As a child of the South, I have a soft spot for mason jars. I grew up surrounded by them, since the ladies on my father's side of the family did a fair amount of canning. (After all, his family did come from the country: Seminole County, in the Southwest corner of Georgia.)
And yes, people really do drink out of mason jars here. In fact, Folks restaurant chain used to serve drinks in them. Of course, it's less common than it used to be, but it can be very handy if you want to be able to seal it up. (Think of it as the environmentally-responsible late nineteenth and early twentieth-century version of the to-go cup and tupperware…) I recently bought a bunch of them for canning.
To me, Mason jars are wonderful to look at. Today's jars look just like those from my childhood, except that the lids and bands are now platinum colored. In our living room, we have a half-gallon Mason jar sitting on a shelf, filled with glass florist marbles. It looks very cool, but in our case they aren't simply decorative: we're gamers, so my husband and I actually use those marbles for D&D and for card or board games.
Mason jars are just so handy! I remember my grandfather keeping miscellaneous fasteners in those jars in his workshop; in the utility room off the garage, my grandmother had a couple of shelves of them, which she would send us to fetch to store leftover soup, or perhaps some sweet tea to send with a guest.
Perhaps it seems old-fashioned to you, but it's not like I'm old. Sure, we have dedicated drink bottles now, and all sorts of plastic storage containers. It's not like we didn't have those when I was a kid, though the variety was certainly smaller.
But think about it: after you finish your 32 ounce cup of Coke from McDonald's, what do you do with the cup? Trash it. What would you do with a Mason jar? Wash it out and reuse it. The only plastic is in the lining of the lid used for sealing; even those lids can be reused for non-food storage. The bands and jars can be reused until the jars chip or the bands begin to rust.
That's part of the appeal of a Mason jar: they remind us of a time when resources weren't taken for granted…and neither were people.
Friday, November 06, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
A Life Less Dramatic
I want a life less dramatic. Until recently, I would listen to tales of drama from friends and co-workers and think, "I'm so glad my life is relatively drama free."
God decided my friends and co-workers had suffered enough and I needed to take on some of the excess.
A month ago today, my husband and I were driving home from a trip to Ikea (yay Ikea!) where we picked up a few small items we had been avoiding buying. Turns out it was a good thing that it was small items, because our car came to a total stop on the expressway. Blessedly, it was actually at the exit to his parent's house, and his dad is quite mechanically adept. So we called him, and he set out at 10 at night to come rescue us. And right after that, the mechanic who works two businesses down from my office happens by, and stops to see if we need help. (He didn't recognize us in the dark; he just stops to help people stuck at the side of the road.) He figured out what we needed to be able to coast to the in-law's house, so we put him on the phone with my father-in-law. He headed on, and by 11:30 we made it my in-laws house. They loaned us his dad's truck, and we headed home, getting back past midnight.
The next day, his mom's car breaks down at the side of the road. His dad has to go rescue her, and the car juggling gets complicated.
Fast forward to Monday. Did you hear about the Atlanta floods? Well, guess where my raincoat was? Yep, in our car. I finally made it to work, over an hour late instead of fifteen minutes early as I would have under normal conditions. Getting home was fun, too…I just love public transportation when I don't have a rain jacket and it's, well, raining.
The next weekend we have to switch vehicles with my in-laws, which wasn't a problem since we weren't going far and my father-in-law actually drove out here to make the switch.
Remember the problems with his mom's car? While we were getting set up for D&D, my husband ran out to pick up pizza. Half an hour later he wasn't back, and he calls. BECAUSE THE CAR KEPT BREAKING DOWN! So his dad is driving back out to pick him up, but he needs someone to come get the pizza from him before it's stone cold. HIs dad comes out, he gets it running, we switch vehicles, and my husband follows his dad back to their house, and then comes back to our house. Meanwhile my friends take me home.
Later that week, we find out the car is kaputt. (The guy couldn't get to it for a few days, because the road going to his lot was flooded.) The engine is shot, which is especially disappointing since we had it rebuilt about a year and a half ago. So now we're car-hunting, only two months after having to buy a house. Oh joy.
During this time we receive some disturbing health news, which I don't want to go into here. Just accept that it's more stress we don't need.
Since then we've had lots of drama with car shopping; a trip my husband and his dad took to Birmingham on their day off, only to find out it was seriously misrepresented in the ad and their phone conversation, getting lost trying to find sellers, cars that sell just as we're about to leave to go see them, and more.
While we're out of town for a conference, his mom's computer also goes kaputt (that's German, by the way). Fortunately, it can be repaired, but we spent a lot of time on our trip trying to provide tech support by phone, with no good results. We have to come back a little earlier than planned to try and fix it, but we're thankful we had a vehicle to even make the trip!
Also during this time my best friends' little girl was diagnosed with swine flu, and one of my nephews (the eight month old) had to go to the emergency room twice. The second time was yesterday…
Which we found out while waiting for a wrecker to come and get us after a guy in a Mustang ran a stop sign, resulting in my husband hitting him. Blessedly, my love was able to slam on the brakes and swerve, so he was going a bit slower and didn't hit the driver's side straight on. Everyone was fine, which is what counts, and amazingly enough there was an ambulance just driving down the road, so they were only four cars away when it happened.
Did I mention we were all the way in Ellijay, leaving the Georgia Apple Festival, two hours from home? And that we were in my father-in-law's truck, which had been the spare vehicle? We ended up on the side of the road for an hour, then the (very nice) police officer drove us to the towing company's lot. There we had arrange for someone who could tow us to Atlanta, which entailed lots of conversations by phone with my father-in-law. We finally found a local who could, and the officer drove us to the local shopping center (Starbucks, IHOP, and Wal-Mart) to wait for the towing guy to finish up what he was doing and pick up the truck. Finally, after 9:30, we make it back to my father-in-law's house, where we pay the driver (a very nice guy, a churchgoing family man) and get the car unloaded. Another of our nephews was there, so he had stayed up WAY past his bedtime to see us and the big wrecker truck. (He loved it, and we were thrilled to see him.)
By the time we got home, my back was killing me. It was already sore, but after an hour standing at the side of the road, and another hour alternately sitting in the back seat of a police car and standing around, then a ride in the cab of a wrecker? Not good. Not to mention the stress that left my back all knotted up.
So, spare car gone, and we're going to look at another one today; not how we planned to spend my love's birthday! I so pray this works out, because the last thing I need is another week or two of drama. And we didn't even get to stop and buy our apples…
God decided my friends and co-workers had suffered enough and I needed to take on some of the excess.
A month ago today, my husband and I were driving home from a trip to Ikea (yay Ikea!) where we picked up a few small items we had been avoiding buying. Turns out it was a good thing that it was small items, because our car came to a total stop on the expressway. Blessedly, it was actually at the exit to his parent's house, and his dad is quite mechanically adept. So we called him, and he set out at 10 at night to come rescue us. And right after that, the mechanic who works two businesses down from my office happens by, and stops to see if we need help. (He didn't recognize us in the dark; he just stops to help people stuck at the side of the road.) He figured out what we needed to be able to coast to the in-law's house, so we put him on the phone with my father-in-law. He headed on, and by 11:30 we made it my in-laws house. They loaned us his dad's truck, and we headed home, getting back past midnight.
The next day, his mom's car breaks down at the side of the road. His dad has to go rescue her, and the car juggling gets complicated.
Fast forward to Monday. Did you hear about the Atlanta floods? Well, guess where my raincoat was? Yep, in our car. I finally made it to work, over an hour late instead of fifteen minutes early as I would have under normal conditions. Getting home was fun, too…I just love public transportation when I don't have a rain jacket and it's, well, raining.
The next weekend we have to switch vehicles with my in-laws, which wasn't a problem since we weren't going far and my father-in-law actually drove out here to make the switch.
Remember the problems with his mom's car? While we were getting set up for D&D, my husband ran out to pick up pizza. Half an hour later he wasn't back, and he calls. BECAUSE THE CAR KEPT BREAKING DOWN! So his dad is driving back out to pick him up, but he needs someone to come get the pizza from him before it's stone cold. HIs dad comes out, he gets it running, we switch vehicles, and my husband follows his dad back to their house, and then comes back to our house. Meanwhile my friends take me home.
Later that week, we find out the car is kaputt. (The guy couldn't get to it for a few days, because the road going to his lot was flooded.) The engine is shot, which is especially disappointing since we had it rebuilt about a year and a half ago. So now we're car-hunting, only two months after having to buy a house. Oh joy.
During this time we receive some disturbing health news, which I don't want to go into here. Just accept that it's more stress we don't need.
Since then we've had lots of drama with car shopping; a trip my husband and his dad took to Birmingham on their day off, only to find out it was seriously misrepresented in the ad and their phone conversation, getting lost trying to find sellers, cars that sell just as we're about to leave to go see them, and more.
While we're out of town for a conference, his mom's computer also goes kaputt (that's German, by the way). Fortunately, it can be repaired, but we spent a lot of time on our trip trying to provide tech support by phone, with no good results. We have to come back a little earlier than planned to try and fix it, but we're thankful we had a vehicle to even make the trip!
Also during this time my best friends' little girl was diagnosed with swine flu, and one of my nephews (the eight month old) had to go to the emergency room twice. The second time was yesterday…
Which we found out while waiting for a wrecker to come and get us after a guy in a Mustang ran a stop sign, resulting in my husband hitting him. Blessedly, my love was able to slam on the brakes and swerve, so he was going a bit slower and didn't hit the driver's side straight on. Everyone was fine, which is what counts, and amazingly enough there was an ambulance just driving down the road, so they were only four cars away when it happened.
Did I mention we were all the way in Ellijay, leaving the Georgia Apple Festival, two hours from home? And that we were in my father-in-law's truck, which had been the spare vehicle? We ended up on the side of the road for an hour, then the (very nice) police officer drove us to the towing company's lot. There we had arrange for someone who could tow us to Atlanta, which entailed lots of conversations by phone with my father-in-law. We finally found a local who could, and the officer drove us to the local shopping center (Starbucks, IHOP, and Wal-Mart) to wait for the towing guy to finish up what he was doing and pick up the truck. Finally, after 9:30, we make it back to my father-in-law's house, where we pay the driver (a very nice guy, a churchgoing family man) and get the car unloaded. Another of our nephews was there, so he had stayed up WAY past his bedtime to see us and the big wrecker truck. (He loved it, and we were thrilled to see him.)
By the time we got home, my back was killing me. It was already sore, but after an hour standing at the side of the road, and another hour alternately sitting in the back seat of a police car and standing around, then a ride in the cab of a wrecker? Not good. Not to mention the stress that left my back all knotted up.
So, spare car gone, and we're going to look at another one today; not how we planned to spend my love's birthday! I so pray this works out, because the last thing I need is another week or two of drama. And we didn't even get to stop and buy our apples…
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Dark Gardening
I love plants, and I really adore flowers. I'm even blessed enough to live in an area where you can have flowers all winter long! (Yes, really, you Northerners. I've seen pansies peek up through our infrequent snows, and just keep on going.)
But all the pastels! They make me twitch after awhile–especially the overload of pink. I want a garden that's unique, a garden that doesn't look like every other garden in the city. A garden that doesn't feel frilly.
Like one with this little beauty.
Isn't that awesome? It's a bat plant, or Tacca integrifolia. I couldn't actually grow it in my garden, but that's beside the point. I want plants with character! And preferably, plants with some darkness.
I don't even remember how I found it, but I stumbled across the black pansy yesterday. A bit of searching uncovered the Black Moon, Black Prince and Clearly Crystals Black varieties, all available from Hirt's Gardens. They also carry Bowles Black violas. (Violas, of course, are from the same genus as pansies.)
What's wonderful about these is that I can have them blooming at Halloween! Is there anything more appropriate? (Well, okay, black roses, but this is close enough…)
Hirt's also carries seeds for a few other gorgeous black flowers, including the black iris, King of the Blacks carnations, black bachelor button, and black hollyhocks. (Don't miss the selections of black vegetables, including tomatoes and corn! Hirt's also has seeds for both the black and white bat plants.)
But I hit the real motherlode when a link from a livejournal community led me to Chocolate Flower Farm! Are they not totally incredible?
I can't wait to place an order for the spring. I want to use lots of native or naturalized plants in my regular garden, but I think a few carefully chosen selections of "black" or "chocolate" plants would be a wonderful addition!
But all the pastels! They make me twitch after awhile–especially the overload of pink. I want a garden that's unique, a garden that doesn't look like every other garden in the city. A garden that doesn't feel frilly.
Like one with this little beauty.
Isn't that awesome? It's a bat plant, or Tacca integrifolia. I couldn't actually grow it in my garden, but that's beside the point. I want plants with character! And preferably, plants with some darkness.
I don't even remember how I found it, but I stumbled across the black pansy yesterday. A bit of searching uncovered the Black Moon, Black Prince and Clearly Crystals Black varieties, all available from Hirt's Gardens. They also carry Bowles Black violas. (Violas, of course, are from the same genus as pansies.)
What's wonderful about these is that I can have them blooming at Halloween! Is there anything more appropriate? (Well, okay, black roses, but this is close enough…)
Hirt's also carries seeds for a few other gorgeous black flowers, including the black iris, King of the Blacks carnations, black bachelor button, and black hollyhocks. (Don't miss the selections of black vegetables, including tomatoes and corn! Hirt's also has seeds for both the black and white bat plants.)
But I hit the real motherlode when a link from a livejournal community led me to Chocolate Flower Farm! Are they not totally incredible?
I can't wait to place an order for the spring. I want to use lots of native or naturalized plants in my regular garden, but I think a few carefully chosen selections of "black" or "chocolate" plants would be a wonderful addition!
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
College Board's 101 Great Books
There's a so-called BBC list making the rounds on Facebook, which is kind of interesting. Except no one can find where the BBC ever published it.
Pfff. Details.
Actually, I did find a list from College Board that looks sufficiently challenging:
101 Great Books
Recommended for College Bound Readers
Bold entries are books I have read.
Beowulf (author unknown)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
A Death in the Family (James Agee)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
The Stranger (Albert Camus)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov)
The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
Inferno (Dante)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass)
An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
The Iliad (Homer)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
Their Eyes were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)
The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)
The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Marquez)
Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor)
Long Day's Journey into Night (Eugene O'Neill)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Platt)
Selected Tales (Edgar Allen Poe) *
Swann's Way (Marcel Proust)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare)
Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Antigone (Sophocles)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
Vanity Fair (William Thackeray)
Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
Candide (Voltaire)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)+
Collected Stories (Eudora Welty)
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Native Son (Richard Wright)
So, even though I've made no special effort to read these particular books, I've read forty-one. I have also read other novels by the authors on the list, so I suppose I'm entitled to call myself "well read".
* I've read all but three of the short stories in the specified Edgar Allan Poe collection, and a lot of his other work, so I'm counting that one.
+ I haven't read The House of Mirth. However, I slogged my way through Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome, which is one of the worst "classic" works I've ever read. I definitely deserve credit for that.
Pfff. Details.
Actually, I did find a list from College Board that looks sufficiently challenging:
101 Great Books
Recommended for College Bound Readers
Bold entries are books I have read.
Beowulf (author unknown)
Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
A Death in the Family (James Agee)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin)
Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)
The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
The Stranger (Albert Camus)
Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
The Cherry Orchard (Anton Chekhov)
The Awakening (Kate Chopin)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper)
The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)
Inferno (Dante)
Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Frederick Douglass)
An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser)
The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas)
The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot)
Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
Selected Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford)
Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
The Iliad (Homer)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)
Their Eyes were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen)
The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
The Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)
The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston)
To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis)
The Call of the Wild (Jack London)
The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Marquez)
Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville)
Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
The Crucible (Arthur Miller)
Beloved (Toni Morrison)
A Good Man is Hard to Find (Flannery O'Connor)
Long Day's Journey into Night (Eugene O'Neill)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
The Bell Jar (Sylvia Platt)
Selected Tales (Edgar Allen Poe) *
Swann's Way (Marcel Proust)
The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
All Quiet on the Western Front (Erich Maria Remarque)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand)
Call It Sleep (Henry Roth)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
Hamlet (William Shakespeare)
Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (William Shakespeare)
Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Ceremony (Leslie Marmon Silko)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
Antigone (Sophocles)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)
Vanity Fair (William Thackeray)
Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
Candide (Voltaire)
Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
The Color Purple (Alice Walker)
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)+
Collected Stories (Eudora Welty)
Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
The Glass Menagerie (Tennessee Williams)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Native Son (Richard Wright)
So, even though I've made no special effort to read these particular books, I've read forty-one. I have also read other novels by the authors on the list, so I suppose I'm entitled to call myself "well read".
* I've read all but three of the short stories in the specified Edgar Allan Poe collection, and a lot of his other work, so I'm counting that one.
+ I haven't read The House of Mirth. However, I slogged my way through Edith Wharton's novel Ethan Frome, which is one of the worst "classic" works I've ever read. I definitely deserve credit for that.
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