Plants Inside and Out

As part of my defiant homemaking, the gardening continues.  This is the first year I've had a successful garden--our last place only allowed containers, and it was too shady for even lettuce.  The half nearest the viewer is the neighbors'; the half towards the back is ours.  We'll have some leeway on when we move (J's job goes until mid-September, so we have to be here at least that long) but the neighbors may end up getting the last of our garden. I'm becoming ok with that--they're nice people, and the garden is already worth it for the relaxation I get from it.

Remember this guy?  The little airplant we got in Brooklyn earlier this spring?  It's apparently very happy, since it started blooming all over.  It's very entertaining to watch, since it changes from breakfast to dinner and puts out more flower buds every day.

It is also one of the things I'm least worried about packing.  We're starting to get rid of books and furniture, since we'll be moving by January no matter what happens.  Right now it feels like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon, since we have so much stuff.  I don't know how to begin thinking about which houseplants to move and which to leave.  If you've seen my second ever post, you know I have a lot of houseplants, and that's not even all of the houseplants.  When we moved across town last summer, the plants alone took a car trip by them selves to move, and I've gotten more since then.  (Whoops).  There are a couple that I'm looking for the excuse to get rid of (over grown rescue plants and office plants) but my plants are as much of a collection as anything else.  It's taken me three years to find and cultivate what I have, and it makes me sad to think of giving them up.  Something like my books can be shipped and sustain a little damage, while my collection of antique dishes can be packed relatively compactly and be taken with us in the car.  The furniture is mostly going to be sold.  But the plants--they take up so much room, won't ship well, and I don't know what to do with them.  That's honestly what's stressing me out the most about the move right now.  I don't care where we go, just let me take my plants!

A rainy day

We got our cool weather vegetable seeds put in the ground two days ago, and then I spent the next day hiding inside from the rain and hating all the photos I took in the archives.  Right now I'm just crossing my fingers that the seeds outside don't get flooded away; our back yard is apparently quite low and water gathered in parts during the snow melt.  The inside flower seedlings are looking good, although they got neglected during the couch re-do.

No heavy thoughts for today; I'm contemplating making these hanging moss balls or some macrame (oh noes!) plant hangers to get some of my plants out of the cat's nibbling range.  There is, of course, also the RTW sewalong, which I'm lagging on because I'm playing around with the fit of my muslin.  It seems very large, but I don't want to get rid of all the ease.  I've also got a post rattling around about the place of empathy in politics and feminism, but that's taking a while to come together.  

Otherwise J and I are gearing up for summer and trying to recover from the couch recovering; housework got neglected while we were both distracted by that and there are both piles of laundry and piles of dishes looming.  

The utter sugary chaos

J's birthday was this weekend, and between that, his sister coming to visit for said birthday, and keeping up with the class I'm teaching, the above is what my Saturday looked like.  And yes, that's four kinds of jello and two bowls of cake batter.  J got marble cupcakes and this somewhat daunting confection:

J was deprived of jello as a child, so for the birthdays we've been in the same state for (not many, since we were long distance for my first two years of grad school), I've made him jello cakes.  (His sister hates jello, hence both the childhood deprivation and the marble cupcakes).  The first one I did had jiggler letters suspended in clear gelatin (which was a little disturbing even though it was sweetened and flavored), and I've been waiting to make this one ever since I saw this.  I couldn't find a bundt pan, which I think makes the original look even more epic, but the really thin-walled ice ring mold I had I think made it easier to slip it out when it was finished.  (When everything is set, the whole mold gets dipped in hot water, without the water going over into the jello, to loosen it from the sides and let it slip out).  

I used plain, unsweetened yogurt to cloud the pastel layers, and it didn't affect the taste or mouthfeel much except to cut the sweetness a little (a good thing, in my opinion).  I shook the jello and yogurt together in a small tupperware to mix them, since the yogurt stayed lumpy when mixed in with a spoon or fork, so that's why the yellow pastel layer has bubbles in it.  Each layer set for 45-60 minutes, and then I let the whole thing set for another two hours.  It came out pretty wobbly, and would have been less wobbly if it had set longer, but we were working on a deadline.  Overall, I thought it was pretty successful, and J was happy with it.  Definitely not something I would have made for myself, though.  Anyone else done any epic cooking or craft projects for someone you love/care for that you wouldn't have done for yourself?

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.

Huswifery

I'm using a few of my days (sort of) off before classes start to do some organizing, laundry, and general huswifery. We had a lot of people over right before the holidays, and between that, letting things slide for finals, and then going to my parents' for a few weeks and leaving my partner J home by himself, things need to get straightened back up. J does the majority of our housework, like dishes, cooking, and sweeping/mopping, but he's not very good at landing things where they need to go (or at least, where I think they need to go). And my sewing machine is in the shop with something wrong in the bobbin case, so I might as well make the office/sewing room usable again before I make more messes in there. My poor house plants in the office aren't too happy with J's overwatering and underwatering over the holiday, but that's also partly because our little town of Overcast has been so cloudy all winter.

I feel bad sometimes about all the housework J does, because sometimes it feels like we're replicating the old academic roles of disengaged academic and housebound non-academic spouse with the genders reversed, but then I get over it. Our third anniversary (of dating, not marriage) is this weekend, and we moved in together permanently about six months ago. We started dating in college right after I'd decided to move halfway across the country from Snow City to Overcast to go to Snooty U for grad school, and we planned on dating only for the rest of that academic year. Well, that didn't work out, and we decided to go long distance even though he had another two years of college left (I know, robbing the cradle). He graduated this spring and moved out here, which kind of put his career on hold because there's only work in his field here during the summer. He's working at a wine store for the winter, which is at least something he enjoys and which gets us free wine, but I worry that for all my feminism I'm just replicating old gender roles. At least he's not supporting me through grad school and we don't have that sitting between us. Living together certainly lets us afford a better apartment than either of us could afford separately, but that doesn't bother me so much. I think we're doing ok with it by talking the issue to death every time something happens, but I hate to make someone a trailing spouse since (I hate to admit it) I'm not sure that I would be able to be the trailing spouse myself.

Back to the organizing. My desk has been taken over by stacks of paper, electronics, and piles of art that need frames or hangers or just wall space. And a puzzle we started before Christmas and haven't finished yet. I have a little collection of vintage souvenir plates, and I got six more for Christmas that have to get put up somewhere, plus prints and photos that have been sitting around for months. I'm much less productive trying to write on the couch or at the kitchen table (couch + computer = Internet for me), so getting the desk cleared up and organized again will get me back to work. And I'm telling myself I need a few days to recover from being with my family for the holiday (I just flew back to Overcast the day before the first post here). Plus there's the problem that my sewing pile and fabric stash overflowed from its dresser in the spare bedroom and all over my desk chair, so that has to get taken care of and put away somewhere first. And then some felllowship applications will get written, and there will be a research trip later this month, and then I will do some sewing as a reward.