The Good taste Book police are at it again....

Oh internet, I see you are being naughty again posting articles sure to infuriate those of us who read those horrible populist books. A few weeks back romance novels were slammed, this week it is the turn of Young Adult fiction and the adult readers of YA to be harassed. Evidently reading either romance or YA if you are an adult is equivalent to being caught eating a Twinkie on the sly. At the very least we populist readers should be embarrassed, at most reading this type of material will evidently cause some sort of horrible brain lesions incapacitating any intellectual spark we might have once had.

These arguments flare up periodically and they always amuse me as the people making these assumptions always assume, quite broadly, that someone who reads a Rick Riordan, or a Nora Roberts never ever picks up anything “literary” that the Aimee Benders; the Joyce Carol Oates; the Richard Powers; the Tobias Wolffs are never read by the same audience. They also assume that genre fiction (and I’ll use the term genre for YA for the time being even though YA isn’t a genre) has nothing of substance or literary merit. When one timidly points out an author such as Jane Austen could be considered a romance author there is a sort of dismissal, a sort of “well Austen isn’t literary in the way we are talking about”. When it is pointed out that Cormac McCarthy has written a novel of speculative fiction, or that Colin Whitehead has written a horror novel this too is immediately dismissed. They will tell you that McCarthy hasn’t written speculative fiction, he has just used a futuristic setting. Whitehead may have zombies (zombies!) in his book but it isn’t horror. At this point one can only walk away as the argument can never be won.

Personally, it annoys me that even genre lovers will use the argument the “but we do have some literary” works in our canon. Why can’t we enjoy our pleasurable books, why must we fell guilty that we aren’t reading heavy, serious works? After dealing with long commutes, boring jobs, aging parents, illness, problematic children we need escapist fiction and it's a lot cheaper than therapy. I'm not saying we shouldn't include some literary fiber in amongst all that lighter fare but don't insist that everything we read be highbrow.

Finally, the naysayers need to recognize that genre fiction can and does spark the imagination that can then lead to real life innovations. Reading a "frivolous" book can lead to complex explorations of social issues as readily as literary fiction (science fiction anyone) or may lead to explorations of topics that the reader might not have known about. I cannot count the number of times that I've read a light novel and then gone to the library to explore historical periods or biological concepts foreign to me, nor am I alone amongst my fellow genre readers in this respect. As for YA fiction, why not try and understand what teens are interested in or what might be going on in their world, why can they not read something that they might relate to, why must they read adult fiction? They will become adults soon enough and turn their backs on YA. Trust me, I know, I work on a college campus and most of the undergrads view YA as "too young" for them. Until they reach that stage though let them be and let those of us reading our frivolous fripperies be as well. It's not like we're blowing second hand smoke in your face and I promise we also won't turn into drooling idiots . On that note I'm off to scare myself silly with The Bird Box.

Great Straw Bale experiment

Earlier this year, before talk of a drought, I had read about using straw bales for planting veggies and decided I would perform an experiment. I’d use a straw bale to grow a couple of tomato plants and then use my regular half oak barrel planter for another two tomatoes and see what happened.

As it turns out there were two initial hurdles to this plan. The first being that a friend kept going on and on about how water intensive straw bale gardening was. Since we are in a drought I was a bit hesitant about going forward with the straw bale but then decided to go ahead thinking I’d use grey water to water them. The grey water turned out to be a problem for a variety of reasons but by then I’d already started conditioning my bales. What I’ve discovered is that, except for the initial conditioning of the bales, I use no more water to water the bales than I do to water the plants in the oak barrel. I think I may even use slightly less as the bale tends to hold on to the water on the inside. Fortunately I had also started conditioning the bales and then, huzzah, we had a week worth of rain so ended up using less water than anticipated.

The second hurdle turned out to be my own inability to read. I went out and got two hay bales instead of two straw bales and I panicked. The hay bales did take longer to heat up initially and I do still occasionally see small sprouts of live hay along the sides but for the most part the hay bales have rotted nicely. I used the second hay bales to plant Thai and sweet basils and they’ve gone to town. The most exciting results are in the tomato department though. I have over twenty tomatoes on the hay bale tomatoes and zero on the tomatoes in the half barrels. There may be a slight skewing of the results in that my S.O. Forgot to bore drainage holes in the barrel and, for a while, the tomatoes were drowning, That has been fixed and the tomatoes have made a comeback so it will be interested to see what the final yield will be between the two types of containers. Personally my money is on the hay bales and I’ll def. be using this method to plant next year.

Two new things

I actually managed to do two things on my spring break list. I can check off gym and recipes. I know of course that I have to keep going on both of these, they are not a one- time goal, but I’ve now got a good start on them. Now if I could just get that cat print quilt done…

I have two very fit friends that I exercise with and danged if they didn’t talk me into trying something called TRX resistance training. We watched one class before going ourselves and it didn’t seem too bad. The TRX website claims that everyone from athletes to seniors can use it. It looked like you just hung off of straps using your own body weight and indeed this is pretty much what it is. It couldn’t be that bad, right? As it turns out – yes it could. The workout itself was pretty tough for this middle aged biddy bat and my muscles definitely felt things post workout. The same day I could feel it in my thighs and my triceps, the next day the thighs were quite a bit sorer, my stomach muscles chimed in and I found out the I use my triceps muscles when using the rotary cutter. Can you say ow? I certainly can. My friends are now trying to talk me into a ten week course – I’m not sure I could survive that, but we will see. I am glad I at least tried it though.

My husband and I recently signed up for the “farm fresh to you service.” Basically all this means is that x number of times a month local farmers deliver organic fruits and veggies directly to the house. It’s a little more expensive than buying groceries at Safeway but the flavors are far superior. I never cared much for fruits and vegetables growing up though my mother loved them and did everything she could to get us to eat them. Unfortunately her method of cooking most vegetables was boiling – not a lot of flavor involved.

Since I have all these new fruits and vegetables coming to the house I don’t want to waste them so I’ve been scouring the internet for recipes. One of the items in our first shipment was endive, a vegetable I’ve never had before. Luckily I found a great recipe for it : grilled endive with pistachios, dried cherries and feta cheese. It was excellent and now I’m an endive fan. This recipe and a lot more can be found on endive.com

Spring (break) is afoot

We’ve just entered one of my favourite times of the year. All the students have departed the campus for spring break and it is so quiet and peaceful. The weather is perfect and I can now stroll the campus sans fear of being slammed into by a sleep deprived student on a bike. The ability to think and plan has renewed my zeal in trying to get things done. One of my friends must feel the same as she has instituted a clutter club. I’m not that motivated but I do have plans. Therefore, without further ado, I present my list of things I’d like to happen over the next week.

One: While the kiddos are gone attempt to reinstate weight training at the gym. I’m thrilled to say I actually got a head start on this one. I went last Friday and again today. It was glorious not having to share the machines with a bunch of sweaty jock types – just us aging staff this week! I’m even thinking of the hubster go for a walk or two after work this week.

Two: Continue looking for recipes that match a Mediterranean diet vibe. Iowa girl eats sometimes has some great recipes as does Eating Well so I think this should be an easy one to accomplish. We’ve already found and tried three recipes that are keepers. I’m particularly enthused with the Portobello Mushroom sandwich with sun dried tomatoes and goat cheese. YUM.

Three Try and keep my newly planted garden alive while cutting down on water use. I’m hoping to learn how to use grey water from the washing machine to help accomplish this goal. I don’t want to be a water waster but I do love home grown produce so this one is going to be a work in progress.

Four catch up on my “let’s use up the cat prints” quilt that I’ve been working on since the beginning of Jan. I’ve been plugging away at it but lost ground thanks to covering odd hours at work when my student staff couldn’t come in during finals week.

Wallow in popular culture -In a burst of enthusiasm I went to the library last week and picked up a ton of books. I have just now realized that my best window for actually reading the is this week so – I will read two off the pile before the 31st. I’d also like to catch up on some of my telly programs. Walking dead has been quite the nail biter and I’d like to know who lives/dies gets eaten before the season ends. It would also be nice to try and get a little Downton watched. I haven’t even finished the season premier.

Fabric New Year's resoluiton

Most crafters I know tend to have a hoard of materials they work with. Knitters have yarn stashes, quilters have fabric stashes and so on. Most of us tend to become addicted to our particular material of choice. There are even flickr groups encouraging the aforementioned addictions. I happen to be guilty of having more than one stash for more than one craft but I had vowed to at least reduce the fabric stash. Sadly this was not to be. For some reason 2013 had been a particularly appealing one in terms of fabric collections. I managed to fall in love with three different ones. I was very proud of myself though as I found the perfect pattern for one of the collections but, just my luck, this particular collection only had three fabrics in it and I needed at least three more in order to make the pattern work. It was also just my luck that the collection I fell in love came and went in a flash so I could no longer readily find related fabrics for it in the brick and mortar stores. This meant I had to shop on-line to try and match fabrics and we all know what this means. I’d receive a packet of fabric and realize that what looked so good on the web turned out not to be such a great match. Then I’d buy another bit of fabric and the process would repeat. So now I’ve got even more fabric in the stash, sigh.

I do enjoy about meeting a fellow addict though as it is always fun to be had in confessing our sins. Sometimes I begin to think that, even though I hear about other people having a hoarding/stash problem, I am the only one that really has the problem. However, I then meet someone at a store, at a show etc., and discover that a. I am not alone, and b. that I may not even have the biggest problem (assuming we want to call it a problem and I’m not sure I do). I went into a quilt shop to pick up a recently quilted quilt (thanks Margaret at Golden State) and got to chatting with the clerk there. I discovered he was a fellow block of the month junkie and we then talked about what on-going projects we had. He got out one of his projects and darn if I didn’t learn a new trick. This gentleman uses interfacing instead of the plastic vinyl for his applique overlay. Interfacing is certainly easier to find than vinyl so I think I might try this trick. I also had severe stitch envy as his applique looked perfect.

The above is all just a precursor for my fabric New Year’s resolutions. Since I didn’t winnow down the stash last year I have avowed to do so this year but in a manageable chunk for me. I have an entire drawer of cat fabric and I have decided to use up four of those fabrics in their entirety. This doesn’t seem like much I know but if I try and think about destashing entirely I panic but I’m okay with slowly using up fabrics. I even have a specific design for the cat fabrics, a disappearing four patch, and have even done a few and like the pattern so—fingers crossed that four yards or so of fabric “disappear.”

I’ve also made the resolution that I will finish embroidering and then put together my blocks (which are already appliqued) for my Raining cats and dogs BOM. This should be fairly easy to do and then I’ll need to find a quilter to quilt it. I have another BOM which I swear I’ll finish every year. I have no idea why I can’t but this year I’ve decided that I just need to finish two blocks, i.e. I’ll chip away at it slowly and not be upset with myself when I don’t get it done. Now that I’ve learned a nifty new trick with interfacing perhaps I’ll even do three! I do have the new quilt I’ve started but I’ve decided to let that one come together as I feel like it. I am so in love with the colors of the fabric I may put a lot of effort into completing it. I hope to be good purchasing wise this year but we all know that I’d be kidding myself, like Smaug I need a hoard. This year though at least some of it will be used! What’s you fabric resolution?