Still Tilting at Windmills

 As a storyteller, wouldn't it be fun to make up an evil (or evil-ish) setting and throw in a bunch of protagonists to see how they handle it?
As a storyteller, wouldn't it be fun to take an evil world and set protagonists in it so they could make a Statement or send a Message to the world?

 Well, I'm usually doing this while the turkey is in the oven. but this year again there is no feast to be prepared.

 Once upon a time I had a daughter. Then I accumulated many more.
I had to make rules, for these were kids who mostly didn't have rules, and needed rules, for my sanity and their protection - no one ever really got thrown down the stairs, no matter how often I threatened. 
A few years ago, I started writing down the rules, and the reasoning behind them, because I saw an abhorrent lack of  common courtesy and common sense in the kids reaching adulthood today, and thought,
"Somebody should tell 'em"  and my tricky brain answered back "Why not you?" 
Then my husband started encouraging. Have you ever had a husband who's terrible at subtlety attempt gentle coercement? Sometimes it can be funny to watch. 
So I wrote this book.
More like a pamphlet, truth be told; I had pictured it as something to tuck into a pocket, like those saddlestitched pebbled leather notebooks men carried in the early 20th century. But the magic of technology bypasses physical publishing, and it can still be tucked into a pocket, as long as your pocket is big enough to hold your Kindle, phone, or tablet.

All this blathering is to announce: My first book is out!

If you know teens or young adults who need a dose of reality, if you know someone who need a mama to answer questions without pabulum, if you know a parent who could use some advice and a laugh, this book can help. 

[I really want to write a compelling introduction that makes you want to read this book. I have crappy coffee and have been out of allergy medicine for 3 days. It's all I can do to keep typing.]

Here's where you can get it:

Mama Mary's Rules for Daughters: Advice & Guidance For Becoming A Responsible Adult: Mary Casey Walsh: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

It's only $1.99 (US), or the equivalent in world currency. Hey, Canadians and some Europeans can get a bargain!  Thanks for your consideration.

...why not the entire world?

This afternoon I had a dance party while shelling peas, thanx to Pandora on the laptop in the kitchen.

I love living in a time when I have the equivalent of a library and a stable of entertainers living in a space no bigger than a Life magazine. Wait, no bigger than an opened woman's compact, if you count the phone.

To anyone born after 1970: Look up Life magazine (and Look, for that matter) on Wikipedia. For the definition of woman's compact, see Mad Men.

Audiobooks are a wonderful thing. Since I don't get out to the library much, I can't consume "regular" books like I used to, but I can download audiobooks from 2 different library systems (CLEVNET and Cuyahoga County) with one library card and minimal trouble. I listen to books all day, and that's the big difference for me - it takes ALL DAY to listen to a book. I could have read it in an hour or two, but it takes six or eight hours to have it read to me. Usually I can gather patience, and enjoy the narrator's voice and the aural experience, but sometimes it just doesn't work for me.
The biggest problem I have is with familiar books. If I know the story, I want to speed up the boring bits to get to the good part. Or worse, the narrator mispronounces words, or names. Example: Nancy McKeown, who is most famous for being Jo on Facts of Life, read a J.A. Jance mystery. Just one, and you'll see in a bit why they got professional voice artists for the rest of the series. The series takes place in Arizona, and one of the police officers is named Jaime. Listening to the book on an mp3 player, I could be heard yelling out loud, "It's Hi-Me, not Jay-me!" every five or ten minutes.
Usually, it's not so bad. Sometimes an audiobook is a surprise, like the Stuart Woods mysteries read by the husband and wife team of Dick Hill and Susie Breck. Between the writing and the excellent voice acting, it's fascinating enough to get you through Iowa.* Sometimes, it's a pure delight, like most of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Nigel Planer brought the characters to hilarious life, and Stephen Briggs made them even more human and outrageous. Sometimes, it changes the way you interpret a book, as when you hear memoirs or autobiographies read by the author, and there are obvious points where you hear the thickening of a voice and know the material is still emotionally effecting; other places, the warmth or coldness of the reading gives more insight than the actual words into the mindset of the author.
An omnivore of books, I consume mysteries, science fiction, humor, biographies, and popular fiction and non-fiction as mood and opportunity allow. Because of the bizarre workings of waiting lists at the library, I often get a chunk of notices for books almost at once - for example, over the past three days, I've downloaded Pioneer Woman, the first Hunger Games book, The Impossible Dead, and Quantum Man. I started with The Pioneer Woman, because I love the recipes on her blog, but soon found out it was little more than a romance novel in real life, although an interesting one. So I moved on to Quantum Man, the sort-of biography of Richard Feynmann by Lawrence Krauss, and ended up staying up late last night because I was fascinated by the science in the story.** I'm not sure if I'll finish that before starting on the Hunger Games, one of today's downloads, because two of three daughters and a dozen other friends have recommended it, and by recommended I mean comments like "you haven't read it yet??? [look of astonished disbelief] It's fantastic, awesome, and other superlatives!!!" The Impossible Dead might come first, though, because I love a good police procedural, and I'm an Anglophile from way back, and it's narrated by Peter Forbes, who also read The Complaints, the first book in this new series by Ian Rankin, which I really enjoyed.***


*True story. And a long one. And now, 6 years later, it's funny. It wasn't then.
**I can't do the math anymore****, but I'm still intrigued by quantum mechanics and the whole idea that observing changes the observed as well as the observer.
***Too many commas?
****My math brain is gone, taken by fibromyalgia and/or the medications. Y'know those obnoxious people who can do sums in their head with no thought at all? I used to be one of them. Now, I need a calculator for anything that can't be rounded to tens. To be honest, I really wasn't any good at the math required for physics, and that's what made me drop out of engineering school ("I don't want to calculate where an electron is at any given point in time, I just want to know it'll be there and doing what it's supposed to do.") but I've always understood the concepts. My brain is so convoluted that quantum mechanics makes sense. I'll explain it to you someday over drinks. Drinks are necessary to explanations of quantum.

Once upon a time, I loved listening to my grandparents' stories.* A time before television! Hell, even a time before electricity and telephones were in everyone's home! What fascinated me most, in hindsight, was the anthropological details: buttonhooks to put on boots and fancy dresses, heating irons in the fire for pressing fabric and curling hair, and the stoic acceptance of the cruel double standards of the day, for both women and immigrants. Photography was only done at life events, and was more portraiture than snapshot, and featured solemnity and dour glares. Only my grandfather, late in life, told amusing stories, and we only heard one afternoon's worth, about making and selling bathtub gin during Prohibition, and fighting the other ethic steelworkers in the tavern on the corner, and most surprisingly, how he lied about his age to get out of Poland. He was really 18 when he left, and said he was 15. Being only 5'2" and looking really young, they believed it and let me pass. Finally my grandmother's Polish harangues penetrated the fog of brandy and cherry pipe smoke and he sighed, saying "O.K. Enough."

My parent's** stories, by contrast, were relentlessly cheerful stories about deprivation and climbing the social and economic ladder. Two streetcars and a walk of three miles to get to work? Well, it was a job, wasn't it? And by working hard, look what we have now! With a little coaxing, my mother would talk about studying the ladies magazines and movie posters, buying fabric and using her sisters as dress models to recreate the designer wear she loved and couldn't afford. My father, in later years, would give her money and tell her to go buy a new hat when she was especially down.

Today, I ran across a link, and realized I am now old enough culturally to tell stories about the olden days. My friends, I give you 11 Sounds That Your Kids Have Probably Never Heard. Yep. Feeling ancient. All I have to do is find some kids to bore with my stories of "The Time Before Computers!"


*all born between 1897 and 1903, and immigrated to America from Poland just prior to WWI.
**both born in 1922, and they were married in 1942, before my dad got shipped overseas.

How to Fix Everything The educational system: Stop testing, start teaching kids to learn. The deficit: Flat tax rate. Also, legalize marijuana and prostitution and tax them. Violent crime: Make a walled city. Let them fight it out in there. Washington, D.C.: Abolish lobbying. Inner cities: Allow squatters rights, and see what people can do. Did I miss anything? Let me know.

Got 10 minutes?
Watch this video. No partisanship, no stupidity, no excuses, just a simple explanation of debt and deficit and what this political crap is really all about.
And you don't have to know a thing about math, economics, statistics, or politics to understand it. Well done, Khan Academy!

There were mourning doves on my windowsill a few days back. They looked in at me, and cooed; I cooed back. Then I went for the camera and they flew away.

There was an article in the paper the other day about a body being discovered in a Seven Hills backyard. I alway read Seven Hills news, since I grew up there and especially loved juicy stories about people I might have known. The article mentioned the body may have been a homeless man, and that no one had seen him out riding his bicycle recently. That hit me - could it be Joe? I felt a weird flop in my stomach.

Last night, the news identified the body as Joe Kopp. Joe was older than me, and his parents and mine were friends through the church. Joe was "slow", "different", "odd", but never called retarded; as an adult I'd guess high-functioning autism and schizoid type stuff. He rode around Seven Hills and up and down Broadview Road on an old, battered but well-maintained bike with homemade rearview mirrors - the first mirrors I'd ever seen on a bike. If Joe saw you, he'd have to stop and talk. He was funny, and kind, and often annoying, but never mean. I hung out at Pleasant Valley Shopping Center, and often saw Joe there.
One of the strangest things about Joe was that the bullies never picked on him. The tough guys in the neighborhood always seemed to look out for him, teaching the younger bullies that Joe was to be left alone - they could throw gravel at any other weirdo riding a bike (like, me, like my little brother) but never at Joe.

Olga Kopp, his mom, was one of those no-nonsense, organizing women who ran the Ladies Guild, and after she died I guess the safety net was gone for Joe. I hear he was more-or-less homeless for the past ten years, being taken in by acquaintances whenever needed. I've read a dozen little eulogies on Facebook, from people who don't normally go out of their way to post anything serious. I've found out Joe saved up and donated his money to the homeless, even when he was sleeping wherever someone let him. I'm pleased and surprised by the outpouring of grief and outrage and memories coming from the community. I'm a little surprised by my own deep feelings about someone who I haven't seen in a decade, someone I was never close to. I guess it's because Joe was a childhood fixture, part of growing up in Seven Hills. Now, like Manners and the muscle cars, the empty lots and the woods, Joe is gone but not forgotten, and part of my memories and stories of growing up in Seven Hills.

I'll be watching the news for more on this. Why did someone, possibly the guy who took him in, shoot him and bury him? I can only hope we find out, and that whoever did it gets justice.

I have conquered my one kitchen fail - pie crust.
Everyone loves my pies. Only a few know that my standard pie crust is the pre-made rolled-up kind. Since I am trying to eliminate as much processed food out of our diets, I figured it was time to face my nemesis, the home-made pie crust.
Of course, I had to research it. I scoured cookbooks and the Internet, and decided the secret to flaky, tender crusts was lard.
Of course, I had to make my own lard. So, I bought pork fat at the West Side Market, and rendered it down all day. Result - a jar of pure white animal fat goodness.

Then, the experiment. I went with a 50-50 proportion of butter and lard, and used the same method that Julia Child and Altn Brown use - the food processor.

It's incredibly easy to just pulse the dry ingredients, add your fats, and pulse til it's pea sized.

Add your ice water, pulse some more, and it's crust! No pastry blender, fingers, or two knives, no chance for mixing too much - I can't believe I was stumped by this problem when the solution has been in my kitchen since the 80s.

The only old-fashioned thing left in the pie crust making was rolling out the dough. Eh, so there's still one pain-in-the-ass step.

Filled with apples and spices, the pie went into the oven, and came out looking perfect.

The crust was indeed tender and flaky, with a subtle savory bacony touch that worked perfectly with the Melrose apples. Husband and grandson both declared it my best pie ever.

Now if I could just get the husband to stop asking me to make another pie for him...



(crossposted)