Best Christmas present ever

Today's post is not about dogs, gardening or reading.  Not even cooking.  It's about

Shelling.  Using man's most ingenious invention.  This device and a bag of itty-bitty Texas pecans, and you have a bowl of delight.  Snacktime!

Ow!

Next up is

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

by E. L. Konigsburg


Q: Who is Saxenberg?  Did she ever tell?  Oh, yeah--I finished it kind of late and didn't catch that she told later in the book.  Anyway, I'm not telling.  You'll just have to read the book for yourself.

This is the kind of book we should make kids read in school, so they can find out reading doesn't have to be punishment.  It's fun!  And it expresses a feeling that every kid goes through sooner or later (I've still not lost it)--a feeling of wanting to make something happen.  To do something different--even great--something that makes you uniquely you.

At least that was my take on it.  Others may explain that I missed the point.  I never was good at ferreting out deep, hidden meanings in literature.  I just like the stories.

Oh--I just reread Lizzie Skurnick's interpretation of the book and I see both why she included it and what it meant to her.  And I think she's right...it was an end of childhood experience.  A first step in growing up.  Having more important concerns that the frivolous plays of childhood.  "...she's become, like the Angel, a singular entity with her own history, her own mystery." --Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery, 2009.

Book #7 under my belt

and in my stomach.  Not tummy.  Don't you hate it how clothing advertisements for women refer to "tummy control"?  I'm a grown woman--I don't have a "tummy."
I do got a gut.

Anyway, it's

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women  by Harriet Reisen

First, the good.  Ms. Reisen sure knew her subject.  Her research is phenomenal and she clearly read everything she could get her hands on--old journals, all of Louisa's writings, probably a good bit of her fathers' and I hope she read Emerson and Thoreau and had a familiarity, if maybe not mastery, of Dickens.  At some points I could hardly put the book down.  And I do recommend it.

But for the bad.  I started it over a year ago and put it aside after one chapter.  The first quarter of the book deals with Louisa's father and mother's lives in excruciating detail.  Sure, they're important--parents are always important.  And in the case of the father, extremely important.  He was a transcendentalist and a kook.  He believed in cold showers (for health) and forced a vegetarian diet of the worst kind on his family until his wife put her foot down and insisted on milk for the baby.  By his inability to hold a job, he caused constant unheavals in the childhood hearth, the home.  Aspiring to be a teacher, he experimented on his pupils with teaching techniques that seemed to have no grounding in experience or logic.  School after failed school was result, and then he tried to establish a self-subsistent farming community.  Which failed.  The most obvious influence he had on his daughter's character was to give her a deep, burning desire to provide for the basic needs of her mother and sisters.  Because he never did.

Louisa did, once she was old enough, by writing thrillers and sensational stories for the trashy newspapers of the day.  We don't know if she was embarrassed about them, as her literary avatar was, but she did keep her nom de plume well hidden.  Not until 1942 did a couple of enterprising literary detectives trace the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to her.  (Which adds another book to my reading backlog: Old Books, Rare Friends: Two Literary Sleuths and Their Shared Passion by Leona Rostenberg.)

Embarrassed or no, for the most of her adult life Louisa kept a small income flowing until she finally hit it big with Little Women.

Ms. Reisen's biography was--to me--almost unbearably dull until Louisa started writing and selling her work, coming into her own as a person with ideas and hopes and dreams.   I don't mind a certain amount of "back story," I just disliked her parents and got tired of reading about them.

A couple of other things I wanted but didn't find--the petty details that absorb the life of a growing child.   A gnawing stomach.  An unexpected cake.  The disappointment of having her mother laid up from a miscarriage, unable or unwilling to care for her.  (I know she felt it.)

It could be that this level of detail just wasn't available.  Louisa and her sisters were required to keep journals.  (Wish I'd made my kids to.)  But they were also expected to share the journals with their parents.  Not in a "punishment" kind of way, but in a "how was your day, today, dear?" kind of way.  Even as a kid, if you were writing down your innermost thoughts and feelings and you knew your parents might read them....would you write, "I hate my mother!"  or would you write something more appropriate for adult consumption?  Like, "...I was feeling very naughty today."

And the other thing I wanted was a peek at Louisa's trash.  Although Ms. Reisen quoted frequently and copiously from Louisa's poems and works for children, I don't recall a single quote from the pulp thrillers that paid the bills.  Louisa must have enjoyed writing them, and I'm itching to read one.  Project Gutenberg doesn't seem to have any but I can probably find some at the library.

Last, the ugly.  Nowadays we take it for granted that physicians can heal--they have antibiotics and steroid shots; pain-killers, ultrasounds and vaccinations.  But not then...not in 1865 when Louisa became deathly ill with typhoid pneumonia and was laid up for weeks.  Not when her sister died or...well.  I won't go on and spoil the book for you.  It's a biography.  Everybody dies in the end.

Still reading the biography of Louisa May Alcott

It's so sad to read about the hurt done to her body by her wretched diet while growing up--bread, apples, and sometime oatmeal were the family meals for weeks on end.  And futher damage done by the physician who gave her mercury (calomel) for a typhoid remedy.  (fyi, it doesn't work and mercury is poison).  And who knows what else misguided behaviors, common for the times.

Will the people of our future look back on us and feel sorry for the people who die of cancer, dementia, and diabetes, thinking, "Those poor, misguided people!  All they needed was gene therapy, elimination of such-and-such from the diet, and fresh, wholesome foods."

If only I could live to see the day.

Later...and later in the book.  Several modern-day doctors reviewed the records.  They don't think that the blue pills (mercury-based) given to her in the Civil War hospital caused her later-in-life illnesses.  Based on her symptoms and paintings from the time, they think it was lupus.  There's still no cure for lupus.

Dogs and smells

Here are my observations on a matter of very deep and revealing proportions.  Zack takes twice as long to explore a smell than Izzy, and Werewolf takes the least time of all.  My conclusion is:

The smaller the schnozzle the slower the smeller.

Hope I no need bread because

 I just scooped out my No-Knead bread, "Bread so easy a four-year-old can make it."  It's supposed to rest for 15 minutes, then I somehow have to make it into a ball and encase the ball in towels.
Here is is what it looks like, resting.

 

Hint: this is not supposed to be what it looks like.


Many people said their dough wouldn't make a ball, either, but that it still turned out well.  But was their dough more like a seeping, watery mass on the cutting board?  Dare I add a little extra yeast?  

No, I'll just ball it up and let it do its second rising.

Later.  It's hopeless and I'm a failure.  I can't even make No-Knead Bread.  It turned out flat as a tortilla with the texture of a brick.

On the other hand, the recipe posted for the 4-year-old varies slightly from Smitten Kitchen's.  I'm trying the 4-year-old version next time.  And there will be a next time.

Also, I think it needed more flour and a warmer rising place.  And a 7-1/2 quart Dutch Oven.