We want you as a new recruit!

September and school season are well and truly underway, and with a high school junior living in our house, so is the flood of college brochures. I know that twenty-*cough-cough-cough* years ago, I must have received my own share of collegiate junk mail, but I was so focused on going to Michigan that I didn't really look at any of them. Now that I'm going to be the one writing the checks, however, I'm paying closer attention to the invitations in the mailbox. Boy, of course, is ignoring most everything that comes addressed to him; like me, he's only thinking of Michigan. So I'm going to be the one to inform you about the current state of university propaganda. These came in standard-size letters unless otherwise marked.

Colorado School of Mines: The message basically says: We're engineers!
Northern Michigan: A brochure with pictures; translation: We do have girls way up north!
University of Chicago (1): The envelope was addressed to "the parents of Boy." But the letter says "you might thrive in our vibrant environment." Maybe the exciting online quiz will settle it.
Loyola of Chicago: Oooh, an interactive online quiz, "check it out now, Boy!"
Illinois Wesleyan: We're highly rated and have high graduate placement!
University of Rochester: bigger envelope; "our curriculum has no required subjects" (boldface theirs), plus lots of research money and low student/teacher ratios.
Miami (Florida): another quiz! and we can send you text messages!
U of Georgia: on the envelope: "request your movie poster." On the inside, for Boy: "Athens, #1 campus scenes that rock." For us: "honors fellows receive a nearly full scholarship."
Tulane: Geez, another online quiz to help you find the right school/major for you?
Albion College (1): on envelope: "What kind of thinker are you?" "Are you a true thinker?"
Hofstra U: another "discover your interests" and "what to look for in a college" quiz. Gee, I wonder if the answer is "Hofstra"? And at least now I know it's in New York.
Otterbein College (OH): a postcard-sized, magazine-style brochure touting the usual.
Denison U (OH): Selected as one of 40 "colleges that change lives." P.S., merit-based scholarships!
U of Kentucky (1): "see why UK is well on its way to becoming a Top 20 research university" ... um, call back when you are one?
Case Western Reserve (OH, 1): we're considered a great producer of grad students.
Capital University (OH): Folded brochure, postcard size. Pretty generic.
Ohio Northern: Another, thicker folded postcard-size brochure. Magazine layout.
Vanderbilt (1): Bigger (half-magazine), lots of pretty pictures, lots of rankings.
"The" Ohio State University: 8x11 envelope did get Boy's attention: "Can I burn it and put it on YouTube?" Brochure with no gimmicks, just lots of details.
Wayne State U: shiny foldout brochure, basic "how to apply" plan.
Case Western (2): large postcard saying come meet a counselor.
U of Chicago (2): fold out postcard, a few stats, quote from play
MIT (1): this one also got Boy's attention: big 8x11 foldout into huge shiny poster.
Albion (2): 8x11 envelope, letter stressing high rankings, shiny brochure with more basics.
Kentucky (2): We're still trying to be Top 20. By 2020, after you graduate, so tough luck there.
Reed College (OR): winner for furthest away!  8x11 envelope; letter stresses fun atmosphere (our nuclear reactor has a rubber duck floating on top!) yet the brochure has boring periodic tables and online resources.
Kentucky (3): Really? Three letters? But hey, "you are likely already eligible to receive an academic scholarship," and this time there's no "almost top 20."
U of Chicago (3): another quirky postcard.
Vanderbilt (2): bigger postcard, mostly about financial aid.
U of Michigan...: yay! U of M! ...Dearborn. Aw, crap. But now we know the AP History score is worth 3 credits, or $972.
MIT (2): postcard inviting us to meet a rep locally. Boy said yes.
Kentucky (4): Okay, now you're just sounding desperate. Even if this time you actually give a personal username and password.
Washington U (St. Louis): ooh, this online survey is "backpack secrets of top scholars"!

So, a pretty broad mix of small liberal arts schools and big state universities. Appeals to money, prestige, fun, grad-school potential. Magazine graphics, online quizzes, statistics. And still, Boy didn't want to open a single one of them.

Photo of the Week--9/20/10

We spent a few days in Argentina back in 2007, on our way down to an Antarctic cruise, and one of the highlights of the city was La Recoleta cemetery.  It's like a miniature city in itself, built of mausoleums in different styles. Some were old and archaic and overlooked, while others were clean and modern and obviously still tended by someone remembering the person within. You could get lost down the small-scale streets; luckily the sky was clear and blue and it wasn't too hard to find your way out. If you still had trouble, you could always follow one of the very friendly felines who made their home there.

The Quilt Files, Episode 22

I'd made the same baby quilt pattern about five or six times, varying the colors and fabrics each time. So when I discovered last fall that a couple of friends were expecting, I was ready to try a different pattern. When one of them said they were decorating the nursery in "bright, bold colors," I knew exactly which pattern to choose. I headed over to my favorite fabric store with the goal of finding several bright, bold, mostly solid batiks. The "Pure and Simple" pattern called for five solids: red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. I thought, however, that the blue and purple were too close together to make a really good contrast. After pulling out a dozen different bolts, I decided that red, orange, yellow, green, and blue would produce the most striking combinations.

As you can see, the pattern itself is pretty basic: 3½-inch squares, pieced together in rows. It's the pattern of those differently colored squares, reminiscent of those old-fashioned woven potholders, that makes it interesting. The pattern may look too complicated to use the strip-piecing method—where you sew two or more strips together and then cut them into linked squares, which is much faster than cutting those strips into squares and then sewing the squares together—because those colors alternate all over the place. Careful analysis, however, showed me that there were equal numbers of paired squares: red-red/red-orange/red-yellow/red-green/red-blue/orange-orange, etc etc. So I was able to do some strip piecing to create the paired squares, and because I actually did two quilt tops at the same time, I saved quite a bit of time.

Once I had my stacks of color pairs, the rest was easy: sew together rows in the appropriate patterns, sew the rows together, and add a red border. Once I managed to get the right amount of fabric for the backing (I altered the size of the pattern, and forgot to add the borders in when I calculated the area), the rest was easy. The top was of a manageable size to machine quilt, and the pattern was extremely easy: straight diagonals radiating out from the center of the quilt. You may be able to tell from some of the darker squares in this picture that I used a variegated thread (in primary colors, of course) to do the quilting. (Click on the photo itself to get it in a new window, and you can enlarge to see the detail, if you like). I like using multicolored thread when I quilt because it makes different patterns against different colors, adding another layer of interest to the pattern.

I really loved the results I got with this design: the boldness of the colors, the high contrast of the pattern, the simplicity of it all. In the future I might adapt it to create a quilt with my huge stash of scraps, but in the meantime I have a old project to finish quilting, so I may not get to any new projects for a while.

Photo of the Week--9/13/10

My goodness, another photo with me in it? By the time we visited Washington DC in 2007, we had a teenager who wasn't very interested in sightseeing any more. (Actually, he never was very interested in sightseeing, but it's a lot easier to manage a non-teenager with promises of ice cream.) So TSU and I left him behind with Grandma and took a weekend trip by ourselves to the nation's capital. And here I am in our capital before the Capitol (spelled with a capital C), where you might be able to spy the capital part of some columns. It was a cloudy fall day, but we still had a great time walking our feet off seeing all the museums and other sights.

Conference Report: SCBWI LA

You might recall that about six weeks ago I headed to Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. It was exhilarating, exhausting, inspiring, entertaining, and an all-around great experience (despite the horror story of my three flights home, which I won't tell here except to say that it will be a cold day in Hell before I fly American Airlines if I have another choice).

And really, I meant to share some of the things I learned from the experience; for instance, if you want to place in the costume ball, "subtle and classy" is not the vibe you need. (Okay, the heart deely-bobbers are not exactly subtle, but I thought the dress was nice and the wings weren't over-the-top.) At first, I thought I might actually blog from the conference, as I did in New York in 2009. But I was taking a great workshop that was held all four days of the conference, and we had homework every night. I had no time or energy to blog during my scant free time.

So I thought, maybe I'll write something up the week I get back. After my misadventures getting home, though, I felt like I was playing catchup, and I kept putting it off. Now that it's September and I've barely had time to revise my manuscripts using information I learned, let alone sent out any queries to editors or agents I met there, I've had to admit defeat. You are not getting a detailed report of my experiences at the conference. There was a lot of esoteric writers' stuff anyway, although I'm sure everyone could appreciate the line, "if you chase trends [with your writing], the vampires win!"

But do not despair! I still have something special for you from the conference, and that is proof of my talent for bad puns. You see, at every SCBWI conference, they have joke contests. They give you a theme, you write a joke, and if they read it aloud in between sessions, you get a prize. And I won not one, but two prizes! Here was the theme: you are an editor who can travel through time and thus acquire a memoir by anyone in history. What is the title and who is the author?

My first winner was pretty tricky, as it was read aloud and it really works better visually, so you should be able to get it right off. The book? Abridged Too Far, by Noah Webster. (Of dictionary fame. Get it? Abridged dictionary. Get it? That's bad, we love words. Get—oh, never mind. The SCBWI director loved it.)

The next one came the next day in a flash of brilliance. Another bad pun, but easily figured out: A Farewell to Arms, by Venus DeMilo. Okay, you have to know your iconic art for that one, but writers are a smart crowd.

My last joke submission wasn't used, perhaps because it really described the challenge more than met it. The joke setup was that we had to choose one of six words that some say are inappropriate for a kids' book (like boobs, butt, booger), and write a sentence with a silly substitute. The challenge inspired a limerick:

An author was given a dare
To choose naughty words with more care
She didn't know what
Could fill in for "BUTT"
Oops! Pardon my French, "derriere."

That one wasn't a winner, but it was my favorite. Because really, I didn't "write" this limerick, it was more like it attacked me while I was trying to get to sleep and I had to write it down before it would leave me alone. And that, as much as anything else I can tell you, is a conference in a nutshell: inspiration even when you're exhausted and overworked and trying to sleep.

Recipes from Fish Camp: Don's Broetchen

Has anyone ever met a carbohydrate they didn't like? Certainly not anyone in my family, and my uncle Donald is the king when it comes to making tasty, yeasty, yummy treats. Each Thanksgiving at least one person burns their fingers on his rolls because they grabbed them straight from the oven, and for the past two years his contribution to camp cuisine has come in the form of broetchen. "Broetchen" rhymes with "Gretchen," which gives a clue as to the treat's German origin. They're "little bread," or rolls, and they are tasty, good with jam or meats or any other way you want to use them.

Now, my uncle has been baking bread from scratch for years and years, so it's hard to communicate the "feel" of bread dough that is properly ready. That comes with experience, but in the meantime we have his rambling recipe to help us along. I've boldfaced the ingredients to help you pick them out.

1. Begin with two cups of warm skim milk
• I actually use powdered milk and enough of it (usually almost 1 cup) to make almost a quart of (reconstituted) milk, but in only the two cups of warm water; result: extra rich milk
2. Add 1 package dried yeast  (or about 1½ tsp. dried yeast if you buy it in bulk, as I do)
3. Let yeast stand in warm milk base for 5 minutes (or lots longer, for that matter)
4. Add 1 teaspoon (or slightly more) salt
5. Add 2 Tbl sugar ...... mix well, and then you are ready for flour
6. Add approx. 3 cups bread flour; mix well (until you have like a thick slurry)
7. Mix in 2 Tbl oil (corn or canola or olive or grape or whatever .... the batches I made for vacation in the UP even had a tiny dab of cod liver oil)
8. Add  2 more cups of flour ... work it in as well as you can ... turn the mass out on counter top, kneading in more flour (up to maybe a cup more) until dough is is softly pliable, a mass which won't stick to your fingers
9. Let rise for an hour (or longer; it doesn't matter)
10. Punch the dough! Then cut the punched down mass of dough in half, and the halves in half, and those quarters in thirds ... until you have lumps of dough about the size of an extra-large egg (there should be about 12 of them)  
11. Shape it into a very small loaf.
• It's the feel of doing this which I can't give you.... You use the palms of your hands like a backdrop for shaping the dough-lets and your fingers to tuck the outside edges under and in; in shape they will be something like a miniature, misshapen football ... put them on a cornmeal sprinkled cookie sheet....let rise until double in size.
12. Take a knife and gently, delicately mark a slash longitudinally ... bake at 340 degrees F,  about 30  minutes ... take them out, see if you can resist eating one on the spot.*

*Especially if you have one of Don's home-made jams to go with it! I can speak from experience.

An additional note: These little treats do just fine if you freeze them, then thaw them in a microwave for 20-30 seconds or so. Don brought dozens and dozens to camp, and we made regular inroads on his supply until they were exhausted and we were looking around forlornly for more.

Photo of the Week--9/6/10

We took a short trip to New York in June of 2006, and capped it off with a visit to the USS Intrepid, a former aircraft carrier that is now a museum. I think this photo was actually taken on our way out of the museum, and miracle of miracles, Boy posed for it without complaint. I'm not sure where he acquire this "gotcha," cool-cat pose (maybe from too many Bond movies?), but he liked to bring it out once in a while and was cheerful enough after a day with mechanical marvels to smile for the camera.