Wordless definitions: persistent

I suppose this definition requires a bit of explanation. If you go into my sewing room, you'll see a bit of a mess: piles of spare fabric, stacks of pants that need altering, boxes with projects inside. The boxes are there to keep project materials together in one place, and to keep cats out. This isn't always the best strategy. You see, cats love piles of fabric to curl up and shed hairs upon; they also love boxes. Sometimes when I bring out one of my boxes to work on a project, I have to forcibly prevent Callie from climbing into it. There are enough spare cat hairs around this place without her directly sitting upon something.

This can be especially problematic when I'm working on something large, like a quilt. Once it can't fit in a box any more, I fold it up and hang it on a rack, or place a book on top to protect it from catnaps. In this instance, I thought by folding the quilt and placing it on the rickety end of my ironing board, I would prevent the cat from using it as a bed. Silly me. Callie is so persistent in sharing her fur that I caught her napping in this very position. Of course when I ran downstairs to fetch my camera, she woke up to see what the fuss was about. Still, you can see she isn't particularly inclined to give up her comfy new bed. And now you see why I always wash a quilt once I've finished it....

Cookie of the Month: Lemon Snowflakes

As you may have noticed, I'm slowing down a bit on the blog. Part of it is that I'm spending more time working, and part of it is that I'm running out of quick-and-dirty topics to talk about. I'm not running out of travel photos anytime soon, but my quilt pictures are running low and the latter half of the alphabet hasn't been inspiring me. I've got plenty to review for Janespotting, but it's taking me a while to slog through some of these older classics. So I thought: what is something I love to do that I won't get tired of blogging about? I thought and thought for a while, and then I recalled the immortal words of one of our great philosophers, C. Monster, words by which I strive to live my life:

Work hard. Play fair. EAT COOKIE.

Yes, just for you, my thousands dozens handful of readers, I'm introducing a new feature to The Blathering: Cookie of the Month. Each month I will attempt a new cookie recipe (new to me, at least), and let you all know how it goes. Now, I love to bake and I'm pretty good at cookies, but I tend to rely on the same favorites all the time: snickerdoodles, peanut butter (especially topped with kisses), chocolate chocolate chip—all the usual drop cookies and rolled cookies, but nothing that unusual. For you, though, this will change! And first up is a very interesting treat, the Lemon Snowflake Cookie (LSC).

I was introduced to the LSC this holiday season, when one of my lovely and talented TKD students included a couple on a gift tray of tasty Christmas cookies. I nibbled, I said yum, I asked for the recipe:

1 Tablespoon grated lemon rind

¾ cup margarine

1 cup flour

½ cup confectioners sugar

½ cup cornstarch

½ teaspoon lemon extract

colored sprinkles or nonpareils (about one bottle worth)

glaze: ¾ cup confectioners sugar + ¼ cup lemon juice

Cream margarine, sugar, lemon rind, and extract. Add in flour and cornstarch; form and roll dough into a log.

It's easiest to do this atop a sheet of wax paper. As you can see from the picture, the dough has a texture that's very close to pie dough. It didn't want to hang together very easily, but it's very easy to roll fallen blobs onto the log ... at least in comparison to rolling a pie crust.

Roll log in colored sprinkles; wrap in wax paper and refrigerate overnight. Slice and place on a greased cookie sheet.

Even though my dough had been chillin' for almost a day, it still tended to have little pieces break off as I cut the slices. Luckily, it wasn't difficult to stick the pieces back on (although it marred the nice edges somewhat). You see one drawback of this recipe: it only made one tray of around 40 cookies.

Bake at 350F for 10 minutes. When cool, frost with confectioners sugar and lemon juice glaze.

The recipe I got wasn't clear about proportions for the glaze, so I checked a couple of recipe books and started with ¾ cup sugar to ¼ cup lemon juice. I had a stir a bit to get rid of the sugar lumps, but eventually got a consistency a little thinner than syrup. I used a basting brush to cover one side of all the cookies; I let that dry before flipping all the cookies and brushing the other side. And finally, I ended up with this:

The texture was much like shortbread, but the lemon gave it a bit of a tangy kick. They were very tasty—it was nigh impossible to eat just one—and didn't last long. Therein lies the drawback with this recipe: it was fairly labor intensive (lemon grating, glazing) and if you're the type of person who absolutely must have a cookie as soon as they're out of the oven, this might not work for you. But since the recipe contains no milk or eggs, and you can use margarine instead of butter, it might be good for those who need to avoid dairy products. It may even qualify as a vegan cookie, not that I really worry about such things.

Final judgment: Nom nom nom nom. (Four noms out of five. Fellow Cookie Monster followers should understand.)

Photo of the Week--2/22/10

Proof once again that you can build your ramparts, walls, and castles, and you still can't keep out the pigeons. This was a stop during our Greek cruise at Rhodes, home of one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. There was no evidence of the Colossus, though, just these lovely towers of the Palace of the Grand Master in the medieval Old Town. It was a lovely fall day, and pigeons needed to be terrorized, so Boy obliged.

Janespotting: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

When it came time to reading adaptations/sequels/variations on Northanger Abbey, I was presented with a bit of a dilemma: there aren't many. There are only two, in fact. That doesn't make for a very thorough examination of the novel and its influence, but I was ready to go ahead with what limited resources I had, when I thought ... wait a minute ... I'm going about this the wrong way. There's no reason for me to search out nonexistent sequels when Austen's novel—a satire on the gothic books of her time—is about other novels! So yes, for fun I am going to do what others have done for school: I'm going to look at some of the novels that Austen mentions in Northanger Abbey. (But this being a blog instead of school, I don't have to be very deep in my discussions. Tee hee hee.)

Of course, the novel I must start out with is Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It's mentioned 18 times during the course of NA, and the author five times, so it's the one that engendered the most curiosity. It's the book that Catherine and Isabella exclaim over: there is a mysterious black veil with something shocking behind it, and Isabella proclaims that once Catherine is finished she will give her a dozen more books that are just as "horrid." So I was expecting something dreadful (by tame 18th century standards), a novel of suspense and horror.

Sigh. What I got was endless pages of a) descriptions of the sublime (lots of scenery and peasants dancing); b) regular bouts of poetry (mostly inspired by the sublime); c) overly passionate characters on the verge of collapse (physical and emotional); and d) endless hint after hint of secrets to be revealed, which of course weren't revealed until the very last chapter. It's not that I have any objection to being teased by a book, but if you're going to spend 54 chapters on a novel called The Mysteries of Udolpho, you should at least mention Udolpho before Chapter 3 of Part 2. (And let me add that these weren't short chapters by any stretch of the imagination; although I read an e-book from the awesome Project Gutenberg, hard copies run at least 700 pages.)

Instead, the first volume is devoted to showing us the St. Aubert family of France as the father and daughter, Emily, lose their beloved mother and take a trip along the Pyrenees for a change of scenery. And oh, boy, do we gets lots and lots of scenery, all of which uplifts the St. Auberts' souls exactly as the British philosophers of the time said the sublime should. During the trip they meet a very nice young man named Valancourt and travel with him for a few chapters, until Msr. St. Aubert's health fails (another few chapters) and he expires in a little town near an abandoned chateau where mysterious music is often heard. His dying instructions are for Emily to burn some of his papers without reading them, and of course she sees a glimpse that horrifies her, but she burns them before finding anything else out (or revealing it to us). Emily mopes to the point of fainting for two more chapters, until she is put in custody of her aunt, whereupon she mopes for two more chapters in Paris. Her aunt at first refuses to let her see Valancourt, then promotes the match when she discovers it would be socially advantageous. Emily allows herself to fall in love, but her aunt's sudden marriage to the sinister Montoni cuts the relationship short, as he takes them all to Italy.

We get many many more sublime scenes (many of which inspire poetic verses) as Emily crosses the Alps, goes to Venice, and is finally—after some 17 chapters—taken to Montoni's stronghold, Udolpho. There he imprisons Emily's aunt to force her to sign over some property, threatens Emily after her aunt dies, heads his own army (which borders on being brigands), and generally makes life rotten. The mysteries of Udolpho are mainly: what happened to the woman from whom Montoni got the castle; what is behind the black veil that Emily glimpses (but doesn't describe fully until the end); and who is making the mysterious music she can hear at midnight?

It turns out the music is from an imprisoned Frenchman who is not Valancourt, but he escapes with Emily, her maid, and the maid's boyfriend. They end up being shipwrecked near the town where Emily's father died, and there (after 35 chapters!) we are introduced to a whole new family: the Count de Villefort and his daughter, who now occupy the mysterious chateau. They befriend Emily, who sadly learns that Valancourt has fallen into vice and gambling and debt and is too sinful for her to consider marrying any more. They take two chapters to say goodbye, and Emily mopes for the rest of the book, even as the Frenchman who rescued her waits in the wings. We get more mysterious music, appearances, and hidden identities at the Chateau, until all is resolved in a single chapter, after a dying nun reveals her relation to Udolpho and Emily's relation to the Chateau. Valancourt turns out to be falsely accused, and the two can get married, which is good, because they've been so miserable without each other it's been miserable to read about them.

As for the mysteries? Nothing is supernatural or dreadful; what's behind the black veil is a trick (if I had to read 700 pages to discover exactly what, you do too), and hidden passages account for others. It's not shocking or scary at all, which I suppose I should have known from reading NA. After all, Henry Tilney—a man of the cloth—admits to reading and enjoying the novel, while John Thorpe considers it uninteresting. Unfortunately, I have to agree with the scoundrel ... if you're going to hold my attention through 700 repetitive pages of the sublime, you need to show me what's scary, not just show me someone else being scared ... especially if that character is an overly emotional, silly girl with no backbone of her own.

Photo of the Week--2/15/10

Next up in our continuing series, "Boy Terrorizes the Pigeons of Europe": The Parthenon in Athens! It's amazing, we walked all the way up that hill to visit the Parthenon, and Boy still had enough energy to pursue what is obviously a very lazy pigeon. Or maybe it's just accustomed to very tired visitors who make it up that hill, and had never encountered someone who bothered to chase it. It didn't account for six-year-old Boy, who either sucked energy from his parents, vampire-like, or (most likely) rode part of the way up the hill on Dad's shoulders. In any case, we got that lazy pigeon off its lazy pigeon butt and flapping its wings.

The Word Nerd Asks: You banned what???

I just finished a new baby quilt, so I was thinking of putting pictures up, but then I came across this article and felt compelled to comment. I missed it when it came out a few weeks ago, but today I was perusing the very amusing, bitingly witty blog of The Rejectionist and saw this link:

"Oral sex" definition prompts dictionary ban

It seems that a parent from a Southern California district was perturbed when they volunteered in their child's fifth-grade classroom and discovered that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary used there had a definition for oral sex. (Which, according to the M-W website, is "oral stimulation of the genitals.") Presumably the parent was concerned that Little Johnny might come home all confused and ask his mommy what "genitals" were, so they complained to the district. The district's response? Pulling all the dictionaries from their fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms.

Putting aside the questionable lessons in dictionary use this suggests—if my kid had come home asking what "genital" meant because he read it in the dictionary definition for oral sex, I would have told him to get his lazy ass back to the "G" section and look it up himself—you gotta wonder what kind of educators look at a dictionary definition and consider it "sexually graphic." The same people who then pull a book for one word, and then say "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," as a district spokeswoman did. (Hard to read the dictionary! Say it ain't so!)

The district eventually decided to reinstate the Merriam-Webster dictionary and provide an alternative one for fourth and fifth graders to use, according to the local paper, but still ... they have all kinds in California, including parents who use their spare time in their kids' class to look up dirty words in the dictionary rather than help a kid learn something.

As a side note: my version of M-W's dictionary, being older than most NFL running backs, does not have a definition for "oral sex." I did, however, look at the definition for "intercourse" and it was just filthy!

Helllllp!!!

How many of you can remember what they were doing exactly sixteen years ago? I can, because that's the day my baby Boy was born. I woke up at 1 am with labor pains, went to the hospital (in a mild snow storm) at 4 am, thrilled to the fun of back labor until around 1 pm, when the doctor suggested a C-section because the Boy's head was too large and in the wrong position. By then I was all, "just get it out of me" (we didn't know the sex ahead of time), and by 3 pm I had my baby in my arms and sutures across my belly.

I remember it like it was last week, but today Boy turns sixteen. I won't blather on about how I don't feel old enough to have a 16 year old (because that's silly, I do feel older), or how time flies, or all that stuff. But the milestone made me pause. Now that Boy is sixteen, the following things are true:

• He's old enough to get his driver's license and drive by himself. (Don't clutch your steering wheels, he still needs to pass his test first.)
• He's old enough to get married, with parental consent. (!)
• He's old enough to be out in public alone between 12 midnight and 6 am (according to state law, but not Mom's).
• He's old enough that he doesn't have to wear a seatbelt in the back seat of a car. (Again, state law, not mine.)
• He can legally ride in a camper that's being towed behind a truck.
• He can work in a hazardous agricultural tasks, such as operating a combine or handling blasting caps. (Better not let him know about that last one.)
• (Fingers in ears, lalalalalalala) he can legally engage in naughty business and receive family planning information.
• He cannot, however, get a tattoo or use a tanning salon's services without parental permission. (!)

Sigh. Blather blather blather old blather time flies blather blather thank God he's not 18 yet blather blather blather.

I was going to use this photo for the wordless definition of teenager or hungry but I think it's appropriate here: