one that means something to you, or in this case, me. I am only marginally interested in National Cyber Security Awareness or Downs Syndrome Awareness & maybe just a bit more interested in Breast Cancer Awareness or Lupus Erythematosus Awareness (not to be confused with general Lupus Awareness Month which is in May). But there is a big one for me: October is Adopt a Shelter Dog Month.

There are so many stories, so much alike & so uniquely heartbreaking about shelter animals that I am just not going to enter that now. Instead I am going to give you a taste of what a foundling dog can be, if someone just takes him home:

When I was a kid it was all about Benji, or Higgins actually becasue that was his name-at-home. Higgnins was indeed found at a shelter & once this was learned the American Humane Society reported a HUGE uptick in adoptions from shelters. The subsequent Benji was Higgins's son, who obviously did not come from an animal shelter; Higgins was so beloved by his owner that when the dog died he was cremated & then buried with him (the owner) when he (the owner) died.

Later it was Murray, or Maui a border collie mix also found at an animal shelter, around whom the life of two very busy NY professionals revolved just about the time we got our first dog, Megan-also-called-Piglet. Her shelter name was Denise & I wanted to name her Dodie & I still think she would have made a fine Dodie, but all the yuppies were naming their daughters Megan so Megan it was.

Most recently it is the dogs formerly know as Bad Newz. I confess I have not yet read the book about their rehabilitation, but as a person who lives with a pitbull I know that they are individuals just like every other breed & some want to patrol their territory & some would rather eat pizza on the couch.

Sooooo, it's Adopt a Shelter Dog Month. Chances are your shelter dog won't make you rich, or even pay his own way. Still, there are lots of wonderful dogs out there who have already been thru the horrible puppy stage & just want someone to rub their bellies.

The New & Improved Very Large Array

2011-10-18T17:14:00.016-04:00

You remember the hullabaloo (or maybe you don't) between The Colbert Nation & NASA. The gist is NASA had a contest to name....something. I think it might have been a room on the space station. Whatever it was, NASA had suggestions & the rest of us were supposed to choose fom among them. & then Stephen Colbert started campaigning that the room (I looked it up, it was a room) be named for him. & the rest is history. Or not, actually. Apparently NASA reserves the right to override any winning suggestions & may or may not have exercised it. I don't know. Google it your damn self. Alright, I did google it. NASA conceded & named a treadmill after Stephen Colbert instead.

Well, forget NASA, this time it is the NRAO renaming their Very Large Array. First let me say how much I already like NRAO's naming style over NASA's. Apparently the COLBERT treadmill is really the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance treadmill. This refusal to choose the voted on name because it doesn't fit their vision & then backwards engineering the choosen name so the letters first letters of the elobarota NASA-name spell it tells us all a little something about NASA. On the other hand we have the NRAO, who apparently took a look at a very large array & said "Let's call it the Very Large Array".

& the Very Large Array it remained, so-named in the movie Contact & right up through Terminator Salvation although they called it SkyNet. It was the backdrop for way-too-many music videos, documentaries, comic books & on & on.

The Very Large Array is located in New Mexico, more or less out on it's own. It is in a county with a population somewhat less than 20K people; 6 towns, villages & localities; 11 ghost towns & 49 listings on the National Register of Historic Places-10 of which have restricted addresses; in other words yes they are historic but the public cannot know exactly where they are. Before you start thinking Roswell (actually in another, non-adjacent county), I checked, they are all archeological digs & I know from talking with people in the biz there is quite a black market for artifacts from same. Or maybe that is just the cover story.

So there it is, the Very Large Array, getting all upgraded & shiny & new. & here is your chance to name it. Unlike NASA they are offering no suggestions, except that they just might keep the Very Large Array & add a prefix. As in The New & Improved Very Large Array.

Today, a dwarf

2011-10-17T08:42:00.071-04:00

I freely & unequivocally admit I choose today's saint because of his name. No, not the Juan part, the other part: Juan the Dwarf. I know if you follow the link you will find JOHN the dwarf, but you will also find painting after painting of white Jesus & you all just need to get over that.

Okay, is everyone forming a picture of a Latin Lord of the Rings thing? Yes? Good.

Juan was born to a poor family (surprise, surprise) in Egypt (Juan?). He had a famously short fuse (waka waka) & while his temper never really went away, with spirituality came humility (so not 21st century, right?) & he stopped getting quite so worked up about offenses, imagined & otherwise.

So we have a dwarf, who has left his parents hovel to live in an underground cave he dug himself. It just gets better & better doesn't it? Lived for a while as a hermit, offering himself as a disciple. For reasons known only to ancient villagers with ancient pitchforks (in this instance Berbers with swords), he was driven away, wandered a bit & then settled on Mount Qolzum, over in Anthony's neighborhood, to hang with the other hermits.

In the end, the most interesting story about Juan, in my view, is he was directed (by Saint Pambo, a most excellent name) to plant a piece of dry wood & then traveled uphill in both directions twice a day to water it for thirteen years until it sprouted. The reason I like this is that one of my favorite movies: Enchanted April. It has nothing to do with dwarves or saints or mountains or anything really, but a dead bit of wood that sprouts does come into it. & I guess there are some sort-of hermits living together.

Back to our man of the day; he is the patron of nothing, nada, zip. Not even dwarves.

Curried eggs

2011-10-16T12:46:00.004-04:00

It has been a while since I had a recipe & I don't know about you, but when it gets hot I have trouble eating anything meaty. Alright, I am not a big meat eater at the best of times (I had a cheeseburger a year ago October & by a year ago October I mean 2009), but the simple truth is I need protein just like everyone else. In the summertime, the best way to get it is with eggs. & yes, by the way, it is summertime here again in Fladidah. This week, it is hard-boiled curried eggs over leafy greens (because it turns out I realllly need more iron & spinach is my new best friend).

First hard-boil some eggs. However many you want. Six eggs would last me a week; A could eat that in one sitting. Lets say six: hard-boil six eggs. Then drain them & take make them easier to peel, drop them gently into cold, cold water. Set aside for a minute...or an hour.

When you are ready, return to the eggs & peel them. I roll them around for a bit until the shell cracks & then try to peel it in one piece like an apple. No, I have never been successful, but it is good to give yourself these little challenges, don't you think? Cut them & remove the yolks. Set aside the whites, keeping them as intact as you can, but don't make yourself crazy, this is not deviled eggs after all. Mash the yolks with a fork.

In a small bowl -a really small bowl, I use a teacup- combine 1tsp cardamon, 1 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp red pepper. 1/2 tsp turmeric. Generally these are already ground but if not, grind them now. Grind them together, even.

Finely mince one or two or three cloves of garlic. Three is probably too many, so if you really like garlic, use two. If you buy minced garlic in a jar, try to scoop as much liquid as actual garlic & go for a teaspoon or so total.

Take your smallest pan, ideally a pan with some sides to it (i.e. a crepe pan would not cut it) & put in as little of a light oil as you need to coat the bottom. Any light oil will do. The idea is not to cook anything in oil but to make the temperature more or less even throughout the pan. If you have a gas stove & snazzy cookware, you might be able to get away without the oil. If you are feeling adventurous, or it is the morning after bookclub, you could try a bit of red wine, just covering the bottom of your pan.

Heat the oil, add the spices. Stir. & stir. Do not stop stirring. Add the garlic & stir some more. The spices may smoke a bit, just keep stirring & use your nose. When they "release" add the mashed egg yolks & stir, stir stir for as long again as you stirred before adding the eggs. It is almost impossible to under-cook them, but the longer they heat up together, the more flavor the eggs will take.

Never stop stirring, never ever ever.

When they are done remove from heat, remove from pan (or they will keep cooking, even if the pan is not on the stove) & set aside. Slice the whites into smaller-than-bite sized pieces. I like to put them in a bowl, whites on one side, yolks on the other & spoon it over my salad instead of dressing. Other people scoop them up on pieces of bread or mix it in with rice.

& for those of you who like a media tie-in, I give you Cool Hand Luke. I bet he couldn't have eaten those eggs curried...maybe he could.

Talk about talk

2011-10-13T11:05:00.003-04:00

Today in 1881 an ancient language was reborn. Wait, let me back up. Did you know languages are like sharks? No really, they are. Keep moving or die. & languages happen in more ways than you might think: American Sign Language began as a way for a hearing teacher to reach a deaf student. Noam Chomsky would say this conversation starved girl was just the right age for her language switch to be flipped on & the language exploded. & then there is Klingon; they needed a few syllables to match up to subtitles for a television show. A few cult member later, a movie is made & the producers decide to hire a linguist to reverse engineer into the existing noises & grow something from there. The rest is linguistic history; last year Shakespeare was performed in Klingon & the Book of Mormon was translated. I am not suggesting there is a huge market, but how many people have to speak a language for it to be a language?

Which brings us to today's phoenix. In 1880 there was no such thing as conversational Hebrew. Yiddish, yes, but outside of ceremonial uses, there was no Hebrew. So, if no one uses it in every day living, is it still a language? Eliezer Ben-Yehuda said yes. & then to hedge his bet, he began speaking it. Alright, he probably began speaking it because it mattered to him that this language come back into common usage; gambling had nothing to do with it.

Ben-Yehuda made major changes in his & his family's life to bring back this language,. His son was barely exposed to any other language as a child & is credited with being the first native speaker of Hebrew in a thousand years. Today, it is the official language Israel & regardless of how you feel about whether Israel should exist there is no doubt it is the home to almost 8 million people, more than 60% of whom identify Hebrew as their primary language.

So Happy Rebirth Birthday, Hebrew Language. Alas all I can say in conversational Hebrew is "I have a song that irritates people" over & over & over again. Feel free to blame the counselors at Camp Ramah circa 1981. Wow, exactly 100 years after the whole thing began again!

In a related story, Michael Chabon came to write one of my favorite books (actually he wrote several of my favorites books, but I am only referring to one of them here) because he got to wondering about Yiddish & how it is a dying language, only to learn that it isn't but by then he had started down a whole alternative history concept in which instead of the Middle East the Jewish homeland is settled in Alaska. & all of this was before he rest of the country ever heard of Sarah Palin. I am talking of course about The Yiddish Policeman's Union. Do yourself a favor, get the audio version read by Peter Riegert. It is a jewel. & now I see the book has been optioned for a movie by the Coen Brothers...I can hardly wait.

Back to the birth of Hebrew....& ASL & Klingon & Esperanto & so on. While waiting for that movie that now I really must see, also get a copy of In the Land of Invented Languages. The people of language are some of the most interesting people to read about.

Pelagia AKA Margarito

2011-10-08T09:51:00.104-04:00

I backed into Saint Pelagia, not in a parking lot or anything but through the Boris Akunin series about Sister Pelagia (which I backed into because of my deep & abiding love for all things Erast Fandorin, also a Boris Akunin character).

There are a few different Saint Pelagias, conveniently celebrated on the same days (today or later this month, depending on which calendar you go with, but all together on whichever day): a virgin who jumped from the roof of her house rather than be raped by soldiers, another who drove one man to suicide & his father to burn her alive for refusing to marry either of them, & a nun who saw a vision of Mary that told her where to find buried treasure, but today we are taking a look at Pelagia also known as Margarito the Courtesan.

Our Pelagia lived in Antioch (as did the roof-jumper, who is known as Pelagia of Antioch) & had quite a following as a dancer & professional mistress. She was known for her outrageous costumes & public spectacles (think Lady Gaga) & was out one day with her entourage when she happened to hear Saint Nonnus preaching in the street. In an unusual twist, as far as I can tell part of what got Nonnus the saint gig was baptising Pelagia & then getting her to renouncing her sinful ways. Pelagia was a very big fish (imagine Lady Gaga; now imagine her joining Westboro Baptist Church). She had a very public, very well compensated life of sin. She was a walking-talking repudiation of be good & good things will happen to you, be bad & you get my point. This was most excellent PR for the christians.

But Pelagia does not stop being interesting. She was casting off her worldy goods & worldly life & really wanted to get to Jerusalem & live as penitent without attracting undo attention. So she went disguised. As a man. No where else have I come across a saint who went cross-dressing to redemption. I am just going to beat this Lady Gaga thing like a rented mule.

Pelagia spent three years disguised as a man, shut away in a monk's cell. When she was found dead, she was buried without above ordinary ceremony. I wonder what they thought of the babe in monk's clothing but maybe everyone secretly knew. Also things were hopping in the Holy Land right about then. In more scandalous death-news, the wife of the emperor also died- yes they die all the time but this particular wife had been banished to Jerusalem because of her adultery. There were also a lot of religious schisms, the results of which are still seen today, hence Pelagia being a widely recognized saint in some churches & not so much in others.

That's it for our Pelagia really. The second go-round of the hooker with a heart of gold story. For another story about another Pelagia (no more holy than our saint & no less interesting, frankly) let me recommend Sister Pelagia & the White Bulldog. It has everything: religious schisms, sexual intrigues & behind the scenes look at champion dog breeding in Tsarist Russia. Also, the sister wields a deadly knitting needle, what's not to love?

In which the best thing we have becomes more like MadLibs

2011-09-30T12:22:00.105-04:00

I'm not sure what happened to me at the outset of book banning week but here is the post I researched, made notes on & actually started writing:

What with Banned Books Week right around the corner (or upon us & rolling away as the case may be), I thought I would take a look at a newly-not censored book: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as newly translated (it sounds better than bowdlerized, also no one knows what that word means anymore) by Alan Bribben.

The short version is Mr. Bribben (Professor Bribben?) went through & replaced the word "nigger" with the word "slave". I understand the word "injun" was also removed, but I don't know what replaced it. The word "slave" could work there too, I guess. Unlike a lot of people, I actually have a more than passing familiarity with Mr. Twain's original work. I adore it & I don't mean that in the knee-jerk literature major way. To give you some perspective, I refer to Moby Dick as the G*d damned fish book & while I have been trying for almost 30 years & I still cannot think of anything more overrated. Also, The Great Gatsby is puerile crap. I do not love literature lightly or because someone told me I should.

& I actually think the word nigger is worth hanging on to, in Huck Finn & in general (yes even in rap music). Nigger means something. It isn't pretty, it isn't flattering but why oh why are we so anxious to paint over a word with history (an ugly history but no less real). Why isn't someone waging a war on "nice" or "like", which as far as I can tell are placeholders for "I don't really remember that person/place/thing" & "uhmmm" respectively?

I do not understand why the choice is Huck Finn without nigger or no Huck Finn at all. I don't understand why we have room for Harlequin romances & holocaust deniers & The Surrendered Wife & Beatrix Potter rip-off board books & all kinds of copy-cat rehashed consumer driven word-putty, but nigger is two syllables too far.

I did not think for one moment Huck Finn could be improved by replacing nigger with slave but what the hell. Here is one of the more or less nigger-rich passages:

They asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running -- was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I:

"Goodness sakes! would a runaway nigger run south?"

No, they allowed he wouldn't. I had to account for things some way, so I says:

"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he 'lowed he'd break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim..."

But why slave? If we are going to rewrite history, Jim should be a ...patriot! & let's face it, who calls their father Pa? & those $16 really should be adjusted for inflation. Because that's where this goes, it doesn't stop with one bad word, there is always tomorrow's bad word & "let's update the language to help the kids through" & so forth.

They asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running -- was Jim a runaway patriot? Says I:

"Goodness sakes! would a runaway patriot run south?"

hmmm. Let's keep going.

No, they allowed he wouldn't. I had to account for things some way, so I says:

"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and daddy and my brother Ike. Daddy, he 'lowed he'd break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Daddy was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing left but sixteen hundred dollars and our patriot, Jim...

Interesting, but "Ike" calls up images of Ike Turner, so unflattering to black people & "Uncle Ben", well I don't think I need to explain that one. According to the baby name trends site I found, boy's names that were popular when Ike was popular are: Dock, General , Gustave, Enoch, etc. So I'll just randomly grab another name from that era. As for Uncle Ben, well there are other forms of the name Benjamin we can fall back on. So, let's try this:

"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and daddy and my brother Otho. Daddy, he 'lowed he'd break up and go down and live with Uncle Bentley, who's got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Daddy was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he'd squared up there warn't nothing left but sixteen hundred dollars and our patriot, Jim..."

I think there is a future for the Madlibs version of The Great Works of American Literature, because that is what we are screwing with here. Ernest Hemingway said "All American writing come from that (Huck Finn)". Are we so sure whitewashing is always the best way to keep something clean?

World Tourism Day

2011-09-27T19:04:00.018-04:00

I am not the world's best world traveler. In fact, I kind of hate it. I share this with Richard Nixon who famously preferred Hilton Hotels because all the rooms were the same. At least I think it was Hiltons. Maybe it was Sheratons. Maybe it wasn't quite so famously.

Anyhow, I am not much for leaving home even on trips I want to take which makes this year's World Tourism Day a natural good fit for me because this year's theme is Linking Cultures & this year's host is Egypt. In light of Egypt's inability to link within it's own culture well, what can I say, I laughed.

I laughed again when I went to the World Tourism Day Official Celebrations page & learned that "The official World Tourism Day celebrations will take place in Aswan, Egypt/Details coming soon". Given that today is World Tourism Day & it is no longer today in Egypt, I don't think those details are going to come soon enough.

Nowadys, I live in a tourist destination myself. In a broad sense, Fladidah being the Once-Upon-A-Time go to locale for snow-blind refugees & that was before the Temple of the Mouse was built just to the south east of here & then right-right here we get educational tourists who come for the university, college sports tourists who come for the football & stay for the basketball, as well as the healthcare tourists (one of the largest research hospitals in the country is right here as well as a distinct regional hospital that serves the surrounding counties).

Besides the actual sunblock on the nose wearing (or more likely chemo cap wearing) tourists, on any given day, ten or more of the people I deal with are unlikely to be here in another two years. This can be good & bad. It is hard to convince a local who will not be local in five years to commit to a five year budget that involves sacrifice or investment. In some ways they show up & expect things to just be here.

On the other hand, there are things here (that their predecessors have helped pay for) that are way-way better then anything they have back home & I don't mean the reason they came. Our local library has won national awards. Life downtown, even in the smaller surrounding towns, is alive & well thanks in part to a population that would rather bicycle or walk than drive. Live music, theatre, dance are all alive & well supported by the people who live here & the people who are stuck here & need something to do.

I don't think I could take living in a resort community. Mouse-Mecca is one of the most crime ridden cites in the country & even Horse-Town, the county seat of the county just to the south, makes the Top 100 most dangerous cities in the US list (interesting tid-bit: there are 50 states & 100 cities on this list & 18 of those cities are here in Fladidah, mostly centered around-you guessed it- tourist hot spots).

So Happy World Tourism Day. Stay home, even the host wants you to.

Martin Van Buren-the encore

2011-09-25T07:59:00.000-04:00

WOW. I just reread that last post & what can I say, we are repainting ALL the public (not bedroom, not bathroom) parts of the house & apparently the fumes are taking their toll. I did a report on Martin Van Buren at Laurel School & have been repressing ever since..? I want you to know the draft of the book banning week post was about Huck Finn. I don't know what happened.

Taking a break from book burning

2011-09-24T09:29:00.297-04:00

It's that time of year again, Book Banning Remembrance Week. Yea, yea books were challenged. Some were banned, some were restored. It was a same old, same old year book-banning-wise.

So I thought why not take a look at what was not banned. Yes, that is a lot of books but there are national groups (freedom of speech groups, the world is a funny place) that assist local groups with their book banning challenges. They also recommend books these local groups might want to challenge. I thought it might be fun to take a look at their recommended reading lists. It's convoluted, I know; let me try to sum this up: what books do book banning backers believe are books you better buy?

It took me almost no time to discover the 9/12 Project. They are very upfront about books they don't like, & aren't skittish about being named in the complaints. I am told they have a very helpful & easy to navigate website, but every jump off the main page requires signing up & I have no desire to be on their e-mail list. It took me years to get the fruit basket of the month people to stop sending me messages; G*d only knows what these e-mails might bring me & for how long (does anyone seriously buy those $200 stacking tins of rare nuts?).

Right there on the front page, the 9/12 Project has a disclaimer where they make sure to repeat at length how they are "not owned by, operated by, or in any way affiliated with the Glenn Beck Program, Glenn Beck, Mercury Radio Arts, or any radio station, Cable TV Network, etc". This parallels nicely with their Read These First list of ten books, four of which are authored or co-authored by Glenn Beck. While not automatically ban-worthy, I wonder about the credibility of any organization that says that these books tell you how to think & we are in no way affiliated with the guy who wrote of more than a third of them any longer. Imagine if Greenpeace said we would like you to ban all books that discuss how valuable whaling is & read instead these books coincidentally written by one of our founders who has since gone his own way.

From what I could see, most of the books the 9/12 Project object to have a strong sexual component. I gather this from the titles, such as Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology a book they helped get banned from a library in New Jersey, although others they targeted were not "deviant" (their word) just plain old How-To primers. The locals did not quite get into the spirit of banning though. Only Revolutionary Voices was actually removed from the shelves & in response to that the group Revolutionary Readings was begun. What used to sit between the covers of a book someone had to actively seek, open, etc. was now being performed/read aloud over&over&over again, with newspaper coverage & television coverage & a facebook page & twitter feed & so forth. I am guessing that did not go quite as planned.

The books the 9/12 Project endorse have an entirely different theme (not a sex manual in the bunch, at least not that I could tell by their covers). Aside from the four by Glenn Beck &/or Glenn Beck et al there were two co-written by two gentlemen named Stewart. Both books have the word "miracle" in the title & one of them is more specific: The Seven Miracles that Saved America. I made a swift & incomplete search for a list of these miracles & if I had been willing to sign up on one or another website, I am sure they would have been at my fingertips, but again I am skittish (those fruit basket of the month people have really made me gunshy). Also, I am suspicious of the word miracle, because it always turns out to be interpretive. For example, I don't actually think looking out on a familiar vista & seeing a guy hanging in mid-air with life threatening gory wounds is a miracle; I think that is really really bad food poisoning. Just to make sure christians don't feel singled out, I don't think all that much of lamp oil that burns way past the laws of physics following the pillage of a people; wouldn't the miracle have been to prevent the massacre? I am really not interested in reading about the miracle of the Reagan tax cuts or whatever. I read the introduction (it was free on Amazon) & it did belittle certain celebrities as not being qualified to discuss the mater they were discussing. Any list that includes Glenn Beck & belittles others for not being educated on their topic amuses me, but probably not for a whole book.

Two others are histories, secret & otherwise. One of them seems (from the title anyhow) to be devoted to George Washington: The Real George Washington. That might be interesting, I like warts&all biographies. I am not convinced he was the one & only individual that could have lead us out of the dark night of the British Empire as the blurb implies (Amazon again), but I am also fairly certain that even without Neil Armstrong there still would have been a moon landing & I don't think this view diminishes Neil Armstrong one bit.

According to a cookbook I have, George was quite fond of beefsteak & kidney pie which sounds unamerican from here, but it was probably just what he was used to, being born in a British colony & all. The Must Read List does not include any biographies of Martin Van Buren, the first president actually born in the US of A (what with all previous presidents being born in the colonies that would become & so forth). This is a shame really because I think I could argue that Martin was more American than his predecessors & not just because of his resident versus naturalized alien birth status. He ditched the powdered wig for good (so had Jackson before him but let's face it, Jackson was a madman & maybe we shouldn't get too cozy with anything he did & well, yes the Adamses did too...Okay forget that part about the wig). He did lots of other American things & by American I mean not attempting to emulate Britain. After being voted out of office, Martin ran again, on a slavery-opposition ticket. Everyone goes bat-shit for Lincoln but no one remembers this about old MVB.

Two months into Van Buren's first & only term, the US entered its first great depression (I know, they start to pile up) & most of his time was spent dealing with that. Jackson had left behind some rather conflicted policies, including but not limited to the decision to require all purchasers of federal land to pay with precious metals. In other words the US government would not accept US currency. In retrospect, it is easy to see how this might go badly. What can I say, I would rather read about Martin Van Buren than George Washington; I think he is more relevant in the way that paying the electric bill is more relevant than knowing the guy who invented the latest lighting technology. Sure, the later might be more fun at parties, but not if we all have to stand around in the dark.

For whatever reason, I cannot see that 9/12 Project endorses any Martin Van Buren biographies, but they also don't appear to oppose them either. This might change though if they learned he opposed the annexation of Texas (it might be a good idea for some future date, but it just wasn't a good idea right then), he declined to go to war with the British even when Canadian loyalists killed a US citizen for illegally selling weapons to Canadian separatists. In fact, Martin went so far as to say that the government "would not countenance Adventuresome Americans attacking the British" & stated that the US would remain neutral in this dispute on the northern border. Later disputes were resolved diplomatically.

In happier news, the only biography of the man I could find is actually Martin Van Buren's autobiography. & for reasons I can only speculate on, his wife is nowhere in that book, so there hopefully isn't any sex to object to anyhow. I can tell you according to the aforementioned cookbook, he was widely criticized for his love of French cuisine.

Going going gone to the dogs

2011-09-22T16:07:00.036-04:00

I should have caught this earlier, but alas I have been wrestling the kitchen demons. So, way late & not one iota less for it: September is National Guide Dog Month.

A long, Long, LONG time ago, I worked oh-so-briefly for a company with offices on the green in Morristown, NJ. Morristown, NJ for those who do not know, is the home of The Seeing Eye, where the whole seeing eye dog moniker originated. Funnily enough, I still hear people calling all kinds of service dogs seeing eye dogs, even the dogs helping people who can see just fine.

Anyhow, every day, rain or shine, the dogs in training would do convoluted laps around the green, encountering people, crosswalks, hotdog wagon, etc. the green was a hopping place in those days & may still be, I have not set foot in Morristown since April 1994.

On an entirely (OKay not really) I have been following a story that is happening locally, in the great football mecca just east of me. First you should know that there is a better-treated-than-average homeless population in that city. I think liberal politics, moderate climate & high population turn-over what with the average citizen graduating in five short years (URP!). A large homeless shelter & soup kitchen has finally gotten their dream legislation, specifically there is no longer a cap on how many meals they can serve in a day but instead a beginning & end to the hours they can serve. This really is a good thing, even for people who think the homeless should be beat to death in the street (a favorite local pastime in that great cartoon mouse mecca to the south). Instead of people always asking if there are any left, the giant clock on Century Tower will tell you whether or not you should hang around.

For a few years now, adjacent to the people facility, there has been a pet clinic. & before you get in a twist about homeless people having pets, it turns out to have been a good idea. It turns out a person who has no home, no family except a transitory, cobbled community, a person who has intermittent access to the prescriptions etc. that keep them from believing someone is out to get them, such a person is more likely to remain peaceful if they can share their lives with someone who does not care that they are homeless. It turns out that someone is often a pet.

Not surprisingly, it also turns out to be better for the rest of us if those pets gets neutered/spayed, vaccinated, flea & tic treatment & general veterinary care. & while they don't have the paperwork or the training to prove it, after watching homeless people & their pets, it is impossible not to see that each companion is a bona fide service animal.

Late with the cut glass dish block

2011-09-21T08:33:00.013-04:00

I am running late. I mean really super-bad late. I should have put the Cut Glass Dish Block info up weeks ago & I do mean WEEKS. My excuse is I had no kitchen; even as I type this I still have not counters or table, so no surfaces. Life without surfaces is challenging. If I cannot hold it in my hand, whatever IT is, I cannot deal with it. Multitasking is just not possible.

Ah well, it will get better. Also barring a few small jobs (putting in lights!), work stops for the next ten days or so, which means I can at least go to the bathroom without someone (dog, contractor) looking for me.

Which brings me FINALLY to the October 2011 swap block. It is one component of the Cut Glass Dish block. We will be making (are making, have made, yes some have already arrived) the 4 square of 1/2-square triangles.

The completed Cut Glass Dish block would take six of these, a perfect number for our swap as you send five blocks, get five back & if you keep one block for yourself that means each swap set has all the 4 square 1/2-square triangle blocks you would need.

You would also need three solid blocks (not solid fabric, necessarily, just not pieced) for each complete Cu Glass Dish block & yes, we are casual-swapping those. Some people asked & I could not see a reason not to. If you would like, you can send five (5) 6.5" squares of any fabric you used in any of your blocks. Or something completely different so long as it meets the block requirements (either o novelty OR bright print OR reads-as-solid) & you will get five (5) back. This will leave you with two more than you need but we are quilters; I am confident you can find something to do with any extra.

The directions for making the block we are swapping are detailed here, the size is 6.5" unfinished/6" finished, the blocks are DUE the last Saturday in October which means you should mail them first class within the US no later than the Friday before the Saturday before the due date.

Kitchen is the heart of the house

2011-09-20T07:13:00.001-04:00

What would Freddy do?

2011-09-15T09:34:00.005-04:00

I have been rereading that manifesto where the pigs walk upright, dress like people & generally consider themselves smarter than the rest of the farm animals & by&large the rest of the farm animals accept it. No, not that manifesto; I mean the Freddy books.

Freddy the pig is in two book before he really emerges as a force of his own. In the third farm book by Walter Brooks, Freddy starts solving mysteries around the farm after reading & assimilating the techniques of Sherlock Holmes. Freddy is such a force the publisher turns around & releases the first two books (which were farm animals adventures generally) & re-releases them under the titles Freddy Goes to Florida & Freddy Goes to the North Pole.

In the first book, the farm animals are unhappy with the state of the farm & generally feel put upon by the farmer. At the outset of one cold winter, they decide to strike out for Florida & have adventures there & back again: robbers, kidnappers (farm animals nappers?), & US Senators. In the spring, the animals return to the farm, renegotiate their contracts with the farmer. Everyone makes a few concessions & then all settle back down to a quiet life.

In the second book, some of the animals are getting itchy feet & they are ready to go a-wandering again. Some smaller trips are organized (& they incorporate), but it isn't long before Freddy realizes that through judicious management, those animals that want to can be away for a longer journey & a trip to see Santa is planned. The bulk of the book, though is not about this trip but about the rescue mission when the trip goes awry. I think the descriptions of what they find at Santa's workshops are my favorite. A ship of well intentioned but unqualified whalers (yes, people who hunt whales) have taken over the toy-making operation. As a result, all the toys are the same as all other toys of their kind, all dolls have one pony tail, not some with braids & some with bangs & so forth, so that an assembly line can be used. Santa's labor force, which consisted primarily of people who were too sick or too old to work conventional jobs are now being forced to work the long o ours they couldn't before. These & other decisions, as well as the new board always losing the daily snow ball fight to exactly the same military maneuver make it clear: these men are just not cut out for this life. In fact, they are going to run a small but very successful old family operation into the ground with their greed.

Well, I don't want to give too much away, but I can tell you the cows learn to ski & the cat may or may not have taken up trapeze work (he lies, so it can be hard to be sure). & Freddy the pig does start wearing clothes, eating at a table, sleeping in a bed, etc. but does not...well I don't want to ruin anything. It turns out you can embrace some changes & still maintain your principles.

& just in case anyone gets the idea Brooks was trying to water down/wash away the impact of Animal Farm, the first book in the series was published almost 20 years earlier. Do yourself a favor & read the first two Freddy books instead. Your local library probably has several copies.

Why you don't want me anywhere near your wedding

2011-09-06T11:23:00.008-04:00

A friend of mine was recently in a wedding. She was The Maid of Honor & it was marginally less fun than anyone would have predicted. Let me give you the highlights:

The Bride wanted to have a destination shower. I had never heard of this, but I gather from the trailer of Bridesmaids that it is a thing. Her location of choice was rather pricey being some distance away & in a generally more expensive part of the country. What it wasn't was someplace any rational person would want to go. Her reasons for choosing it had to do with the entertainer who would be there the week-end that had been set aside for the shower. This same entertainer is actually from the state where the wedding was later held, the home state of The Bride, The Maid of Honor & many others of the bridal party. He does shows less than 100 miles from the blessed event frequently, just not on demand.

Ultimately it was a destination (to a different, more convenient, but no less inexplicable locale) shower & it unfortunately coincided with the very day The Maid of Honor lost her job. This was, of course, not The Bride's fault; it wasn't even The Maid of Honor's fault, as her employer had been circling the bowl for a while. The Bride gave The Maid of Honor a stirring & uplifting speech about how she better not be a bummer on this oh-so-important of weekends, second only to the importance of the blessed event itself, just because she didn't have a job. Also, she had better not try to play it cheap.

& finally: at the time of the initial wedding planning The Maid of Honor was dating a guy, lets call him The Snake. Introductions of The Snake to the happy couple were made, as it was expected The Snake would be the The Maid of Honor's date to the wedding. After The Maid of Honor & The Snake broke up & he started openly dating the reason for the break-up, The Bride invited him & his "new" girlfriend to the wedding as guests despite no other previous contact except through The Maid of Honor. Then the Bride began nagging The Maid of Honor to get another date.

Which brings us to today's story. The Maid of Honor had a few drinks at my dining room table & we started brainstorming about who she could bring to this wedding. Previous suggestions included a friend who offered to appear costumed as a butch lesbian, but I knew we could do better. By the end of the evening on the date-table were:

A stripper...to give the groom a lapdance right after the ceremony. She should also be encouraged to make as much extra cash as possible performing private dances for guests & wedding party alike throughout the reception.
A drag queen-they are surprisingly pricey
A mime-they are surprisingly cheap, OKay maybe not "surprisingly" but still a most excellent bargain

By the end of the week we had expanded to include:

An Elvis impersonator-not as easy to find as you might think, outside of their native Vegas anyhow
An accordion player-hey, I like accordion music better than the next person. I even still have Gérard Blanchard on vinyl (dude!), but lets face it not everyone wants to hear accordion music with their dried-out chicken entree.
A clown-which I ended up expanding to include a bride clown & groom clown & their entire wedding party all crammed into a clown car. This made no difference, as the only clowns we could find were strictly of the birthday party/balloon animal variety & if we were going to spend that kind of cash we would definitely go with a stripper.

A few weeks later, it was suggested she order a pizza during the ceremony & ask the delivery guy to stay for the reception. When it was pointed out that the delivery guy probably could not stay, we thought maybe we could get someone to pose as a pizza delivery guy. In the end, there was a kinda-sorta actual offer to pose as a pizza delivery driver but it would have required interstate travel at rather too short notice to board his dog.

The day before the wedding, I texted the suggestion that she dial 911 during the ceremony & ask the firemen to stay. Somehow, I doubt she did.

//nothing to do with this wedding exactly, but I have spent way too much time with brides & I think I might have an idea how bridezillas happen: in order to get a bride to pay exorbitant amounts of money for food she will not eat, a dress she will not wear again, etc. wedding vendors spend a lot of time blowing smoke up the bride's ass. As a general rule, it is never a good idea to take fashion advice from the person who makes a commission off of what you spend on your wardrobe; as a bridal rule it is probably just about as stoopid to take lifestyle advice from people who make money the more extravagant your lifestyle is. I'm just saying.

& about accordion players. I actually briefly dated one in high school, although in those days he was a mere clarinet player. He is a very nice guy & if he lived locally he would absolutely not have attended this wedding with his accordion because he is so nice he would never force accordion music on anyone no matter how egregious their sins. You can see why we didn't last long as a couple.

Lastly, I might be wrong about why The Maid of Honor & The Snake broke up. It is possible this is the reason, it is even possible she told me the reason & this was or was not it & I just don't remember. For the purposes of this blog post, however, The Snake was a semi-discreet man-whore who got caught.

Beige-quest twenty eleven

2011-09-03T10:34:00.002-04:00

I know you are all just sick of hearing about my kitchen remodel. I know this because I am almost, but not quite, sick of talking about it.

We are at the stage of choosing paint for the kitchen dining room space. This is easy because A pretty much only likes cream. This is hard because there are A LOT of creams out there. We went thru this same rigamarole when we painted the family room/tv room/sunroom/whatever you want to call that room at the back of the house. Three times I had to go back for more paint cards; none of them were quite creamy-beige-white enough. Since these rooms connect in large open doorway I had thought we would just paint the kitchen&diningroom the same color but alas either they have discontinued that color or I wrote it down wrong.

& so this weekend is Beige Quest: The Next Generation. Compounded of course by the reality that the room we are painting gets way-less light than the room AKA The Sunroom. Or maybe not compounded, maybe the dramatic change in the light will smooth any weird transition in the doorway. As for the rest of the space, it will pretty much be covered by cabinets & tile.

In the garden

2011-09-01T15:33:00.008-04:00

You know how you lose time in a garden? Well, today's saint, the patron of gardeners, has some feast-day time-loss. Fiacre is lauded August 18th, except in Ireland where his day is September 1. Maybe it isn't losing track of time in a garden, maybe it is losing track of time in Ireland. Nope, another source lists the Feast Day of Saint Fiacre as August 30. If it were the 31st I would say well they just got confused with that whole feasts begin at sunset thing, but August has 31 days....right?

One of the things I like best about the saints, all of the saints, is the chaining that happens when it comes to patronage. We start with Fiacre (& we will get back to him, I promise) & then we go to Paris where we have a hotel named for him, which is conveniently located for temporary hired transport (today we would say a cab, the French word for which is still fiacre or fiaker) to gather & so he becomes the patron of cabs & cabdrivers. What do cabbies suffer from? Why hemorrhoids of course. Guess who is invoked when you have them! I am anxiously awaiting the next link in this chain. I am banking on Fiacre becoming the patron of sheetrockers & drywallers. Little window into my post-adolescence: I was never so admonished not to play with fire as I was to never ever under any circumstances ever sit in sheetrock or drywall directly. I will let you all figure out why.

Like the cabs that were once named for him, you see Fiacre in the background more often than you might think. His most frequent role is pretending to be Francis of Assisi. I have lost track of how many little garden chachkahs I have seen labeled Francis of Assisi that are really Fiacre. Let me help you out here: if there are no animals but instead Saint Francis is holding a bucket & spade...he is really Saint Fiacre.

Back to the man: Fiacre was, well, difficult. I know, I know a medieval misogynist who would be considered hard to get along with by today's standards: what a shock! But Fiacre was hard to get along with by his day's standards. His first miracle involved clearing land by dragging a shovel across it (the bishop said he could have whatever land he could establish for farming in one day). A local woman claimed Fiacre was a sorcerer but the bishop decided he was favored by the lord & so continues his relations with the local women until he eventually banished all women from his monastery. I cannot help but notice how much his area of expertise (herbalism) might overlap with women's work & that might be the root of the problem right there. It is certainly the beginning of his patronages. Fiacre was first patron saint of herbalists; growers of food, general gardeners & florists came later, probably around the same time as potters While never the patron of healERS, Fiacre is often prayed to for healING (that herbalism thing again). He is also invoked against venereal diseases (a happy marriage of healing & misongeny), sterility/barrenness (ditto), & as I mentioned earlier hemorrhoids (whatever). He oversees the occupations above (cabbie, gardener) as well as boxmakers & needlemakers, two professions I had never thought much about but are thriving even today. I guess that is another humming-along-in-the-background quality of old Fiacre himself.

Raining & pouring

2011-08-31T23:15:00.023-04:00

The kitchen contents are packed, the kitchen is a giant hole in the middle of the house, I don't have time to be in my sewing room never mind the space to move in. What more could I possibly want? Oh right, unrelated internet problems CHECK, a recurrence of a thought-we-solved-that plumbing issue CHECK, a delay in the kitchen sink (because- get this- the company that makes them didn't know they made them & the company that placed the order placed the order wrong; I know right?) CHECK. & then some good news: I won the Block Lotto! Again!

I loved this block from the moment I saw it. I even loved the different sizes. I envy the Block Lotto-er who was able to make the quilt using a variety of sizes so quickly (you just know her kitchen is not in boxes in her sewing room).

I wanted this block (so greedy after winning last month as well) so bad that I promised the Block Lotto gods I will donate the rest of my chances for the rest of the year. & I plan to. But I never said how many I would make... On the other hand if I am going to renegotiate with the universe AFTER I have gotten what I wanted maybe I deserve my kitchen sink to go AWOL.

Caveat Emptor

2011-08-19T09:49:00.018-04:00

It is back-to-school time here in the Land of Flowers. On Thursday, campus was a mob scene, I am told. I missed it because I was chasing a cow across my neighborhood. Yes, I am fully aware that if a student gave this as an excuse for missing an exam A would probably not believe her. On the other hand, pretty much whatever your cockamamie excuse, you can get on the list for the make-up at the end of the semester which is convenient for no one (being slam before finals when, if you are taking any other classes you probably have other stuff to do), so you would be crazy to miss an exam for no-good-reason & burden yourself with the make-up, but whatever.

What was I saying? Oh, right, Let The Buyer Beware. Over at Poodle (and dog) a discussion has sprung up around a class action lawsuit wherein the students of a law school are suing the school for misrepresenting employment numbers for previous graduates. Let me break it down: the kids say the school told them they would probably get jobs after graduation because X previous students have gotten jobs & it turns out X is not a real number. I mean an truthful number; X is of course a real number in that it is a number of quantity in a continuum blah-de-blah-blah. The students are not alleging that X is the square root of a negative number, but that the school more or less made X up to make their degrees appear more desirable to the individual about to go in debt to the tune of tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars. Got that? Good.

So the discussion begins & there are a few different perspectives. J** expressed it as an irony (I could be wrong, but I think it is actually satire because of the whole opposite-juxtaposition thing, but I might be wrong & also she is a nice person so I didn't go there on her blog but somehow felt compelled to mention it here. Yes, I'm a bitch). Next up was a recently graduated student who was not jazzed about the "There are too many bottom-feeders already & I do not mean catfish" tone. J** was very polite to her (I think a "her", I could be wrong, what do I know); more polite than I would have been. Suffice to say she did not respond with "Oh Kitten, if you cannot take the heat from a blog about family pets maybe you should get out of the courtroom". The follow-up has been less sympathetic. One person (not me) pointed out there has been a well-documented glut of lawyers so how could a person applying to law schools not realize this would be a factor, regardless of where they went? I don't know the source but my own research (commercials on tv mostly) would indicate there do seem to be a lot of lawyers out there, but they also seem to have healthy advertising budgets so business is.....good?

I told you that story to tell you this one. A used to (& will again, no doubt) teach a large seminar class taken primarily by future engineers. There were a lot of them (there still are) & they were a mixed bag in the way all large groups are. Among those in the bag were the handful who materialized at the end of every semester having blown off homework, labs, flunked exams etc. wanting to negotiate their grade. By & large they were not so successful; with such a big group of students, the guidelines for how grades are handed out are largely determined by the department, or departments in a cross-discipline class. That guy you are giving such a hard time to has not-so-much control over your grade as a real number, but PLENTY of control over what he puts in the letter of recommendation you will so foolishly request when applying to grad school (this actually happens; so far he has resisted the temptation to write: she was a mediocre student who couldn't follow instructions & got pissy when she didn't get her way).

As for the rest of the students, so long as they work within the existing framework, things go much smoother. The school will even let you take the class over&over&over again until you get the desired grade & each time your improved grade will overwrite the previous one, so only a review of your semester-by-semester transcript will show that you have ever been there before. That and your bill.

This week in cow

2011-08-18T14:50:00.017-04:00

Dear M******,

I know I usually send a "this week in cow" update by e-mail. Also it is usually about the week. All I can think about right now is This Morning in Cow. What a bad cow! She knocked a board out (breaking it: bad bad cow) & made her way inot the main pasture. After that, she chased the horses, donkey, goats around..

OKay, maybe she was not chasing them. Maybe she just wanted to go where they were going...at top speed. Fortunately Ira, in all his goofiness was in his stall, & Becca-Pony as well, so everyone mostly just did laps around the barn. I finally got her in the milk stand an hour late & got a WHOPPING 2 cups from her.

Once she was off the milk stand, I let her back into the big pasture (what the hell, right?) & she jumped, JUMPED the back fence (a top plank was down & I did not see, shame on me). Once in the alley between our place & next door she trampled the old barbed wire barrier & spent a frolicking hour with at the neighbors (not the red neck who goes hunting drunk & never manages to shoot himself but the other on the other side which is a guy my brother would describe as Most Likely to Kill Buckwheat).

In the end I took down more boards, hauled her thru & put them back up. It is pouring rain now & she is quite pissed to be out in the big pasture now that she has seen ALL the others are eating every morsel of grass from her pasture. So, I am thinking of getting hay sometime later today.

Not that any of this is anything you need to worry about, but I do have some actual info for you: I am almost out of jars (there was one big one left I thought I would use this morning). Also I made 24 hour yogurt & put it in the fridge this afternoon & last of all I have some yogurt spread, also fermented extra long. Are you still thinking of borrowing some books & bread forms? Any interest in coming by Saturday afternoon (or later if you want to milk)? The kitchen cabinets arrive Tuesday so I am packing the kitchen starting then.

I know you want to test-drive the yogurt maker; I want to hang onto it until the last possible moment but then I will deliver with whatever starter I have left & I will write up the recipes (I have more than one, go me!).

mb.

PS: this is the absolute best, most favorite granola recipe ever! Thank you! Apparently I do like apricots.

Garden Maze block: LAST CALL

2011-08-17T14:37:00.017-04:00

Wow, what a month this has been! Yea, I know it's only the middle of the month, but it took all my energy just to surface here. It is only a matter of time before the next wave takes me under & then it will be September.

So, to be quick & yet informative: the August Facebook Quilt Block Swap group block (Garden Mazes, directions here) is still happening. Blocks are due in-house the last Saturday of this month, which means a week from this Saturday or Saturday August 27th, 2011.

If you are not part of the Facebook group, you need only ask to join (because people's home addresses are printed for swapping purposes it is a semi-closed group). Search on "quilt Block Swap" & If you are not interested in joining on Facebook but do want to swap, just leave a message here with an e-mail address so I can send you the instructions.

I can see from the Blogger STATS page, the October block is getting A LOT of traffic, which is great, but the August bock has not closed yet. Yes, it is on the large side but the center square is any 6" (finished) 4-patch or 9-patch of your choosing so long as one of the fabrics used has a floral pattern visible somewhere in the block itself. As for the maze border, one of the two fabrics used should have some green, it doesn't have to read-as-solid or even be all green. If this block cannot be cut from the average scrap-bag, I really don't know what block could be.

As for what to do with the blocks you get back: six of them (five swapped & one kept) would make a simple table runner; a few more could be a wide border to a larger quilt with a garden-y-themed center panel. & as always, a sixth block sent with your five-to-swap will go to one person in the group making a quilt for her community (I will start saying "his or her" when we get the first male 6th block quilt maker.

Curds & whey

2011-08-13T14:18:00.000-04:00

Don't come around here no more OR Step One

2011-08-09T09:37:00.013-04:00

I fell in like-a-lot with the July Block Lotto block as soon as I saw it. I am a fan of off-kilter graphic designs & I knew right away it had real potential in combo with large scale novelties (I am on an eternal quest for not-so-obvious places to insert smaller pieces of a large scale print). Yes, I know, not everyone looks at 10" 16-patches & says "needs something big & confusing, pattern-wise", but there you are.

First let me show you one of the sets I made. Alice in Wonderland just as she meets the Cheshire Cat, right? Hence the title of this post (you are actually most welcome to come around as often as you like, cyberly anyway).

& then on July 31st I learned I won! 48 of these puppies will be working their way to me (I kept none of the blocks I posted because I had made a few back-ups for a not-yet-determined project; I really enjoyed MAKING this block). That same week another quilt-blogger of my digital acquaintance asked how it was that I never took the process pledge. The answer is mostly I never thought of it. Also my process is not exactly linear; very few things come to me even in a roundabout way. Mostly I stare at blank walls until it just seems like it has always been that way. You read that right - I do not have a design wall. & brace yourselves, quilters...I could have a design wall; I choose not to. I have a hard enough time staying interested in a project that is draped across my sewing table & even then, once I am finished I am very likely to send it elsewhere, so sick am I of thinking about it. If I actually had to look at the d*mn thing, on the wall I just might stop quilting all together. Have I ever mentioned deadlines make me tense? Well they do & a design wall is a giant looming deadline as far as I am concerned.

So here it is:

Step One- try not to think too hard about the quilt design. This is best accomplished by never looking at the potential components directly or as a whole. I'm really not kidding. Instead heap everything together, ideally on a surface not quite large enough so that it periodically falls over & everything gets reshuffled & jumbled.

What would Wallace do?

2011-08-02T23:52:00.010-04:00

Living in a college town (OKay, in a town that is college-town-adjacent), we hear a lot (A LOT) about how impractical artistic intellectual types have no business sense. Did I mention I live in a farming town? Have you ever heard of an industry more rife with hard working, below par businessmen than small farming? Seriously, the hours they put in & what they barely get for that? I'm not saying I'm not grateful, just that I had a hard time keeping a straight face while I bought my feed before they knew I was laughing at them.

Anyway, farming is neither here nor there because today is Wallace Stevens birthday. Wallace Steven is almost the first poet I ever heard of, mostly because his stomping ground was my stomping ground, although I was not born until decade after his death. He won a Pulitzer for his poetry. He was also at the helm of a major Hartford insurance group for many many years (I have actually seen I-don't-know-how-many live performances in a theater named for him in the gynormous office building that is the home of the same insurance company). Wallace Stevens was born into a prominent conservative family & was himself a member of the Republican Party & had strong anti-labor union beliefs. When he married his wife, a woman from a working class background, his parents refused to attend the ceremony; he never spoke to them again.

So I think we can all agree it would be hard to predict what Wallace would do, so enough about him now lets talk about my cow. Wait, one more thing about Wallace Stevens: his poetry really is marvelous. None of that black-is-the-color-of-my-true-love's-heart-hair-whatever that has become a cliche. One of my favorites is Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I also like the Peggy Lee's version of Bye Bye Blackbird, which is not relevant except you can hear it here.

Let me present my version titled This Many Ways of Looking at Milking My Cow:

I. Misty or steamy there is
nothing like the smell
of potent lady cow

II. Her bag pushes her legs further
apart, arched up to her back
her back is bony table

III. Myself folded & reaching
underneath for the wrinkled
gorilla fingers swelling smooth

IV. One two one
one two two
one two three
one two four

IV. Sometimes I dream that someone is
twisting my hands, pulling my fingers straight
folding them, turning them
slowly like mozzarella

V. I saw the cord in the mirror
in my arm, when I reached to put away the towels.
These are new muscles.

& finally VI. You know those men - it's always men - who like to squeeze your hand until your finger tips turn blue & pretend it is just a friendly handshake? I can make those men cry.

I think it is safe to say Wallace would be spinning in his grave. Also, I really need to get some sleep. Good night.

Goodbye old kitchen

2011-08-01T21:18:00.002-04:00

The kitchen in my house is mostly original; the house was built in 1977. The cabinets, the soffits (& the wallpaper!) are certainly original. The dishwasher was new in '99, all the other appliances are older than that, but probably not pushing 50 (maybe 35).

This means that around the same time someone first walked into my kitchen, the Sex Pistols had just released their first album with one of my favorite songs, actually, while Fleetwood Mac released their most important album & another song I really do like; Jimmy Carter took office & pardoned draft dodgers; Anwar Sadat went to Israel & started talking peace with Menachem Begin; at the movies Tony Monero danced his way into the night, while in a galaxy far, far away... well you all know what happened there; & finally back here on earth Fonzie jumped the shark. In short, this kitchen has been overdue for a while. Half the people who eat (& cook) here on a regular basis were not born when this kitchen was installed & they can all vote & purchase alcohol, legally even; some of them have children of their own & some of those kids are in school. OKay, pre-school.

So it is goodbye old kitchen. Goodbye fan/peacock/whatever that pattern is supposed to be wall paper. Goodbye wagon wheel detailing, you were handy for sorting the dry cleaning. Goodbye refrigerator whose door never did open all the way because of that weird pantry shelf. & goodbye weird pantry shelf; I'm still not sure what you were supposed to be anyway. Goodbye breakfast bar, you were maybe a good idea but never really worked for us. & goodbye to your buddy, the over-head cabinets with doors on both sides of the bar, it was fun pushing things all the way thru & out the other side; that's when we stopped stocking up on canned goods...

Goodbye, kitchen. We'll always have that Thanksgiving I broke my leg walking out the front door.

*sigh*

Seriously, what is the deal on those wagon wheels? Was this ever fashionable, even in 1977?

What would Hawley do?

2011-07-31T11:13:00.063-04:00

There has been so much chatter, I am guessing nationwide but certainly here in her home state of Fladidah, about how Casey Anthony got away with it. & maybe she did. Or maybe she was just a really lousy parent. I have an opinion myself & that opinion is...if I am ever accused of murder, I want the jury sequestered.

But enough about Casey Anthony (please, ENOUGH), lets look back on another murderer everyone knew was guilty & did not get away with it. Today in 1910, Hawley Harvey Crippen was arrested for the murder of his wife, Cora. He was apprehended while crossing the Atlantic Ocean with his mistress who was disguised as a boy. He denied murdering his wife right up until he was hanged. When asked why he ran, why the disguise, etc. he said he didn't think anyone would believe he didn't kill his wife. The book Thunderstruck, which is about a lot of other things as well as the Crippen case, describes the media frenzy that surrounded the murder & manhunt. For decades, the whole business was lauded as a triumph of police technique...until....

Until almost right away, frankly. There were a number of problems with the investigation, including the idea of Mrs. Crippen as a hapless victim, & the problems have only multiplied over the years. In 2007 a research group tested one sample of DNA from the remains found in the Crippen home (where Mr. Crippen disposed of his wife's torso, after moving her head, hands, & pretty much the rest of her elsewhere, never to be found) with DNA from contemporary descendants of Mrs. Crippen's half-sister & found no match. They also found the remains from the Crippen's home were from a man. & it gets better...or worse if you are Crippen. Letters that alleged to be from Mrs. Crippen, alive & well & living in the US written to himself in prison, although neither he nor his lawyers were ever told such a letter existed.

So maybe Casey Anthony was really just the worst mother imaginable, but not actually a murderer. Kind of like Gary Condit was not the world's best husband & was maybe sleeping with a federal intern but did not actually kill her. Or William Michael Dillon, another party-loving young Floridian who served more than 25 years of a life sentence before DNA evidence exonerated him.

But back to Crippen. What would Crippen do when his wife's friends started asking questions about where she had gone? Well, he lied. He made false statements to them & to the police. He changed his story over & over again because he was pretty sure they were not going to believe that an unhappily married man who had made is mistress pregnant was not involved in same wife's disappearance. & he was right.

Daddy was a preacher & Mama was a go-go-girl

2011-07-26T08:10:00.000-04:00

I have lived south of the Mason-Dixon (WELL south of the Mason-Dixon) for not-quite 1/2 my life & if adulthood comes at 14 (this is the south) most of my adult life, but I am still not of the south. They say you are never a local (anywhere, not just here, but where I grew up as well) unless you were as-good-as-born there. Still, I have acquired some southern preferences. No, not barbecue. or NASCAR. or Jesus. But no one & I mean no one does irreverent mash-ups like they do in the deep south. I am eagerly awaiting a barbecued Jesus NASCAR event, I know there is one somewhere down here.

When I lived towards the north-eastern corner of this very large country, every summer, if we could, me & my mom used to go to a regular fair held at the local polo grounds (& if that right there does not tell you what kind of let-your-hair down community it is not, I do not know what will). It was a very large, very civilized event. Refreshments all on one side & almost no one brought their food out of that area; screaming running kids were just not to be found. A much smaller fundraiser for a local church, complete with rides & carnies, was also just not the cut loose kind of thing you read about in books or see in movies.

& then I came here. Let me say we do live less than 5 miles from the winter home of at least one major circus, so what we experience now is what people who are paid to make sure everyone else has a good time do when they go active-relaxing.

& that is as far as I got yesterday morning, saved the file & opened it again when this morning the tv was full of a Baptist Minister (no doubt with his own First Baptist Church somewhere) with a product endorsement prayer & a movie rip-off. For the record this is not what I mean. The best thing about this prayer is it reminded me of that Southern Culture on the Skids cover, which is I guess where I will end now.

Today is not Secretary's Day

2011-07-22T11:28:00.002-04:00

In April, I think, some people observe Secretary's Day (or if you are still other some people: Secretaries Day, which may or may not be the same thing but more of it), & it turns out what still others may or may not observe is Administrative Professionals Day. When I worked in an office, Secretary's Day was always a touchy subject. I have lost track of how many women who answered phones, dealt with correspondence, filed, organized calendars & all other things secretarial got VERY OFFENDED when they were recognized on Secretary's Day. My feeling was if "secretary" worked for Kissinger, it worked for me: bring on the chocolates.

But none of that matters just now because today is not Secretary's Day. Today is an older holiday that honors a much older, much more under valued profession: it's Ratcatcher's Day. Or not, there seems to be some confusion there, too. The actual Town of Hamelin celebrates Ratcatcher's Day in June, but the Robert Browning poem puts it on July 22. Puts what, you ask? The day that the pied piper is said to have returned to Hamelin & led off the children of the town.

Chances are you know the story: the people of Hamelin hired a ratcatcher to clear their town of rats (they had quite the problem with rats). When the job was done, they decided not to pay him. He said "you will rue the day", disappeared & then came back later & lured all the children of the town away, using the same technique he used to dispose of the rats & the children & the ratcatcher were never seen again. The moral of this tale varies depending on who tells it, but I have always understood it to be "payback is a bitch".

Let me update this story for modern times. An individual entered into a verbal contract to perform a one time service. After the service had been performed, the contractee declined to honor the contract. Various reasons were given. While none of these reasons given were satisfactory to the contractor & the work was such that it could not be undone, the contractee had considerable influence over all methods of arbitration & the contractor was left unsatisfied & went away. The contractee thought everything had wrapped up nicely & went back to business-as-usual...until...the contractee lost something he never thought was even on the table.

Many years ago I worked for an accountant who, for many years before that had worked as a contractor. A government contractor. Her job was to review Medicare claims for fraud & she had an EXCELLENT record. In fact, she found fraud in EVERY CASE she reviewed. Every single case, 2 or 3 or 10 or 20 a month, depending on how many came in, for YEARS. Before you take this as given that every doctor is committing Medicare fraud (they aren't), you should understand that all of the referrals she got were as a result of complaints directed to a single individual. & for years & years & 100s of audits, all of those complaints came from a single source: disgruntled former employees. The case that sticks with me best was a very personable, very pleasant older internist. As I recall, his office manager of say 10 or more years (really it could have been 25 years, they were both old enough) had used all of her allotted vacation when her mother/father/someone became ill & she went to take care of whoever it was. Because her vacation time was used up, she was doing this without pay, which maybe pissed her off & maybe didn't, I don't know. This went on until finally she was told that she HAD to be back at her desk the following day or she was fired, period. & so she was fired & even that, while probably not making her super happy, had not yet pushed her over the edge. The final straw was when she filed for unemployment & her former employer contested it. According to him, by failing to appear for work she had quit & the judge ruled in his favor. She left that courtroom & went straight to the Medicare fraud office (in the same building, how convenient) & reported on the duplicate billing system, dead patients, etc. scam her former boss had going. I remember it NOT because it was the most egregious bad-boss-behavior I saw (it's not even close) but it was the biggest whistle-blower payout the office had ever made at the time. I am guessing the doctor went to his grave wishing he had just let that unemployment claim ride.

So Happy Ratcatcher's Day everyone!

How we ended up at Sears

2011-07-21T16:38:00.001-04:00

I was watching House Hunters the other day, which for the record I would not ordinarily do. I wanted to watch Ice Loves Coco but the batteries in the tv remote need to be replaced & sometimes they take you to the closest channel to the channel you entered less one digit & then won't do anything for a few minutes while they regroup or something.

So I was watching House Hunters & all this first time buyer (yea, it might have been My First Place, sue me) wanted was a space big enough for a pool table she did not yet own. Every property she viewed, she measured to make sure there was a room for her pool table to-be; 15' if I recall but mostly I really wanted to see how Coco's sister's baby shower was going & I was pissed at myself because I do not know how to change the channel on my own tv without the remote & if I had kids I would have tv-grounded them for sure at least once & taken the remote away & now they could help me change the channel so I could watch the drag queen dance with his mariachi band at Coco's sister's baby shower, so don't start measuring your house thinking 15' is enough for a pool table because I might be wrong about that.

Okay, so she walks into every house & she measures. The real estate agent acts like this is a huge inconvenience, rolls her eyes, the whole deal & then....& then the agent actually shows a house without space for a pool table completely wasting everyone's time! All I could think was how much it would chap my ass (yes, that's how I think) that someone who is making THOUSANDS in commission to show me houses mocks my requirements TO MY FACE & cannot even be bothered to make sure the properties we visit meet that requirement, that one requirement.

I have no idea what happened next because the batteries started working again & it turns out the Ice Loves Coco that was on while I was stuck was last week's & I did not miss a single minute of the baby shower & let me tell you drag queen doing what look like high school cheers while a mariachi band takes a break by the pool cannot be beat.

I told you that story to tell you this one: while we were shopping for appliances for the new kitchen (yay NEW KITCHEN!) every single solitary sales person tried to convince me what I really wanted was a range hood with a microwave. They stood next to my 5'+ self, opened a microwave door that was level with my eyebrows & told me that while I might not find it convenient, what with not being able to see in the microwave & also having to stretch to push the damn buttons, etc. it would help the resale value of my house. They would not shut up about things I didn't want & things I couldn't use. I was so bummed. Where oh where would I find a sales person who was not motivated by his commission, who would barely even make eye contact because he was busy texting, where oh where could this paragon be? Well, let me tell you, he's at Sears. If you want the specs on any of the appliances, he can show you how to find them on the website & other than that he stays completely out of your hair. Who knew there was a place for inertia in the marketplace? Sears did...does....always has done.

I have a friend who wanted a particular baby stroller (the baby is in high school now). She went to Sears, because they were the only ones who had it & looked for a sales person. She found the floor model & looked for a sales person. She found the shelf they were on & looked for a salesperson. She climbed the shelf & pushed the box off. Giving up on the sales person, she put the stroller together, put the baby in it & went to the check out where she had trouble convincing them she did not come in with same stroller. Really.

That's it, we got a fridge, dishwasher & range from Sears. The hood we are getting elsewhere because finding a quiet one that does not have a microwave oven cannot be done, even in the leave-me-alone paradise that is the Sears sales floor. To their credit though, when I said that was what I wanted, the salesman said "we don't have that" & went back to texting.

Saint Zvlkx

2011-07-19T09:23:00.001-04:00

If you have never heard of Saint Zvlkx you need to run don't walk to your local library & get acquainted with Thursday Next. By the time you get to the fifth book, you will have heard of Saint Zvlkx in passing, mostly in reference to the site of his now-demolished cathedral.

On the way, you will learn about the new world religion (the Global Standard Deity). Living as I do in a part of the country where religions that have a lot of overlap (our county has three, count them three, independent First Baptists Churches) but spend mucho energy emphasizing their differences, the idea of a religion that emphasizes the sameness of them all, well, it is almost irresistible. It has all gotten mixed in my mind with the older brother in Wonderfalls, the atheist studying comparative religions; a state of belief quite common in his field at least according to him. G*d I miss Wonderfalls.

Who was/is Saint Zvlkx? Well I don't want to spoil anything for you so all I will say is he might be a visionary, or a sham, a flim-flam or a visionary sham. Seriously, read the books. Also, get Wonderfalls, it's on Netflix.

Air conditioning ROCKS!

2011-07-16T13:09:00.001-04:00

How far away is Cleveland

2011-07-15T08:25:00.005-04:00

I miss 3rd Rock From The Sun. Until The Big Bang Theory, there was just nothing on tv that even came close to what it was like to live with a physicist (no, he is not from another planet but he is from another culture; I often think his life would be easier if his accent was more pronounced). & while I love every single episode, my favorite (today) is the pilot & the whole conversation about how far away is Cleveland (Cleveland is a felonious assault way).

The gist is what is the distance between pint A & point B. Point A is an unfixed point representing where I am now, Point B is my new kitchen:

My new kitchen is 6 to 10 weeks away
My new kitchen is 14 to 20 quarts of yogurt away
My new kitchen is Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk away
My new kitchen is...

Did I mention we are remodeling the kitchen?

Perpetua

2011-07-10T12:07:00.045-04:00

Anyone who has ever spent anytime here at Useless Ranch knew it was just a (short) matter of time before I churned up the Patron Saint of Cows. There are actually lists of patron saints of cows, including Brigid who is also patroness of chickens, which seems like a lot of work for one saint; Homobonus, better know to this blogger anyway for his oversight of shoes & well, others. But Perpetua grabbed my fancy early in the running & yes, it was the dream sequence.

Why don't I restart a bit closer to the beginning. Perpetua was a more or less ordinary noble hausfrau, born in the second century after the BC/AD switch got flipped who converted to christianity & was then torn to pieces by wild beasts for the amusement of the ancestors of people who watch Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, etc. That's all there is, at first. As with all things catholic (& Catholic), god&thedevil are in the details. You could move on to the next cow-saint on the list. You could ditch AD entirely & start looking at cow-goddess cults of ancient egypt. There really are so many places to go, but staying was really the only option for me because after I read the brief little paragraph on Perpetua all I could think about was "Why cow"? In case you did not notice, the only animals in her story are wild beasts. I'm not saying cow cannot be dangerous, but I never heard of any bread&circus event in which martyrs were torn apart by a herd of holsteins.

So, there I was wondering how the cow came into it. & that is when I discovered The Organic Viking, a discovery otherwise much-worth making (thank you Saint Perpetua!). I was directed to a passage (which also happened to be further down the saint-bio page I had already skipped through, (curse you scroll bar for not jumping up & hitting me in the face). Turns out, she WAS martyred by a cow. Go figure. A big stomping, horns intact, don't try & milk me buster, wild bull.

I could continue with my write a quippy little piece about her, but the Organic Viking has already done it.

The national foods of July

2011-07-08T18:25:00.004-04:00

Every month always has foods & usually they are all over the map: desserts & vegetables all mixed in. Not so July. I knew July was National Hotdog Month, mostly because several dachshund rescue-type groups link their fund raising to that whole weiner thing. But there is more...

Ronald Reagan declared July National Ice Cream Month (alas National Jelly Bean Day was in April). According to several sources, he did it to emphasize the nutritional value of ice cream. Voodoo home economics if you ask me but whatever, ice cream is a fine food. It gets better. July is also Baked Bean Month & Pickle Month (although apparently May, June & August also have pickle days).

To round everything else out nicely, July is National Picnic Month. Let me suggest you bring along some hotdogs, baked beans, pickles & ice cream. National Potato Month is not until August but you might want to throw some french fries & potato salad in the mix. & National Apple Pie Month was in May, but go ahead & put some of that in the basket, although I confess to being puzzled about that one, apples being out of season in almost all of the US in May.

Finally, July is National Park & Recreation Month. This one also dates back to the Reagan years. Let me suggest we all show our patriotism by picnicking in the park.

The Ringling Bros. Circus Fire

2011-07-06T21:02:00.097-04:00

After writing about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire earlier this year, I got to thinking about the most famous fire I ever heard of: The Ringling Brothers Circus Fire. I grew up just a few miles from the site of this fire &, whenever my class did a local history unit it was bound to come up.

On July 6, 1944 between 7,000 - 8,600 people were in the big top of the Ringling Brother Circus in a large field that was later, when I was a child, the Stowe Village Housing Project in Hartford, CT. Attendance numbers are hard to come by; the circus had arrived late & missed a show so more than the usual number of free tickets were given away in the hope of reigniting interest. After the fire, there was no way to find out how many had been redeemed & most victim identification began with a missing persons report. In addition to being the state capital, Hartford was a major stop between Boston & New York which meant someone might be reported missing in two other states before anyone thought to look in the makeshift morgue.

There a re many theories how the fire started, but a lot of realities combined to make it the disaster it was. First, gasoline was a common form of waterproofing; the tent canvas was saturated with it over & over again to keep out the wet weather. second, the big cat cages were, at that stage of the show, blocking many of the exits. Whatever the reasons, despite the confessions & the theories no specific cause, deliberate or otherwise has ever been established. By the time I was alive & walking around Hartford County, the most notable thing about the fire was the still unclaimed body of Little Miss 1565.

I will give you the highlights: An eight year old girl was killed (I am guessing trampled, reading between the lines) & no one knew who she was. There were other unidentified victims, but in this case her body was found without any burns & with her face recognizable, if only the right person would look at it. They never did. Many, many years later an identification was made (& a reason given: those who could have identified her were themselves injured), but there are still questions & people who doubt the identification, based largely on more modern forensic identification techniques.

let me just say Little Miss 1565 haunted my childhood. I blame the local history buffs who came to school every year for a presentation about local history. Not much happens/happened in Hartford County that was ever as big as this & they played it for all it was worth. To this day I practically need a valium to light a match to a pile of wood in a well maintained fireplace.

I thought that would be it, really as far as my geographical connections went, but it turns out I was wrong. The late James A. Haley, Representative from the State of Florida was one of five to plead "no contest" to involuntary manslaughter (more than 150 people died in the fire). He served less than a year, returned to Florida, where ha had been at he time of the fire, & was pardoned. The reason for the charge was the general state of business safety practices at the circus, of which he was an officer.

There is one last thing about the circus fire; I could not find any direct on-line references but I remember from those childhood presentations: given that black patrons were generally seated in less desirable places (higher up, further from safety & closer to the canvas that ignited), there should have been more black victims -there were plenty don't get me wrong, just not as many as would have been predicted. The credit goes to one man, a minister at a local black church, who kept his head, kept his section calm & got most of them out safely, including children (many of the children who died got separated from their escorts & were lost in the panicking crowd).

What would Marie do?

2011-07-04T08:53:00.005-04:00

Guess who died today...in 1934? I'll give you a hint: she makes all tellers of Polish jokes look, well, you decide.

Marie Curie is the only PERSON to win two Nobel Prizes in different disciplines, so please Please PLEASE can we stop talking about her lady parts? Not to compare myself to Marie Curie, but here I go: A long time ago I was a fairly highly ranked person in an obscure professional field. In the trade journal that publish lists of these things, my name was usually in the top five. & every year, every efffing year said trade-journal even I only read when trapped on a plane would call me & ask what it was like to be the only woman on the list. They never asked what it was like to be the only one without a military &/or law enforcement background OR what it was like to to be the only one without a well-documented drinking problem... I think my point is made. Year after year apparently the most interesting thing about me was almost the only thing over which I had no control ever & frankly, it got old. The only other thing I consider I had no control over would be my height & now that I think about it, I probably was the shortest person on the list (it never occurred to me to wonder until this moment so it is hard to be certain).

What did Marie do? She worked the work she loved, until it killed her.

It takes more than one to tango

2011-06-28T09:47:00.000-04:00

Since 2006, And Tango Makes Three has been our most challenged book according to the American Library Association, who tracks these things, except in 2009 when it was the second most challenged book, making it overall the most challenged. Think about all the other books that have been published since then & the biggest threat to our society is...penguins?

The gist of the challenges is that the story (which is based on two male penguins who, after attempting to hatch a rock together were given an extra egg which they did hatch) 1-promoted a homosexual agenda & 2-does not tell the rest of the story when one of the father penguins leaves & forms a nesting pair with a female penguin.

It is hard to know where to begin. So lets start with the whole gay agenda thing (after all it is the real reason for all the objections that follow). There are slews of books about gay families, & a good chunk of those are picture books; there are picture books about living with gay parents, gay adoption, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, & so on. What makes And Tango Makes Three so much more objectionable than others which are patently about gay families? To put it in a nutshell (eggshell?), these were actual, observable penguins & penguins don't make "choices"; they operate solely on their godgiven wiring.

Next, the complaint a picture book does not tell the whole story...specifically events that happened after the book was published. Was the publisher really supposed to recall all the books & add that paragraph to the end? Would the adverse be true? Is anyone recalling the King James Bible to add the note by the by King James himself had sex with men to the biography bit with the frontispiece? This particular complaint has kind of faded away after Tango (the baby girl penguin with two daddies) has herself hooked up with a female penguin; I guess they don't want that particular footnote added, although since it reinforces some prejudices I really don't understand why not.

Also published in 2005 (& protested & banned & all that) was Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. All the Harry Potter books have been listed as unacceptable by one person or another, although it amuses me to learn now that the whole series is in the world (& there will be no putting that genie back in the bottle) some groups are suggesting the whole thing is a christian allegory à la The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe (also challenged by a christian group for mysticism et al although if you cruise a few forums more than one person who says Harry Potter should be banned because those books ARE evil floats the idea that the reason Lewis was banned was because he was so very christian). I guess if you can't beat him, pretend he joined you.

Joy in December 2011

2011-06-23T11:00:00.000-04:00

The last block swap of the year can be tricky. People want winter holiday things but by the time you get them back, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa et al. will more or less be over. Also, it can be challenging coming up with something that works for all of those. So here's hoping JOY works; this year we will be making our first ever word blocks.

I picked JOY because it only has three letters...& because it seems like it ought to be universal, regardless of what holiday you do or do not observe. Finally, it could work for any time of year.

You may need as few as one fabric (but probably more, depending on how you want to make your letters), & that first fabric should read-as-solid or at least any pattern on it should not make it hard to read the letters J, O, & Y as this will be the background fabric. As for your letters, you can use different fabric for each letter OR all the same OR no fabric at all if you embroider them. You can piece the letters (my example is below, also numerous examples in the book Word Play Quilts which is my new addiction) or you can applique them or embroider them (probably the only way you would use just the one background fabric) by hand or with an embroidery machine.

Instead of finished dimensions I am going to give you more-like guidelines: the block should be no smaller than 6.5" x 6.5" unfinished (being sure to keep ALL the text WELL inside of 6.25") or it might be longer, & maybe even a bit taller, but try to keep it close to 6.5" if you can. That being the case, the height of the letters probably should not be more than 5.5" (to keep it at at least 1/2" from the top & bottom edges), but the lengths will be variable. In other words most-if-not-all of the blocks will not be square or even uniform, leaving you with a block that is 6.5" x 6.5" OR ~6.5" x >6.5". I know, it sounds odd, but I have seen irregular word blocks work.

This means you will probably want to add blocks of the holiday or not-holiday of your own choosing, size-up the smaller blocks with snazzy borders or whatever in your own quilt top. When you make your own quilt, you might decide you want to add some words of your own (for myself, I am thinking of making PEACE in different languages & a few might find their way over to my JOY quilt). You could also expand your own JOY blocks with prefixes & suffixes to ENJOY or JOYFUL or JOY in other languages or JOY in phrases such as JOY TO THE WORLD or maybe even JOY phrases in other languages such as JOYEUX NOEL.

So, to be clear, the block you send will be 6.5" unfinished/6" finished by not less than 6.5" unfinished/6" finished & will say JOY... or Joy ...or joy.

Because there are slews of different ways to do this, I am offering my own work as an example only. I lifted it more-or-less straight from Word Play Quilts (which I own & I highly recommend as one of the few quilting books you will always wish you did own; I even requested my library by it which they did & it has been checked out ever since). If you cannot bring yourself to buy yet another quilt book for yourself, you can find free examples on-line here & here & here & here & many, many, many more.

I began with the J. Keeping in mind the entire block should be no taller than 6.5" unfinished & all the text no taller than 5.5" finished, I started with two 4.5" x 1.5" pieces of fabric, one background & one letter fabric. To that, I added a 1.5" piece of the letter fabric across the bottom & a 1.5" strip of the back ground fabric to the right. To keep all the letters more or less the same size, I then began my O.

The O is almost too easy: two sets of two strips of letter fabric, one of them 1"5 x 5.5" & the other 1.5" square, & a piece of back ground fabric for the center 1.5" x

Finally the Y. The base was also easy-peasy 1.5" wide of letter with a strip of the background fabric on either side. The top of the Y was harder, but I just sort of whacked around until I had this one.Yes, yes the Y in the first photo is not the Y in the following photos; it looked shtumpik so I put that one aside & made another in the exact same way, I just cut it down to size later.

Because it will all be bordered by straight cuts of the background fabric, I did not worry for a moment about the bias edges, but as it happens I did not have any. All of my strips were 1.5" (including the kerns or the spaces between the letters) & all of my letters 5.5" tall. I added a strip to top & bottom once the letters were all together. Again, this is how I made my JOY; you can make yours as you please, so long as it is 6.5" tall & not less than 6.5" wide, keeping all text more or less within the 6" of the center (so that even with a generous 1/4" seam allowance no one needs to worry their letters will get cut off.).

As always, blocks are due (not postmarked by but due) the last Saturday of the swap month: Saturday, December 31st. Blocks will be swapped on the following Sunday (yes, New Years Day) & mailed back on or before the next Wednesday. The easiest way to join is to log into Facebook & search for the Quilt Block Swap Group. If you do not want to join Facebook, leave a message here with your e-mail information & I will send you the address for swapping.

One cut of the cut glass dish for October 2011

2011-06-23T10:50:00.001-04:00

I often (often!) get requests for blocks that are quite large &/or complex & as much as I would like to swap these, it just is not realistic to ask people to make six of something so very involved (either because of size or skill or materials consumed or whatever) & send five off. I have been chewing this over for a while & I think I might have a solution. Instead of making an entire complex block, I am going to try & break one down into less complicated pieces that we can realistically swap & see how that goes.

For October, I thought we would try one piece of the block that makes up the Cut Glass Dish block. I freely admit this is one of my favorite blocks. You can see a completed Cut Glass Dish quilt here (please note the much more soothing colors than the single block example at the right). The quilt in the link is actually nine blocks, in a 3x3 arrangement (not coincidentally the block itself is 9-patch variation). The cut glass dish block is also a 9-patch, three 6.5" squares & six 4-patches made of 1/2-square triangles arranged so that the three squares create a diagonal line from one corner of the block to the other & the mid-lines of the 1/2-square triangles are parallel with that diagonal line.

Whenever I have a certain amount of something leftover, I cull thru the scraps bag for what could be the 1/2-square triangles to work with it. It occurred to me we could swap the 1/2-square triangle squares & people could make up them up with their own 6.5" squares. Because it helps to have some kind of unifying idea, I landed on I-SPY. Soooo, we will be exchanging the 4-patch 1/2-square triangles & our theme is I-SPY.

You will need two fabrics for each 4-patch 1/2-square triangle block. One fabric should be a busy juvenile print OR a bright print OR a bright reads-as-solid. The second fabric should read-as-solid or be solid; it can be bright or pastel or black or white or anything in between. Each 4-square should have only two fabrics. When you are done, you will have a 6.5" unfinished/6" finished square. Six of these (five to swap & one to keep) will make one cut glass dish block (when combined with the three 6.5" single-fabric squares).

There are gazillions of ways to make the half square triangles & as long as you end up with 3.5" half square triangles it does not much matter which technique you use. I am providing the steps how I make them I make them this way because I think it is the easiest & most accurate way to use up irregular & smaller pieces of fabric but again, so long as you end up with four 1/2-square triangles each measuring 3.5"x3.5", you can make them any way you like:

1. Cut four 4" squares from one fabric & four 4" squares from your second fabric. On the back of one of the fabrics, with a pencil or fabric marker that will not run make a straight line from one corner to the other. Ultimately this will be your cutting line, so you do not need to worry about it not washing out when you are finished. Pin the other two corners. I know it does not look it but I did not fussy cut one bit for the blocks below. Because there are four 1/2-square triangles in each 4-square we are making, one of them is bound to have most of the image you are looking for (all of it if the motif is small enough) & as this is an I-SPY project, bits & pieces are just fine.

2. Stitch 1/4" from this line on either side. I find the easiest way to do this without getting the points jammed into the machine is to chain piece (just keep stitching without stopping to cut in between) while alternating which side of the line you are stitching.

3. Once you have sewn 1/4" on both sides of the line, unpin & cut on the center line. Press open. It is possible your triangle will need to be squared up, remember the size you want it to be is 3.5". Also, cut away any threads (if you did not chain piece) & trim the pointy-bits from the ends of the seam.

4. Take your four 1/2-square triangles & create a 4-patch in which all the triangles have the same orientation, that is the same fabric is on the same side for all four squares (as in the example above).

You're done. Make one set of six, keep one, swap five. If you add three 6.5" squares of another fabric to your set of six, you can make the cut glass dish block & I will have the directions for that in a later post (I am worried if we put it here people will get confused about what the swap block actually is). It could stand alone as a doll quilt (18.5" unfinished/18" finished) OR you could swap four sets & make a nap-sized quilt (36.5" unfinished/36" finished) OR you could swap nine sets & make an almost-twin quilt (52.5" unfinished/52" finished). Keep in mind these measurements are before quilting but also before any border you put on so, depending on what you do border-wise, they could be spot on; if it helps the finished quilt in the link above it 51" by 50.5", no border. So as not to confuse anyone, I will not put the direction for the complete cut glass dish block up until this swap is winding down, but trust me, if you can make these six 4-patch 1/2-square triangles, you can make the whole block.

As always the blocks are due here the last Saturday of the swap month, in this case that is Saturday October 29. & as always we are collecting 6th blocks. You have the option of sending a 6th block with your five swap blocks; you will get five back & the 6th will go to whichever member of the group asked for them to make a quilt to donate to in her community. Previous 6th blocks for kids have gone to Project Linus in Houston Texas & CareNet in Port Ste. Lucie, Florida.

Garden mazes for August 2011

2011-06-23T10:40:00.001-04:00

I had originally thought to have this block in December & then I got another way-better idea for October & then I changed my mind again & then & then... So here we are with a slightly more complicated block than I usually put up for the first-of-three, but I really truly think you can handle it.

The first swap block for the second half of the year is a not-uncommon block; it has quite a bit of mileage frankly. You will see a variation of it in at least one quilting magazine or catalog every year, although I doubt you will see exactly the variation we are doing. If you are interested in more about this block, it is listed in Brackman as quilt block 3030.

We begin with a 6.5" unfinished/6" finished 4-patch, 9-patch or 16-patch. You can make the 4-patch using four 3.5" squares, or the 9-patch using nine 2.5" squares or the 16-patch using sixteen 2" squares or combination, variations so long as they are fundamentally 4-, 9-, or 16-patches. In short, you can make almost any block you can think of & the only fabric requirement is at least one of the fabrics used is a floral. You can use anything from two to however-many fabrics & again only one need be a floral.

For this example, I made the simplest block I could with two different floral fabrics but you can stretch your wings in any direction. You can make a much more complicated block, you can make this same simple 4-patch but with four different fabric & only one of them need be floral.

That part was the "garden"; next is the "maze".

To make the maze, you will need two (& only two) fabrics: one of these should be more green than any other color (& both of them can be, if that suits your stash), although neither has to read-as-solid, nor does either need to be exclusively green. Neither of them need have anything at all to do with florals or leaves or anything, just one of them needs to have a noticeable amount of green. One (or both) of these fabrics could also have been used in the "garden" part of the block although it is perfectly OKay if your garden & your maze fabrics have nothing common.

From each of the "maze" fabrics you will need four (4) 2" by 6.5" strips (or one long 2" strip, as you will sew them together along the long edges). If you make a long strip, cut it down into 6.5" lengths (& if you measured correctly when you cut, they will be 3.5" across).

From one fabric (the fabric that must have green) you will also need four (4) 3.5" squares; from the other fabric (which could be green, but does not have to be) you will need eight (8) 2" squares. These will make the outer corners of you block & will be what connects your maze to the maze in adjacent blocks.

The hardest part of this whole thing is making the corners of the "maze", the outer corners of the completed block. To make the corner blocks:

-take two of the smaller squares & draw a line on the back in faint pencil from one corner to the opposite corner.

-place one of these, right side down in the corner of one of the larger squares (which is right side up). The line you drew should connect one straight edge to another.

-stitch from one corner to the other along the line you drew.

-press so that the smaller square (now a triangle) covers the corner

-do the same for the opposite corner of this same square & for each of the other three corner pieces.

Once all four corners are made, attach them to the ends of two of the long strip pieces.

Attach the other two long strip pieces to opposite sides of your center "garden", keeping the green strip to the inside of the block.

Assemble what is a 12.5" unfinished/12" finished block.

If you would like to join this swap, the easiest thing is to go to Facebook & search for the group Quilt Block Swap & ask to join. Blocks are always due the last Saturday of an even numbered month (which means they should be in the mail no later than the Monday before, if not sooner). This particular swap is due Saturday, August 27, 2011.

Step-fathers's Day

2011-06-19T22:38:00.081-04:00

It will surprise no one, not even not-Catholics, that the patron saint of fathers is Joseph. Which is funny really, because he is not actually on record as anybody's father. Which means that the patron saint of fathers was actually a step-father. As a person who has a much better relationship with my step-father than my biological father -in all fairness I have a much better relationship with Sarah Palin than I have with my biological father & Mrs. Palin & I have never ever met, nor are we likely to & if we did I cannot imagine either one of us would have three nice things to say about the other; I think you know where I am going with this... As a person who has a much better relationship with my step-father than my biological father, the message of this is not lost.

This Joseph, for those who have not figured it out, is not the guy with the coat of many colors. For the record that one is not a saint. This Joseph is the one who married Mary, went to Bethlehem, got the short end of a fiscal negotiation with an unscrupulous innkeeper, left town with a child that was not his, raised that child (including but not limited to hunting him down in the temple when the precocious little angel went a-wandering) & the rest is history...or not, depending on how you look at these things. Go ahead & read the gospels from Joseph's point of view; can't you see him secretly LONGING for joint custody? Just one day a week when his father-father had to deal with the holier-than-thou little monster he created?

Anyhow, today is Father's Day in the US; not last Sunday which is when I called my own step-father to wish him a happy Father's Day. This is not the first time I have observed Father's Day a week early, either. Clearly I have an issue. Maybe I should just move it all to March 19 (the actual feast day of Joseph) & be done with it. I could sing the only song I know about Joseph & be completely out of season in that way, too.

So, in conclusion today is Father's Day but it is not the feast day of the patron saint of fathers who was himself not a father. Got it? Good. Oh & a most happy father's day all the other 364-give-or-take to all the faux-fathers who do the heavy lifting. If it were not for a guy like you, christianity would never have happened.

Magnolia grandiflora

2011-06-18T07:00:00.002-04:00

The sky is falling, the sky is falling...no, really it's falling....fer crissakes LOOK UP

2011-06-13T11:07:00.001-04:00

Chickens panic. It is what they do. & even when they are not panicking they sound a little panicky. Their natural, resting voice is a little bit "what's that, what are you doing, why are you here, who the hell are you anyhow?" It has been especially rough on them since Wednesday when the sky did indeed start falling.

I know some of you do not want to hear this (& some are saying "I hear you") but we need rain. We need it bad. As of last Tuesday, there were 75 fires burning in this county alone (25 of them started since the previous weekend). I know that sounds like a lot but not a whole lot, except this is a county of <250k people & <100 square miles of land, almost 10% of that is water. This means there is 1 fire for every 3,300 people or every 13 square miles or so. In one week.

Then, on Wednesday we got 6/10ths of an inch of rain in under 40 minutes. That is a lot of rain all at once & it came in with very high winds on both ends. When the storm left, my hen house had a ruffled edging along the roof. I realize that is nothing compared to say, Joplin, but it was plenty for us. As for helping with the fires, it did some. It also ignited a few (lightening) & brought one that was under control out over the firebreaks (high winds).

& so on Saturday, we (& by "we" I mean A) began re-roofing the henhouse. There were other structural things that needed doing as well, so we (he) went ahead & did them, replacing beams, clearing old, mostly-broken perches, etc. In order to do this, we had to move all of the henhouse structures (all but one we hoped, it is really more improvement than infrastructure, but in the end it too had to go, at least temporarily get out). While the sun was going down, the lady-birds turned their beaks for home only to discover all of their worldly goods tipped out into the pasture & their home still roofless!

We scrambled & got most of the panels up put some beams across them for weight & the ladies perched up on the roof beam they prefer, the new roof balanced but not fastened overhead. On Sunday, we woke up bright & early to continue the job & then this morning A went a firmly fastened the last narrow row of panels for the next round of high winds.

The best part of this was watching those poor birds. All weekend the hens wandered around all of their stuff tipped out all over the pasture & reminded me of nothing so much as the mother in "One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" trying to keep her child busy & her neighbors from looking through all her worldly good while movers pile everything she own in the NYC sidewalk.

//about the math: yes, I could have said 3/5ths of an inch of rain but the rain gauge is marked in tenths. Also, if the math does not quite work in the equations that is because I used the actual numbers (population, square miles) & not the less-than-this rounded number. If you are so inclined you can back into the actual numbers doing the problems in reverse. Or you can just get on with your day.

Brigid of Ireland

2011-06-10T16:48:00.062-04:00

Yup, patron saint of chickens, chicken farmers (& blacksmiths & cattlemen & fugitives Oh My), Come on Down! Brigid hailed from Ireland, died in Ireland. & then they took her head to Portugal. Those crazy Jesuits!

Everyone seems in agreement that her pagan father was a freeman or lord or king & her mother one of his slaves. Just before her birth her mother was sold & when she could live apart from her mother, Brigid was returned to her rightful owner, her father. He in turn sold her to a christian. While they were haggling over the price, she gave away her father's sword to a leper; when her father tried to punish her, her new owner prevented him. Babies & bastards (the kind with parents who are not married), mariners & midwives, poets & poultry farmers, sailors & scholars all call on Brigid for aid & comfort. You know who doesn't? Fathers.

Aside from her own father, Brigid seems to have clicked with virtually everyone she met, hard working, intelligent & famous for her patience etc. etc. Turned down legions of marriage offers or walked away from the one her father arranged, Brigid is one of the chaste saints. No big ugly martrydom here. Instead, she somehow became a teacher, then an abbess & then a saint. It is all very murky in the way these things are & I get rather a sense that more than one person might be mixed in there. Aside from pissing off her father.

In that holistic way of these things, Brigid is also the celtic goddess of poetry, healing arts & metalwork (c'mon, dontcha love the old gods?). Both the saint & the goddess,when appearing in pictures are beautiful young women with red, red hair.

& just in case you weren't sure she was an irish saint/goddess let me leave you with a lines from her "readings": I would like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.

Yogurt maker the second

2011-06-04T20:11:00.035-04:00

Yes, yes it is true my previous post a tale of two yogurt makers actually only had one yogurt maker in it. I ran out of time. So without further ado, here she is My New Yogurt Maker! I call her Gertie & she is a dream.

One of the reasons there was no second yogurt maker in the other post is I did not get around to using her until late last month. Hey, I was busy. & then I got a new cow (NEW COW!) & then I had more milk than I usually have & went looking for a purpose.

Now I finish the morning milking & I take those results & do the whole heat-cool-mix in cultures thing. Then into Gertie it goes, somewhere between 10:15-10:30, out again eight hours later & into the fridge overnight. For breakfast the next morning we have two quarts of the best yogurt you have ever, ever tasted. This week I have been mixing it with M******'s homemade granola & the blueberries A got from a co-worker (we swapped for farm fresh eggs).

We were expecting Mister Lincoln

2011-06-03T07:35:00.001-04:00

This past spring there was this rack of roses marked clearance & of course I could not resist. For six dollars I got six roses, four of them survived, one of those was given away & now those that made it are starting to bloom.

This one is the only one I bought on purpose; that is I had no preference re: the looks (color, size), style (climbing, shrub) etc. when it came to the others. This was the one I wanted; the others were extras in one of those buy one get five free giveaways.

I have always loved the rose Miser Lincoln. I love the name, I love the look & we even hit the planet around the same time (Mister Lincoln had his big debut the year before I was born). I was all set for a feathery, bushy, not-too-flowery rose bush. & that is what I got, but this sure is not Mister Lincoln. Who this blush beauty is I don't know, but tall & red with strong fragrance it ain't.

Also not what they seem is a Joseph's Coat that shows every sign of being a small shrub rose (not climbing, not large) & small shrub rose that shows every sign of climbing, but is not, alas Joseph's Coat.

For now, I guess I will leave them where they are until I am certain how they are going to behave; I cannot put them thru another planting this season & expect much in the way of blooms (clues) anyhow.

It's okay to be Takei

2011-06-01T22:03:00.124-04:00

Maybe you know (maybe you don't) but June is National Gay & Lesbian Pride Month. & completely without irony it is also the traditional month for getting married. & National Candy Month. & National Dairy Month. As you also may know (& again, maybe you don't) late last month Tennessee passed a law (A LAW) making any discussion regarding homosexuality off limits for elementary & middle school students.

More than one person has asked "should they really have that conversation with students that young, anyhow"? But this ruling does more than clamp down on a health & sex education class that was not taking place. This means when homosexuality comes up in the course of a student's life, & since currently almost 15k foster children nationwide are in gay homes & not less than 300K children- again nationwide- have a gay parent, chances are good it IS going to be relevant even in Tennessee; it is off limits. When it comes up in current events, say when the next politician is on the news explaining they were just friends (or my favorite how he happened to hire a guy who only advertises on a rentboy website to not help him with his luggage because of his bad back), the teacher is to ignore any story no matter how far reaching & talk about something else. If asked what does that mean, the answer is "I am not allowed to say."

Pretending something does not exist & banning talk in the classroom is how Tenneessee traditional alters the transfer of information (think Scopes Monkey Trial).

But it turns out a traveler across space & time has a solution. This is how it goes: when you might say "gay", say "Takei" (which rhymes with gay; I had no idea-ay). Then let whomever is policing your vocabulary infer what you mean from context clues, if they don't have their hands full with other problems in their school, say sexual predators or domestic violence or bullying or drugs. It is so bend-over-backwards absurd that it does take some of the pressure off. At least until the Tennessee legislature rises up & bans Star Trek in the classroom. Or until they grow up, whichever comes first. Given that it has been almost 100 years since the Scopes Monkey Trail, I would not hold me breathe on that one.

Just for fun, I went looking for other things banned in Tennessee, just to see what's up. In Tennessee it is illegal to possess synthetic herbs that provides the same high as pot. You cannot produce porn in the state but you can possess it (so, careful where you point that camera; don't worry about the dirty pictures though). & apparently it is illegal to be an illegal alien in Tennessee. Seems a duplication of effort to me but whatever. Tennessee did manage to lift another local ban on bringing handguns to local parks. Also, apparently Jack Daniels had been playing fast & loose with some obscure law since the 1930s & they are trying to fix that. Leaving us with this memorable quote:

"Today, if a 13-year-old started making whiskey, they'd chop up his still, send him to reform school and arrest his parents," Niceley said. "That's our biggest problem today - overregulation."

On the other hand if today a teacher were to say maybe you shouldn't pick on that other student because you think he acts gay, is gay, his parents are gay, his parents might be gay, his parents are not gay but the 13 year old cooking up whiskey in his spare time cannot think of anything else to hit him with well it is not overregulation to stop that conversation, it is just good common sense...in Tennessee anyhow.

The price of milk

2011-05-31T09:02:00.000-04:00

We have a new cow. I know I have hardly talked/blogged/whatever about anything else since she arrived. I have milkmaid's wrist, milkmaid's forearm & milkmaid's grip. What tennis is to the elbow, running is to shins, etc. you do the rest.

& mostly it is good. You cannot imagine how good that milk smells when it hits the pail. I want to drink it, warm on a warm day, it is so sweet-(& I only ever drink milk, cold milk when I have a stomach ache or cookies...or both). I have gotten to the point in the process where I am not so exhausted when it is over that I can reflect on how not-exhausted I am, which is its own kind of high. No really. Apparently I have not yet gotten to the point where complete sentences out number the other kind, though. Oh well.

What I do have is just enough energy to kick back & watch one of my favorite movies. Since I am having trouble with continuity, it helps to watch a movie I have both seen before & is not quite continuous itself. Which brings me to The Price of Milk. I love this weird little film. That it happens to be about a dairyman (& yet not about a dairyman) just helps. Also, it is on Instant on Netflix, so go for it.

As a side bar, the next time I hear someone complain about how food prices are outlandish & can you believe what they want for a gallon of milk, I plan to show them my milking bruises & cuts, all for not more than a gallon a day.

Bernard of Menthon

2011-05-28T06:07:00.000-04:00

When you think "Saint Bernard" it probably is not an actual saint that pops in to your mind but an actual dog. For me, it is Nana from Peter Pan. It seems, the dogs were named for the famously impassable Great Saint Bernard Pass & the pass is named for the man himself.

For perhaps the first time ever in my looking into the saints & what they do for us, Bernard is invoked by Alpinists specifically, mountain climbers & skiers more generally & ultimately all travelers in the mountains. No skin ailments, no lost children/innocents or innocence, no diseases, no random occupation associated with the gruesome way he died, nothing. Sweet blessed relief.

The man seems almost normal, as well. During his mortality, he held a clerical/local magistrate-type office near the 10-months-of-winter pass that bears his name. While there he established the patrols & shelters for travelers in this plagued (by weather & thieves) region. I can find no grand show stopping number in his repertoire, just 40+ years of hard work, patrolling, administering & preaching against idolatry, pretty much in that order. His miracles have been described as "numerous" & that is all; the entry has a kind of after thought quality. I marvel that the church made him a saint. It seems to me the man himself might have been more pleased about the naming of the dog breed, but maybe I am projecting.

The final thing that struck me about Bernard of Menthon was not so much that lack of information about him as the extra information about him. I found TWO definitive years of birth (923 & 996), THREE definitive nationalities (Italian & French & Swiss), as well as a number of offices for which he was 'most well known'. I cannot help it, I feel if anyone is 'most well known' for something it ought to be just the one something. There are also legions of other Saint Bernards (not to be confused with other saint bernards) & so I cannot help but think they might be raining on this everyday clergyman's day. Which is a damn shame, because I think I like him best.

//in the course of writing this I double checked to see if Nana was indeed a Saint Bernard, she certainly looked like one. She was, according to stage directions, a Newfoundland. Interestingly enough, many Saint Bernards are also almost Newfies; the avalanches of the 18-teens were particularly hard &, because of the dog-death-toll, the Newfie line was introduced into Saint Bernard breeding stock.

No, not the rapture

2011-05-21T15:18:00.006-04:00

This morning, I took time out of my busy schedule to observe one of my own high holy days. Not the rapture (like that needed saying). & no, it is not the library book sale; those are April & October. Today was the annual Master Gardeners Plant Sale.

I look forward to this sale all year; well for months anyhow. I start making lists of things to try & find at the sale. In the past I have hunted lilies of the valley, any white flowering flower, something that will survive deep shade, lemon tree, plum tree, any kind of flowering fruit tree. This year I went looking for the fruit trees, especially lemon & plum, lavender & catnip. Last year I got the worlds most gynormous catnip plant for W***** & now I want one for my own cats.

I came home with a catnip plant & nothing else I went for. There were flowering fruit trees, but nothing that really whet my appetite. The lavenders sold out before I got there, less than an hour after the sale started (curse you people who can leave home before milking the cow). Instead I got lime basil plant, a lemon balm & two cannas. The taste for cannas was slow in coming to me, but now whenever I see one that even suggests it might be a color I do not already have, I must purchase it.

Eliza Doolittle Day

2011-05-20T05:51:00.028-04:00

It is just a little thing, but today is kind of a silly-big deal in my world. It is Eliza Dolittle Day. For those of you who have never heard of Henry Higgins or maybe think Pygmalion might be the patron saint of swineherds, let me ease yOu in.

Have you ever suspected your boss might be conducting experiments to change your speech pattern (i.e. have you ever been a telemarketer asked to pass for an american)?

Have you been sexually harassed & kind of liked it...until you didn't?

Do you fantasize about a world in which you hold the power of life & death over people who barely acknowledge you as human?

Well, any of these things might mean you need an Eliza Dolittle Day. We will celebrate by watch My Fair Lady start to finish & jumping up & down on the furniture shouting The Rain In Spain et cetera.

Nymphaeaceae

2011-05-17T09:45:00.007-04:00

I have so many many not-quite-finished projects, but when it came time to spotlighting a finished quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival, I could not believe how many of my finished quilts have already been covered in my blog. Virtually every one I had here that I could take a picture of or had taken a picture before I shipped it off has already been shown here. With one exception: Nymphaeaceae.

Quite some time ago (yea, I could look it up or I could just move on), a floristic inventory of the local botanical garden was begun & a while after that it was mostly finished; these things are never finished-finished. As it was wrapping up, the wife of the inventoryer, the guy collecting & identifying one of everything in the garden, & I took a fraction of the digital images & made a quilt for a show at the museum of natural history (they were having a quilting natural fladidah-themed exhibit) & we made this. Meanwhile, the manager of the collection was doing everything in his power to make things easier for us. By everything, I mean everything, including re-prioritizing what specimens got mounted & photographed when so we could get the images we needed ASAP & not taking it to heart when they turned out not to be quite what we wanted & oh, could we have this instead?

In the course of this whole process, it became very, Very, VERY clear which image was his favorite. He used it for buttons on the website, he used it as his screen saver; everywhere he could squeeze it in, he squeezed. When we finished our main project & started planning our Thanks For All Your Help project there was no other choice.

As with all the images for our original quilt, I printed the images on 100% cotton using the Bubblejet product & an HP Photosmart printer. We used a single close up of the primary image for the center of the front & several others that we cut up to incorporate into the sawtooth border. As patterns go, it is not complex; we wanted to be careful that the quilt layout not clash with the image we were trying to highlight. For the back, we printed the whole specimen with label. While not particularly important in terms of the quilt, it is (almost) the most important part to an herbarium manager. The whole thing is less than 30" x 30"

If you want to see the original specimen (kind of) you can search for accession number 214601 thru 214601 at the collection search page.

Saturday it rained

2011-05-16T11:01:00.006-04:00

Saturday it rained:

It rained, I was drenched, we lost power & the sun came out.

It rained again, the sun came out, I loaded old boards into the truck bed until they were level with the sides.

Then it rained again, the new cow arrived, the sun came out.

It rained, the cow-delivering-family left, I was drenched again, the sun came out.

It rained, C**** arrived to work on the milking stand & the sun came out.

It rained, A & C**** kept working, C****'s phone died, the sun came out.

We made C**** do other not-cow milking-stand related things, A left to go see what the deal was with our power, it rained again.

We moved the milking stand to the pasture, C**** rode sitting on the milking stand sitting on the pile of old boards.

A & C**** unloaded it, A took the truck to the dump, me & C**** got the cow in & she got milked.

Over night it rained again. On Sunday morning, there were waves in the sand, but the water was all gone. On Sunday afternoon, the grass seemed to grow before our eyes. Monday morning, I ran the sprinklers for 30 minutes, it was already that dry.

That new cow smell

2011-05-15T21:45:00.016-04:00

& then there was one

2011-05-12T17:48:00.000-04:00

Yesterday a tree trimming & removal crew (that we have used before; they are great) was here, doing what they do. We had the emus (& the other animals) contained but then Antonelle, the female emu did something we never expected. She became so panicked while branches were being removed by Bobcat she pushed so hard she knocked the center board out of a three boards fence & ran out into the street. One+ hour for me & two of the tree guys to get her contained, another hour for A & the same two guys to get her back in her yard. She never recovered from the shock & died around 9:30 last night.

Yes, I am sorry. I already miss her voice (she made a noise that sounds like the opening chords of These Boots Were Made For Walking...no, really. The thrum-thrum-thrumming, not the tambourine. CleoPatton, her mate is calm-ish as I type this. The tree guys are back today & making as much noise as ever, but he never was as high strung as she was. He is pacing, but showing no sign of doing himself equal damage. What happens next is anyone's guess. Emus are not wired for solitary living, but we really don't want another one.

Poor Antonelle. Up until 5:09 yesterday she had a very nice emu life & was happy & well cared for. In the end, though, there was no reasoning with an 80lb animal with a brain the size of a chihuahua's.

Massachusetts star for June 2011

2011-05-10T09:23:00.006-04:00

The April swap blocks are already in the mail back to the swappers; some have already arrived in their new homes. Sooo, I am a bit late posting the nudge for the June swap block: the Massachusetts Star.

Mostly I am late because of the changes to the way Facebook handles Groups. The short version is all Groups are either moving to the new format or being archived. For reasons I am not clear on (& because Facebook is free, they don't exactly have people standing by to answer questions), our active group was flagged for archival becasue it was not active enough . After trying unsuccessfully to find out how to get the "upgrade" option for our group, I began the process of creating a new QBS group using the new group tools. Naturally, once I was almost done our group was changed from to-be-archive to upgradeable. Oh well, you get what you pay for, right? Mostly it looks like a good change, certainly more flexible but time will tell.

Which brings us to now. We are at the third of the first three block swaps for the first half of 2011. The blocks are due in-house the last Saturday in June. The directions are in a previous post on this blog as well as other places on-line.

You will need two fabrics for each star. One fabric should read-as-solid & be either blue OR white OR black. The other can be red, white or blue OR red, white & blue OR any combination of red &/or white &/or blue.

In addition to the five blocks you send & get five different blocks back, you have the option of sending a 6th block. Every swap a different person is chosen, sometimes people contact me, sometimes I contact them. The 6th blocks are gathered together & go to back to that swapper for a quilt for her organization of choice. For June the blocks are going to the same person who made last years Quilt of Valor quilt. She is not the first person to make more than one 6th block; all I ask is that the previous 6th block quilt be completed (quilted bound) & a picture posted in the group so everyone can see how their blocks ended up.

If you would like to join the swap, search in Facebook for the group "Quilt Block Swap- every other month" & ask to join. If you would like to be part of the Quilt of Valor quilt send an extra block (or two or three) with your five swap blocks.

April showers, May flowers, Mothers Day & so on

2011-05-08T06:20:00.006-04:00

For the first time since I joined Block Lotto, I managed to finish something for the virtual quilt that gets posted for the upcoming lotto (for the record, this was for the first of April & I am just blogging it now). It is a pretty block, & on point which I love.

I made ten & donated them all. I just could not see myself making a whole quilt of them & the handful I might want for a bouquet I would be happy to make for myself. It seemed like good karma, but then I learned my mom really wanted to win that one. So much for good karma & Happy Mother's Day mom.

Jewish Studies thru Zoology

2011-05-05T22:12:00.088-04:00

It was graduation weekend here last weekend; we are still recovering. The graduating undergraduate class of the college of liberal arts & sciences is so large that, although the ceremony is held in a largish space, they still have to have to hold two ceremonies. Physics comes in the second wave which begins with Jewish Studies & ends with Zoology. This particular college within the university also has the largest number of non-majors taking classes within it (the cutbacks in public education that have been happening over the past several years means that even the cream of the crop don't have some of what used to be basic college-entry-level skills; the smartest person in the world cannot learn to read if he never sees a book). The average undergraduate here takes five years to get out

In other education news this week, the rule designating the percentage amount to come from an individual teacher's paycheck to a retirement fund over which they have no control, no say & no oversight took effect here in Florida. In our case, this means the man who is part of a team of three faculty members responsible for a lecture, office hours, online homework etc. for 600+ pre-med students per semester, as well as raising through grants & other funding sources enough cash to cover his research (equipment, graduate student salaries, etc.), his own salary if he expects a check during the summer & let's not forget the 40% allocated to the university for administrative support, space, electric, etc. just took a 3% pay cut. I know things are tough all over, but the in this country educators make on average exactly the same amount they made in 2005, no cost of living increases, nada. From 2000 to 2005, teachers were lucky to get cost of living raises which might explain why only one teacher out of every three teaching in 2000 was still teaching in 2005. I could not find stats on those still teaching in 2010, but it is I doubt that many returned to teaching even with the economic downturn.

OH & it is Teacher Appreciation Week. Trust me, they are feeling the love...all the way to another profession. Except for the ones who are taking jobs in other countries. Right now, the single biggest next-employer for former colleagues we know is South Korea. If you think your healthcare is expensive when you are being gouged by US companies, wait until you get the bill when another country holds the patents on your diabetes home test kit, cholesterol medication, etc. As for everything else, most states are already lowering the education requirements for public school teachers. It turns out you cannot require a person to pay $$$ out of pocket for a job that pays less than $. Which means that chances are good that the teacher who stays in teaching is making money someplace else. Maybe it is from a spouse, maybe it is from patent licensing, maybe it is from dealing in crystal meth.

Kansas troubles

2011-04-30T13:53:00.147-04:00

Around the middle of March I got ensnared in a completely asinine conversation with my mother-in-law, the gist of which was how she resented paying higher taxes for other people's kids to go to school & not learn anything because the schools are completely broken. While I do have issues (many, many issues) with the state of public education, I had never entertained her solution-that the whole system should be privatized or pay-as-you go. My only response (I was a bit unprepared- not that I couldn't anticipate her opinion but that her son would ditch me with her for so long) was that didn't she think it was good thing that the person who handed her her medication could read? She countered that no, she did not think that was important because the doctor can read & the pharmacist can read & she can read & papa can read & they can all check that the medication is right. OKay then.

What she mostly kept flapping on about was some internet e-mail thing-y of an exam students used to have to take to graduate high school. I cannot link to the original for you to view because the document was formatted landscape but my in-laws printed it portrait, making the headers & footers & therefore the source unreadable to me. As for what did print, they could only read that mostly because the type was waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy oversized (but they don't need glasses, no sir). The whole thing boiled down to her assertion (& that of the chain letter, I gather) that no one could answer these exam questions today & therefore public education was completely decayed & should be trashed.

For future visits to my in-laws, I am thinking of carrying a copy of the equation sheet given to students taking today's FCAT so the two of them can use it while they answer those questions on-line (I am not printing the whole test & killing all those trees just to make a point that will not be taken), but on the day itself I was lucky enough to spot the one & only complete question (completely printed question, that is): Discuss the origins of the State of Kansas.

It was a gift, I tell you. I (& pretty much every other person who has ever had a glance at a quilt history guide of any kind) can do 15-45 minutes on Kansas...Kansas Troubles that is. & it all began today in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.

I will spare you the history highlights & get straight to my favorite part: the quilt blocks. That is except to say I think the intention of the original exam question was to probe the students' understanding of the ratification of an abolitionist state that could have gone either way (free or slavery I mean). I can do neither the history nor the quilts justice, but you can see quite a bit more here if you are interested (& you should be, it is interesting).

Kansas (OKay, a few more highlights are necessary) went on to make itself miserable, while trying to achieve a higher moral standard through narrow definition of the idea "high moral standard", by maintaining prohibition way longer than any other USState. Voters approved the state constitutional amendment 30+ years before the change was made to US constitution & kept it on the books until after WWII ended. Much more restrictive laws than any other state were still enforced well into to 1980s. It is just the shortest step from prohibition to Carrie Nation & her legendary hatchet. I have the vaguest recollection that the Kansas Troubles block is intended to represent her (hatchet, specifically), but I promise my mother-in-law was not listening any longer anyhow & never did get the quilt block connection. Also, I think I might be wrong & the hatchet of the block is actually...something else. History by quilt block is not an exact science.

Anyhow, we now arrive at the Carrie Nation quilt block, which looks like a cross between Puss in the Corner & Jacob's ladder to me, but hey, why not? There are all kinds of other temperance related quilt blocks including the Temperance T & Drunkard's Path. You could spend quite a while on this branch, but let's get back to Kansas, shall we?

There are other lovely Kansas-specific quilt blocks; Kansas Star is one of my favorites (although I did not know it was called Kansas Star until I started writing this blog entry-kind of like a FBQBS member who works for The Hartford but did not know the block she had chosen was called Hope of Hartford, not that I think the quilt block is about the insurance company).

It is hard to know exactly why quilting & Kansas are so linked; I know the Kansas City Star was one of the primary sources for quilt patterns (newspapers with declining subscription rates today don't have to buy a clue-I give them this one for free). It was probably one of those crucible things. For whatever reason, the Kansas City Star pretty much set the high-high standard of quilt patterns for decades & not surprisingly named many of the blocks after, well, Kansas & things Kansasian...Kansasite? If I really wanted to know (& I do, now, kinda) I could get the book by Barbara Brackman.

Finally, I decided I should make some Kansas blocks of my own so I went to Quilter's Cache & printed the directions for Kansas Trouble (sic) & the variation & made one of each. They are constructed on the same 4-patch idea with the swinging hatchet look. I (& again, most contemporary quilters) can see how the variation could become more popular with the tools & techniques currently in favor, but I think I prefer the look of the traditional block. To make the original, make four of the block on the left, to make the variation, make four of the block on the right.

The other life

2011-04-25T08:47:00.001-04:00

The final exam for A's physics class was Saturday afternoon so bright & early Sunday morning he got to work.

Coco is always scratching her big horse rump against something. After she did this, she moved down the fence line to the corner post & started rubbing on that. As the fence sawed back & forth, this particular piece wold flex open & closed like an elbow.

& I am not sure who did it but someone kicked a chicken-sized hole in the back of the hen house early Friday morning. I went out & found one small bird in the opening looking out. By the time I got the materials for a temporary repair, the biggest fattest birds were trying to force themselves en masse through the opening.

The donkey entertains himself on cold winter nights pulling down fence boards; this winter being what it was entire stretches of pole & board were just hanging off of their neighbors or gone entirely. But by lunchtime yesterday the fence looked like this:

What would Adolf do?

2011-04-20T05:00:00.050-04:00

Yea, I mean the Nazi icon himself, Der Führer. & there is absolutely no reason to ask what he would do because, well, we know. A better question is what would we do without him. That's right, let's imagine a 24-hour period in which no one called anyone else a Nazi/Fascist/the New Hitler. I am thinking we could roll-back all those cable channels to just the evening news.

Early last year I got so fed up I crossed all Nazi references off my radar. If a book had Nazis or Hitler references of any kind, I didn't read it, movie-I didn't see it, song I didn't sing it... Sorry about that last one, I've been listening to a lot of Petula Clark lately & apparently it is rubbing off. Which brings us to why I have not yet read The Girl With/Who Whatever books (or seen the movie Inglourious Basterds); I was trying to have a Nazi-free year.

It is harder than it sounds. Okay, parts were easier. Not that I was ever likely to watch much Glenn Beck, but now I had a reason because the Nazis come up a lot. Also, I no longer had to even pretend to read the books my in-laws try to foist on me because well, they are all about Nazis. But there are some perfectly other-wise unobjectionable books with Nazis: Pink Slip for example (where the Nazis are oh-so-incidental but still quite vivid for all that), & The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (which I had just read, so I was Okay with that).

Which bring me back to What Would Adolf Do? & I guess I should be embarrassed to say he just might do exactly what I am doing, throwing perfectly good literature, art & science (Okay, I tossed no science, but you get my point) out because it contains a reference I don't like.

By any other name

2011-04-17T06:53:00.009-04:00

When we first moved here, someone had planted three roses (of different colors & types, although I did not know that until later) in a very narrow, smallish space right next to the main gate out of our backyard. By main gate I mean the one we used from the cars, the one the meter reader used, etc. The couple we bought the house from had made many positive changes in the few years they lived here; this was not one of them. By the following spring, the first rose bush had grown the 2.5" inches or so required to start interfering with the gate itself. Digging out all three of them for replanting (as opposed to just hacking them out) was quite a task & I am not sure would not have bothered except R***** said she wanted them & it seemed churlish not to pass them on.

Anyway, they got planted outside the bay window in her kitchen & that is how we learned one of them was a yellow climbing rose (it was eventually moved to her back fence), one of them was lightly bushy with very few large red blooms (Mr. Lincoln, I presume) & one produced a lot of the tiniest pinkish, yellowish little flowers you ever saw along with many, many, many thorns. I have not thought much about roses from that spring to this.

That is when the local community education catalog came & there was a one-day class on varieties of antique roses. One day I could manage & something more obscure (& frankly denser green without the super-abundance of fast dieing blooms that need a super-abundance of deadheading) appealed. Let me stop here & say this is what I thought antique roses were: less work, fewer flowers, more likely to be fragrant, not the same rose every local housing development would have somewhere in the landscaping of their show model. & surprise, surprise I was mostly right. I might be wrong about the fewer blooms thing, that depends on what varieties you compare.

I came home with an overload of information-I was without question the least gardening person there; which is not to say they were not all excellent & experiences gardeners, the truth is I do not set the bar very high. So I had several handouts & a list of vocabulary used in class to look up later (I'm not shy but it seemed obnoxious for me to keep interrupting with "& what does that word mean?").

I also came home with three small roses to plonk down somewhere I can smell them & the name of the once-a-month antique rose dealer within walking distance of my front door (I know, right?). I will let you know how we do.

Le Grand Coeur Galoot

2011-04-15T13:18:00.043-04:00

There is, as you may know, a lot of chatter about pitbulls: how they are dangerous, how they make great family pets, how there no such breed as pitbull, how they are a clearly identifiable set of physical characteristics linked to aggressive behavior, how long do I need to keep this up before you get the picture.

I am rather ambivalent on the whole thing. I know lots of lovely pitbulls (there, I said it) & for each one I have met one whose owner got it BECAUSE he/she hoped it would be aggressive. I think maybe it is just possible that all this profiling has made pitbulls (said it again) ATTRACTIVE to people who want to look badass. The upshot is that the laws that are passed are challenged left & right (that's your tax money defending it people) & heartbreaking &/or unenforceable even where they are not challenged.

So I have decide to take another road, not a higher road, but certainly one less traveled. When asked if my flat-headed, under-slung-jawed spaz is a pitbull, I react with horror. No of course not, he is a Grand Coeur Galoot. I have even toyed with the idea of doctoring papers (from L'Académie de Chien? The Óstlann Gadhar-dhiúité? The sky is the limit, really). The reactions are mixed: "Oh, he looks like a pitbull, but he's so friendly" is the most frequent, my vet & his tech laughed out loud, & my personal favorite "what's wrong with a good old american dog? Why do you people always get some fancy french thing?" Actually that last one was paraphrased; I took out at least one Gawd dammmm.

As it happens our boy did not get as big as we thought he would & when standing next to a male *ahem* pitbull of the same age he looks kind of puny. So we have revised it: Petit Grand Coeur Galoot.

This breed renaming thing did not start here for us: this little girl on the right (your right, my left) is not a dachshund mix (dachshunds being the biting-est breed there is, just look at that other killer in the picture, No, not me, although I was quite the biter as a child) or even a chihuahua mix. She is Schnitzel de Hua Hua (prounonced Vah Vah). & my brother has a Wall-eyed Dingo...OKay, it's not his dog it's just visiting...for two years & counting.

While I didn't tell you that bit to tell you this one, it seems like as good a time as any. You know the show The Big Bang Theory? I L*O*V*E it. Love it love it love it. The first time A saw it he was irritated. Why do people make fun of physicists, why is it OKay to make fun of physicists, there has never been a more stereotyped group than physicists. He said this to me, his wife, an actual natural born blonde. I pointed out all the implied dumb blonde jokes in the same episode & oh by the way, get over yourself, which to his credit he did.

My final point is to all the people wringing their hands over unfair canine stereotypes, there is a small ungenerous part of me that wants to say "tell it to a french poodle". Yea, I know there are no laws saying poodles must be shot on sight, but when you start tracking the breeds of the dogs coming into vet clinics because some one kicked them, threw them out a window, tried to microwave them, etc. miniature poodles are winning. Or losing.

Log cabin count down

2011-04-13T09:38:00.005-04:00

A brief interruption to just nudge anyone interested in the log cabin swap. Blocks are due here Saturday April 30th. I was not sure what I would do if the gov't shutdown & non-essential services were turned off (i.e. our local mail delivery staff would have been halved for the second time in

We have a 6th block person, who is making a quilt (or quilts, if we get enough blocks) for kid(s) in her local foster care system. If you want to participate, send your five blocks to swap (with return envelope, et cetera) & a 6th block which I will send on to her.

The block is a semi-traditional log cabin. The specifics of the block can be found here & here, but sometimes a photo of the actual swap blocks helps, too:

The centers should be RED, one side either dark or light & the other side three fabrics, one of which should have a "nature" theme (ideally a leaf pattern but flowers are fine, too). All the planks should be cut 2.5" & the unfinished size is 14.5" (14" finished, which you can see is bigger than my dog, so that is a pretty good size. Nine could easily make a baby-sized quilt.

PS: Please please remember the deadline for this swap is "due by" not "postmarked by". It is true that if you tell me your blocks are in transit (especially if you are on another continent or even at the other end of the US) & they do not arrive by the deadline, there are a few sets I can hold for re-mix (those going to people I actually see in the course of the week or so following the swap & of course, those going to me), but this usually means you get at least some of your own back unless it has been a particularly popular swap. Our local post office has taken one of the worst cuts I have heard of (we suspect they are trying to get us to all get post offices boxes so they could faze out rural delivery entirely), so delivery has been slower than usual. Within the US-48 blocks should be in the mail no later than Monday, April 25th to get here on time.

Magnolia mothers & daughters

2011-04-09T12:09:00.004-04:00

We have two of the largest, most wonderful a Magnolia grandiflora in almost opposite corners of our backyard. While certainly the same kind of tree, they are obviously not from the same cutting: they bloom on slightly different schedules (one always a week or so later than the other & somehow finished sooner), when they first emerge their buds are dramatically different shapes (one looks just as yo would expect, the other is long & narrow like a cigarette & thickens to a more bulb shape over a few days). They are so big & so healthy that on a hot humid afternoon you can sit between them & feel the fragrance hanging over you like a curtain. They are wonderful.

In the fall, they produce large prickly seed pods with very dramatic red, red seeds. I used to hurl them into the no-man's-land between our front yard & the road (a space about 16' wide we let grow wild so we have some barrier from the dust of the road). Over the years I have tossed many things in there & as a result we have quite a a mixture that more or less does just fine. I mentioned once to a more experienced gardener that was doing this & he told me it would never work. The seeds need to be soaked, et cetera et cetera & it was more work than I was interested in especially once he said it was unlikely any of the seeds had been fertilized anyhow (in his defense he had never been to my house & I am not sure I mentioned I had two adult, almost-adjacent trees). So I stopped doing this about five years ago, after doing it for seven or so years in a rather haphazard way with no discernible results.

Did you know it takes up to fifteen years for Magnolia grandiflora to flower for the first time? & in an undergrowth of young cedars, virginia creeper, varieties of sumac & mimosa, not to mention an airy but thorough ground cover of ferns along with various other take-a-chance plants, it can be hard to catch sight of those signature leaves, especially if you are not looking for them.

Spring is over, long live spring

2011-04-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

In mid-February, when my mom was visiting, we took a walk around the local botanical garden. I used to spend a lot more time there than I do now; I had not been since the last time we took my mom.

When we went our own backyard camellias were peaking & slipping down the other side, theirs were as good as over; their azaleas were in full bloom, ours opened later in March; the bulb garden was in full swing, ours were also in full swing, mostly because I force them indoors BUT the amaryllis someone planted outside the back door, when the house ended at the kitchen & now that garden is in the corner behind the Trane were not blooming yet, then. They are just opening now.

These seasonal pockets can be quirky: my yard lags behind a neighbors by about a day & of course on the grand scale, what is already waiting for next spring here is just this spring springing where my mom actually lives, so she is kind of having two springs. I wonder if that is why she always tries to visit in February?

Whatever the reason, that day spring was everything it should be & we were in a garden.

Not your mother's tofu..not that I know your mother, maybe it is her tofu

2011-04-02T14:32:00.018-04:00

More than a few people have told me recently that they might be willing to eat more tofu if only they knew what to do with it &/or they had a bad (i.e. bland) tofu experience 20+ years ago & have not been back for seconds. Also, I have had a few husbands say they would not eat tofu, not matter what including one guy who had been eating tofu for let's just say a while without ever questioning what it was. It might be chicken. Very square chicken.

For those who do not know, tofu is what happens when milk made from soy beans coagulates & is then pressed to remove moisture. & before you get all EWW disgusting, chicken nuggets are primarily made from offal. In the game of I-may-never-stop-gagging, chicken nuggets win.

When you buy tofu at the store, it is usual to open the container & move the block to another container of fresh, clean water although I admit if I know I am going to use it within the next day, I don't bother. Once you have moved it however, you will want to change the water every day or so until you do use it. Because tofu blocks are large for a single meal, it is likely you will not use a whole block at once. Just tip out the water, add fresh to cover the remaining block (& then put the cover on the container so you don't slosh water all over the fridge) & put it back in the fridge. Because there is so much water in tofu, I have never frozen it. I am quite sure the texture would change dramatically, but for all I know it changes back, or it is a pleasing change. Someone will have to try that & let me know.

If all of this water changing sounds like too much work, you can do what I do which is cook it all at once & then use it in salads, casseroles, sandwiches, scrambled eggs, etc. over the next few days. If you are going to go this route, you want to cook it in a spice or spices or flavors that will 'match' the rest of the menu for the next few days. Or not, I suppose, if you want something completely different.

This is what I do:

I buy extra firm tofu & cut it into cubes no bigger than my thumb. I have small hands so think small cubes.

I take whatever pan I will be using; I like a big flat pan with high sides, but anything you have would work. If you have been looking for a reason to use that old wok, here it is.

At this point I either cook something else in the pan (sauteing onions is the way I am most likely to go) or in a cold (Okay room temperature) pan I put in as little light oil as possible to cover the bottom. This will involve adding a few drops, & swishing the pan around. Again, because tofu has so much water, you don't want to add any more moisture than you need to. At this point I often also add whatever spices I might be using. Lately I have been favoring a mix of spices from Pakistani cuisine, last summer I was on a kind of chili powder kick, but I have been known to go with curry or sage or sesame or paprika...anything really. A friend of mine puts bouillon cubes in the pan with the littlest bit of water, lets that cook away & then adds the tofu. Whatever you fancy will probably work; tofu picks up flavors readily (another good reason to keep it covered in the fridge).

Then I turn on the heat, let one side sizzle, gently stir, let the next side sizzle. The sides exposed to to the hot pan & spice will shrink a bit, giving it a lopsided sort of look until all of them have shrunk down. All told, it probably won't take much more then ten minutes or so giving you ample time to call your mother or make next weeks grocery list or empty the dishwasher or whatever between stirrings.

When it is done, maybe tip it onto a plate covered with a paper towel to cool. Or spoon it, depending on how wet/oily the whole thing is. After it cools, you can put the cooked tofu into sealed containers & refrigerate a day or three until you are ready to use them.

It doesn't sound like much but added to salad it will add well, calcium & protein. & yes, it will also add some fat, but compared to what you might eat instead, it is an improvement. As for all those studies about increased dementia, keep in mind the study looked at elderly japanese men who 1) ate way more tofu in their lives than you will even if you eat it every day starting today & 2) the same group also had a much lower incidence of heart disease colon cancer, etc & lived way longer than you are going to if you are eating any other fried crap, so stop worrying.

Pascua Florida Day

2011-04-01T09:57:00.000-04:00

I confess I have lived here for a while, longer than I lived anywhere except the house I grew up in, but this year is the first time I have ever heard of Pascua Florida Day. This is doubly odd as it IS the state holiday & my husband works for the state. Pascua Florida Day is actually April 2, but this year Florida is observing it on -you guessed it- April Fool's Day.

It is just too easy to make fun of Florida (recently a state representative was reprimanded for using the word "uterus" while talking about abortion rights); fool doesn't really seem like enough. So, let's stick to tomorrow's holiday today.

When Ponce de Leon first discovered Florida (& he was here first, no matter what the Timocua thought), he named the place for the flowers that were all around him (Florida = Land of Flowers). Specifically, he named it for the easter-time feast of flowers or Pascua Florida. I went looking for information about Pascua Florida but it turns out there are A LOT of spanish flower festivals.

Every school child knows (well, when I was a school child I knew) that Ponce de Leon was looking for the Fountain of Youth. The gold every other spanish explorer put at the top of his list is just sort of implied. He didn't find it but every little-bit older school child knows/knew that for much of the 20th century the people moving to Florida were still looking for the Fountain of Youth; at the end of the last century, 20% of the population was over 62 or older, while nationwide less than 15% of the population was over 62. Plenty of other people come here to recapture youth temporarily, they tend to hang out & about around Disney. Lost youth is big business here. Anyone who has taken a look at the state of education knows that current youth doesn't have quite the same importance.

Don't get me wrong, I love it here. I would have a lot of trouble uprooting & moving someplace else, even some place that used to be on my top ten I wish I lived there list (which Florida never was). Still when I hear things like "as California goes, so goes the nation" I think about Florida, because here just might be where good old bad ideas come to revisit their lost youth.

In the end, Ponce de Leon was killed by a poison dart from the manchineel tree (the dart was dipped in the poison, I think, not made from the wood although I am told the wood IS poisonous, so maybe) a tree which has both male & female reproductive parts on a single plant. Also, the flowers are really not all that much to look at, but they do pack quite a wallop.

March was...

2011-03-31T06:45:00.000-04:00

Did you know March was National Craft Month? It's Okay, I've been busy too.

March was also National Women's History Month. I confess I am to some degree with Morgan Freeman on this one: He said all american history is black history, or vice versa, or black american history was american history, something like that. Yes, I know he wasn't talking about women exactly but it seems to me all-encompassing histories should encompass well, all. That being said, I am not sure I would mind if they started limiting white man history to just one month.

National Quilt Month I did know. It started as a day & blew out into a month. I know how that goes. I celebrated National Quilt Month by... I don't remember what I did the exact day, but given my usual quilt-celebrations I am sure there was something appropriate.

& of course, National Kidney Month is not to be missed. I would give Employee Spirit Month a wide berth, though.

All kinds of produce: bell peppers & broccoli, & on thru the alphabet to National Frozen Food Month. I guess they thought they would get it all over at once; March is also National Nutrition Month.

Adopt a Rescue Guinea Pig Month, no I am not kidding. Also umbrellas, which I can kind of see, & kites, whose month runs from the end of March until the beginning of May. It's like National Kite Month caught some air & being on a string, it was able to run out a bit further than the usual month does.

The list goes on&on, so let's end with: Expanding Girls' Horizons in Science & Engineering Math Month.

As for me I did quilt, I did not adopt a guinea pig; I ate broccoli & avoided bell peppers; did absolutely nothing to improve employee spirit & watched A expand all kinds of science for women...& men. Even the white ones.

What would Anita do?

2011-03-25T23:39:00.002-04:00

As we s*l*o*w*l*y come up on the end of Florida's gay adoption ban (& yes, I do consider this one of the silver linings of our tanked economy; it is hard to justify spending $100,000s defending a policy that is just not going to to stand up at the next judicial tier no matter how moral you might think it is), I thought it would be a good time to take a little look at today's birthday girl: Anita Bryant.

Anita's parents divorced when she was quite small, & Anita was sent to live with her maternal grandparents. I don't know if it was a happy childhood, but it looks like a successful one: she began her musical career with their encouragement, she graduated high school, was crowned Miss Oklahoma 1958 & made it to the final four in the Miss America Pageant. Shortly after this she made the Billboard charts with one of my favorite songs (although I do prefer the Beatles version & even better Miss Peggy Lee; what can I say, I just love The Music Man). She also got a college scholarship but I cannot see that she attended or graduated (it can be hard to find this information about those pre-Google days in the time I am prepared to look for it, which is almost none). In 1960 she married a Miami disc jockey & they had four children...& twenty years together.

All that time Anita was singing, wedding, birthing, she was also preaching, kinda. I confess "preacher" is a lot like "imam" to me. Anyone with the inclination seems able to break into the biz; I am very unclear as to the qualifications (although I am fairly certain the position does NOT come with health insurance). Anyway, Ms. Bryant declared a fatwa on anything she saw as a threat to her vision of family.

One of her early targets was......divorce. & then she got one. Let me go on record as saying I am a HUGE fan of divorce. As A says, divorce means all those people who cannot stand the sight of each other can get away without killing each other. Neither of us has ever been divorced...so far (I also say the same thing about rape; I haven't been...so far).

Which means I really am happy for Anita's divorce. If she would go through with it despite the disapproval of some of her followers, she must have really needed it. What is damn shame is she never stopped to think if she was wrong about this, what else might she have been wrong about? Because it was her group that reversed local laws protecting homosexuals in Miami & went on to inspire (& bankroll) similar movements across the country. & while her movement had a far reaching impact, it also reached around & impacted her. The divorce, yes, but her wholesome spokesperson career was over. It turns out homosexuals drink as much orange juice as anyone & homo-phobes won't buy orange juice just because Anita Bryant is on the poster, especially a divorced Anita Bryant. & a handful (her description) of protesters getting coverage outside of her other venues helped the invitations to those venues dry up.

So she picked herself up, dusted herself off (after a flirtation with prescription drug abuse) & looked for a niche within her niche (divorced, jonesing homo-phobes!) & opened a theater where those who wanted to could hear her sing & minister. Alas, her flock was only getting smaller, as evidenced by the extremely low attendance at her performances, until finally even the most devoted were completely cashed out & broke & then Anita left town...to rise again-again.

More recently Anita Bryant was singing the national anthem at the 2011 Oklahoma Gubernatorial Inaugural Ball. Which brings us to what would Anita do? From here, it looks like she would count on almost everything old being new again & what isn't old/new being overlooked. What it seems she won't be doing is considering there might be more to the human condition than forgiveness for only the transgression she has made. Happy Birthday Anita. You remain for me a shining example of how a bright & pretty cover can disguise a shallow, spiteful story....but only for so long.

Credit: Free images from acobox.com

Fire: a centennial

2011-03-25T06:41:00.187-04:00

There has been a lot of buzz about the evilness of unions, & I will even grant you that union-might has been damaging to some parts of our lives, but I think it also worth looking at why unions happened & why most of us are glad they existed, even if we sometimes wish they would go away now. Today seemed like a good day; it is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

To highlight, on March 25th 1911 a fire broke out on the 8th floor of the Asch Building just east of Washington Square Park in Manhattan. People on the tenth floor could be (& were) contacted by telephone, but there was no fire alarm in the building & the warning the building was on fire came on foot, with the fire itself. Ultimately 146 people died (the last six victims were only officially identified February 2011) & 70+ were injured. Most of the victims were young immigrant women, still the people generally hired to do the same work in the garment industry today whether it happens here in the US or overseas.

The reason(s) for the high death toll are straightforward:

-access to exits (& entrances for firemen) was blocked either by clutter, opened inward, or might have been actually locked. I think it is worth noting that while locking what we now know of as "fire doors" (largely because of this fire by-the-by) is & was a code violation, I myself have worked in two places that did it routinely; the supervisors could see no other way to keep the riff-raff they hired from sneaking out for a quick cigarette or stealing or whatever. This practice, obviously still around, was as-good-as standard at the time of the fire.

-fire company ladders did not reach above the sixth floor (this was more an available materials versus laws of physics thing than a failure, exactly) & the fire escape bottomed at the second floor. It could have brought people within range of the ladders, but it collapsed under the weight of people trying to leave the building & was neglected & perhaps damaged before the fire ever broke out. More than 60 people died in the fire escape collapse or jumping from windows into inadequate life nets which tore under the impact. Again the laws of physics were at play; the nets could have handled people jumping from lower heights.

-the fire company was quickly on-site, but again, because of the sixth floor limit on the ladders, the blocked doors, & other more grisly reasons, they could not reach the fire. Police lines were erected to prevent people from rushing into the building while it burned.

-most of the victims' first language was not english, nor was any other single language spoken by a clear majority of factory employees; it would have been impossible to communicate anything to this panicked crowd, even if there was a way to communicate with them, which there mostly wasn't. Nevertheless, no emergency plan was in place: employees had never been instructed on how to respond to a fire, how to get out safely, no fire drills were ever conducted (nor were they required by law).

The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were tried & acquitted for manslaughter; they later agreed to pay $75 to the families of 23 victims who brought suit against them. It is worth noting both men were in the building with members of their family when the fire broke out & survived by evacuating to the roof with a number of others. There was a lot of press at the time about their greed, but they were very much men of their time & the conditions of their factory were typical, despite a recent catastrophic fire in a Newark factory. Making these men out to be monsters keeps us from examining our own potential failures.

Less than a year later, sweeping changes were already being drafted to upgrade building codes, their regulation & enforcement. The ILGWU (International Ladies Garments Workers Union) already existed & had called a successful strike the previous year; working conditions were among their grievances. Following the fire, the ILGWU became one of the most powerful organizations in the United States. Another less-clear result was the rise of the suffragist movement. It is certainly not a fluke that the people who suffered most in these working conditions had no political voice.

As for the Fire's centennial, there are events planned at the building site as well as other places around the country, but maybe the best way to honor the day is to remember when you look at those people sitting in protest in state houses & other public spaces, maybe what they want is not a free-ride for life or even no-charge-to-them Viagra. Maybe what they want are the same ordinary protections you would want in their place.

More on red

2011-03-21T21:21:00.015-04:00

I have already blogged about the March Block Lotto block, so I will spare you except: it is red, I didn't have much red & then once I bought some red I figured I may as well use what I had selvage-to-selvage set & made four sets of most. As I was doing this, I remembered C****** really likes red & black (she really likes light blue & black, too; I guess it would be more accurate to say she likes black & other colors) & so I thought I would toss a few black & white blocks in there.

By the time I was done, one set of red&white will go to the block lotto winner(s), which still leaves me holding more red&white blocks, almost of them triplets & much more than I could ever use, especially after I had thrown in the black&white blocks I made soooo....

I thought about this post on the Block Lotto blog. To be brief, she collects 8.5" unfinished/8" finished red&white blocks & makes quilt for leukemia patients (& you can read more here). I had actually already thought I would send her whatever I had left after I was done with the first part, but I had not yet thought thru the whole C****** likes red&black thing either, so I have more left over than if I just used the spare red&whites.

Off these go, to France as it happens, altho' I am guessing they won't necessarily stay there.

Baldrick & green beverages

2011-03-17T09:51:00.037-04:00

For today a saint that is not a saint. Was never even a person, actually (or if there was a person named Baldrick, no one ever attempted to canonize him as far as I can tell). & does not have an actual day. Saint Baldrick celebrants aim for sometime around Saint Patrick's Day, usually a week-end day just to be convenient.

How to observe a saint's day that never had a saint? Why shaving your head of course. Well, actually, having it shaved. I know I said to do this around Saint Patrick's Day, but celebrants are usually stone-cold-sober when they participate.

A few years ago at a Saint Baldrick's Day event, my sister had her head shaved by a clown -an actual clown- while an accordion was played in the background. Then same clown painted flower/flames/not sure what they were really on her face. My brother says this is one of the rings Dante neglected. I'm not sure I disagree. I like accordion music (I still have my old Gerard Blanchard albums for when the apocalypse erases all your new-fangled digital music), but clowns make me nervous. Clowns with clippers, well, I just don't need that kind of anxiety.

At this point, if you are still reading, you are asking "Why?" I have no idea why clowns & accordions & facepainting, but the shaving is a fundraiser for research into childhood cancers. I have a vague idea that they gather the hair for cancer wigs, but I might be wrong about that. It is entirely possible the shaving is incidental. Well, not entirely, money is raised by getting sponsors much like a walk-a-thon only nobody has to walk anywhere & the proof of accomplishment is right there for all to see.

That's all I've got really. No history to plumb...or embellish. The patron saint of barbers has actually already been covered in this blog & believe me, I was as surprised as anyone when I looked it up. I could find no patron of clowns or circus performers, but I will keep looking. As for accordion players or manufacturers nada, although if you google "accordian saint", Saint Paul, MN comes up a lot.

The old sexagon is the new...

2011-03-15T13:04:00.001-04:00

I laughed out loud when I read the original sexagon post over at Lansey Brothers. The gist- kinda- is how the sexagon has gone out of vogue; the word, not the shape. It has been replaced with "hexagon" & the much more cumbersome "six sided polygon". For those of you asking yourselves "this is coming up here why?", the sexagon is actually better known to quilters everywhere as the unit that makes up the Grandmother's Flower Garden.

Just to be clear, we are talking about an actual six-sided shape, not the six person sexual position/act, although now I really want everyone to start calling that a Grandmother's Flower Garden. Whenever it might come up in conversation. Whenever that might be.

So..the sexagon quilt. I have been quilting for a while now, but I have never made one of those. I have made the odd blossom now & then to add to something else. but to commit to a full-size sexagon...I just don't have that kind of time. Also, I am just not that into all those little pieces that all need to fit together. Still it's a useful skill so here we go:

As with all handwork, your first sexagon is probably the hardest. The first tricky part is making sure all six sides (& each angle) is exactly equal to every other side (& angle). But since we are talking about fabric sexagons, there is some wiggle room. More than you can imagine, actually.

Begin by getting yourself a sexagon. Lansey Brothers have oh-so-conveniently provided one right in their sexagon post. Click it, print it, cut it out. It's a nice big one & for a beginner, the big ones are just so much easier to work with. Trace it onto something a bit more stable (I like to use those card stock campaign thingeys we get swamped with every November). Cut out as many of these as you will need pieces for your sexagon quilt. To make a single flower, you will need seven, although you could certainly keep going until you run out of steam.

If you are like me, you will print a second sexagon, pencil in a slightly larger sexagon around the first (say 3/8ths of an inch). This is your fabric template, so you can cut the fabric large enough to fold a bit over the edges. I should note that you can actually buy these; you can buy the masters to make your own templates or you can just buy the templates. But what if you just don't take to sexagons? Then you will have them, just sitting there & you will find yourself saying things like "I thought I would really like sexagons, but alas they are not for me".

Match one fabric sexagon to one recycled junk mail sexagon, centering the smaller on the wrong-side of the larger. There is no wrong side to the smaller, cardstock sexagon. Somehow attach the two; some people use fabric glue stick, but I prefer teeny-eeny torn off pieces of painter's tape. Start basting.

If you are having trouble seeing the potential of the sexagon in quilting, take a cruise on over to The Great Hexagon Quilt-Along. & if you can get them to change it to The Great Sexagon Quilt-Along, you would be well on the way to bringing the sexagon back into the lexicon. If you cannot see yourself going whole hog for a sexagon quilt, this site here has some other fine suggestions (& better directions than mine). I cannot see myself making a whole one, but was delighted when I got another blue&yellow basket in the mail, this one with sexagon flowers.

In absolutely-true, double entendre news, my mother-in-law drops broad hints that she would like a sexagon/grandmother's flower garden quilt whenever we see one. There is a really big one at Dudley Farm. Maybe if they had billed themselves as the Home of the Sexagon Quilt they could have boosted attendance. Maybe not.

One of our Thursdays was in Vancouver

2011-03-14T07:25:00.002-04:00

If you are not a Thursday Next fan you might just want to skip this one; if you have never heard of Thursday Next what are you waiting for?!? Run, don't walk to your local library & get the Eyre Affair. It is good if you have read Jane Eyre but it is not worth postponing the Eyre Affair to get caught up.

Let me begin (again) by saying I have been the side-car on more than one of A's business trips. In the old day, if I didn't tag along some of the time, we would never have seen each other. At first, when people knew I was coming it did not matter that he attended every meeting, every lunch, every dinner & that I went off & did my own thing, whomever he was meeting with acted as though we were taking advantage of this trip to take a vacation. Considering that I/we paid for my own travel expenses, our meals if we did eat together & any past-the-business-portion portion of the hotel bill, while passing on to whatever organization paid for him to be there the reduced airfare (for a Saturday he would never have stayed over if I hadn't been there), the reduced hotel (because we extended our stay beyond the conference, meeting, whatever) this frosted me a bit. The funny thing is how much this has changed; you cannot imagine what perks a company was prepared to throw in if we would leave a few days early for our own vacation, make a stopover near SanFran & spend a couple days/nights there.

Where was I again. Oh, right, M****** was tagging along on a trip & needed to lay low while her husband did the work he was being paid to do. Also she needed something(s) to read while en route to the opposite corner of this country & then out of it. Our bookclub had met a day or so before she was leaving & so I handed over my (library's) copy of Peyton Place, a book we decided against mostly because 1/2 the group had already read it & not for the reasons bookclubs might discard it (it was so potentially popular, next year I am floating Valley of the Dolls). Anyway, she took it & planned to read it & everything was settled...

...when suddenly, the following day...

...I happened to stop at the library & what should I be given but the brand new Thursday Next book, released that very day & I was numero uno on the book holds list. I was so excited I started reading it in traffic (at the red lights, I'm not suicidal). But while I was driving, I realized there was no way I would have time to read this book with the schedule I am looking down on for the next ten days at least (& more like 20, really). & it really truly pains me to have a book I know others want & not read it; it just seems greedy & thoughtless & wrong. I was on the verge of returning it so as not to have it on my conscience when it occurred to me, Thursday Next could go to Vancouver! I could get the good-friend points for passing on a book I didn't have time for anyway & maybe, just maybe if I knew it would be back in a week I could clear & make time for Agent Next.

So it happened that a brand new copy arrived here in Alachua County & 72 hours later traveled due west & then north out of the country. That Thursday, she gets around. I just wish she could hop on back here three weeks ago when I could have spent some time with her, but for now I am rereading all the other Thursdays (because I found a few pockets of time, also most of them are on disc & in this way I can read Thursdays & do something else at the same time).

A tale of two yogurt makers

2011-03-12T17:19:00.000-05:00

It has been many many years since I made yogurt the old-fashioned way: heat the ingredients, cool the ingredients, add the culture & let it sit, warmly, for upwards of eight hours. It has, in fact, been decades. The last time I made yogurt this way had to be sometime before 1992. How can I be so sure? Easy: in 1992 I moved to north joisey & they have laws against doing anything good-for-you that does not involve a hefty gym membership...

OKay the real reason is we moved out of our apartment in Storrs, CT. & what made this such a magical yogurt making apartment, you ask? Well, let me tell you: sometime before my residence there hot water was included in the rent, but that changed. As a result each apartment had to be fixed with its own hot water heater & in almost every case this meant what was the front closet became the hot water heater closet. The hot water heater filled most of the space, but there remained a shelf at the top (for storing anything that could be subjected to daily increases in temperature with or without high humidity depending on the water heater's state of repair). Between the water heater itself & the shelf there was a gap just big enough for a glass topped bowl & with a little big of plywood rigged up a yogurt making/bread dough rising space was created. All I had to do was the heat, cool & add cultures thing, then A took a shower, then I took a shower, maybe did a few dishes, etc. With adequate insulation & spreading these tasks out over six or so hours, it was perfect.

After we moved & alas, no such space existed, or could even be made to exist. In Joisey, landlords never ever included hot water so there was space accessible only from the outside for the hot water heater & I caved & got a yogurt maker. Actually I acquired my mother's yogurt maker, a machine that was looking retro even then. & for many years we were happy together.

Sure, me & that old yogurt maker, we had our ups& downs. That timer looking thing on the top there is more like a dial; you set it to the time you should turn off (which in the absence of a fancy-shmancy switch means unplug) the yogurt maker; the appliance itself does nothing on its own except make kinda-even heat. More than once I had a batch of very very tangy yogurt when I left it too long, but it made lovely cheese so all was not lost.

Last week, I taught C****** the heat & add & keep warm thing & sent her home with a batch of not-yet-yogurt & my mother's old yogurt maker. I did this, of course to make room for my new yogurt maker. It arrived on Tuesday, just in time for me to gaze at it longingly while I got ready for bookclub.

Color: the beginning & the end

2011-03-11T12:40:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday, we had our second to last bookclub of the year; yes we have an off-sort-of schedule. This means that in addition to our regularly scheduled book discussion, we also picked the books for the upcoming year (which starts in May). Last March-ish we choose the book we read last night & we really had no idea how things would line up. So it happened that on Fat Tuesday, we had our discussion for Color: A Natural History of the Palette.

As I may have said before (I cannot recall & I cannot be bothered to look), we have food with our book on the second Tuesday of nine of the twelve months (we rest in July, August, & December). Sometimes we try to match the food to the book, sometimes we don't, sometimes some of us do & some if us don't. For whatever reason, last night -with the least accessible book food-wise that I think we have ever had- we all decided to eat-in-theme. & that theme was color. I made white bread, white rice & a yogurt spread that was....white. Others brought pickled beets & carrot soup, chocolate, black beans & so forth. We also had a dessert of white cake, white creme & a painters palette of fruit.

As for the selection, it is always a surprise to me what people will choose bookwise. I sat down thinking there was really only one of my candidates I really wanted; less than half-way thru the process I was completely prepared to cut it loose & forget about it but others were now very interested (in what is a I admit a bit of dated dime fiction-that is what I like about it). We ended up with:

May 10th - Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
June 14th -Waking up in Eden by Lucinda Fleeson
September 13th - Palace Walk by Nagib Mahfouz
October 11th - We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
November 8th - The Dining Room by A. R. Gurney
January 10th - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
February 14th - Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin
March 13th - Enders Game by Orson Scott Card
April 10th - Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
with the extra for the overachiever of Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout .

We also had a lively discussion about how obsessed a woman has to be with the origins of color to go wandering around Afghanistan looking for a guide who can she her where the lapis lazuli comes from. These are the kinds of people we love to read about & are mostly glad not to be.

The meeting ran late & by the time we wrapped up I was ready for bed. B****** looked ready too; I almost offered her the futon in A's office, but I know she has dogs to get home to. S**** & L**** were driving M****** home; she was planning to stay up for several more hours packing for a trip to Vancouver. C****** left us to go on to a Mardi Gras party that was more or less just getting started.

Next month our book is The Tortilla Curtain by T. C. Boyle. This most recent time was the first time anyone came in costume, but I am kinda hoping she does it again...

8:56 (4 to 9, get it?)

2011-03-10T08:56:00.002-05:00

It began with the red&white March 2011 Block Lotto block. I am not what you would call a red fan; I was hard-pressed to find any red fabric at all for a much small challenge way-back-when but this time I decided to just bite the bullet & buy more fabric. You know, to help the economy.

& since I was buying fabric, & I happened to have a 50% off any single purchase one-day only coupon in my purse & I was right there on that day... I also bought a little (by my standards) cutting board with a lazy susan idea. The short version is, if it were not for this purchase,many many 8:56 blocks would never have been cut; because of this board, I now have even more quilts in mind.

Almost everyone on the block lotto blog said how fast this block went. That was not quite my experience, exactly.

I will say making the first step 4-patches was indeed a piece of cake. Almost every selvage-to-selvage strip worked up into 8 pairs & then four 4-patches, so that pile did grow quickly, quantity-wise.

The next few steps really dragged though. One at a time each 4-patch was cut one inch from that center seam four times. Then the borders between the two were flipped, etcetera etcetera etcetera. I like to do this kind of thing in bulk, but having one board from which to work & a desire to keep everything in order as best I could, it was one block at a time from here on out.

It probably did not help I was listening to the Fellowship of the Ring at the time. All those elven legends, all that cut turn cut turn cut turn....stitch press stitch press... Still so far I am happy with the results & I am 99.9% sure the worst is behind me (never say never).