Cheers! Salute! Proost! A votre santé!

So, we're a little late with the report on our first batch of beer. In fact, of the 46 bottles we put up, there are only about a dozen left in the basement. Before you start worrying, many of them went to Columbus and on to friends and relatives. It's been a rough couple months, but not quite that rough.

I guess the fact that so much of it is gone is the best testimony, though, to the fact that it was (and is) really good! Not just palatable, but tasty: dry, malty without being sweet, a little hoppy, and with modest carbonation that makes it drink like an English draft ale. 

The inaugural tasting happened at my mom's house in Columbus a few weeks ago, where we paired it with (what else?) my sister's fabulous homemade pizza.

The following week we made our own homemade pizza and broke out a couple more bottles: delicious.



I'm afraid Jane may be right: this could easily turn into an obsession.  In fact, we've just received our second and third kits from Northern Brewer. 

Next up: "The Innkeeper," described as being similar to Bass Pale Ale.  Once we get that started, we'll be heading up to South Hills Brewing to get a secondary fermentor so we can make the "Chinook IPA."  And Tom's got a bug to make mead at some point.  Stay tuned! 

Hornbooks

I've admitted to being a collector here before; we have, stashed in various places around the house, all sorts of things roughly organized into loosely defined collections: books, glass and pottery, ephemera, folk art, and so on--even a few paintings.  It's always a great treat, then, to find an object that fits easily into more than one collection, as does the tiny (less than two-inch) late-medieval pewter badge shown here in the shape of a hornbook (complete with "abc"!), which fits both into a collection of books and into my collection of late medieval religious and secular badges. I got hooked on badges after seeing a number of them on display in the Cluny, the Parisian museum of the middle ages. The badges, both secular and religious, were the cheapest sort of personal adornments and/or tourist souvenirs from the late middle ages, and now they are an invaluable record of material culture from the lower levels of society, and they literally survive by the thousands.

Hornbooks, of course, were small wooden paddles, covered on one side with a see-through section of cow horn, behind which lay a printed or manuscript text of some sort, usually an alphabet and the most rudimentary elements of a primer. Hornbooks were often the first book in a child's literacy education. Real hornbooks, of course, like most early books intended for children, are virtually impossible to find these days, both because early collectors did not value them and because kids literally wore them out. If we can judge by an analogous example, the earliest American children's book, The New England Primer, apparently was first printed in 1689 or 1690.  It went through literally hundreds of editions in the next century and a half, and yet not a single eighteenth-century copy is available for sale on the ABEbooks site, and only a dozen or so copies from before 1830 can be found there. Charles F Heartman's bibliography of 1930 could not locate a single copy surviving from before 1727, though providing evidence for at least five earlier printings.

Excited as I recently was to find and buy the horn-book badge (which probably dates from around the fifteenth century), it was an especial treat since, many years ago, at an antique show in Greeley, I had bought a single-sheet hornbook page, although I've never been certain about just how old it is.  About the size of an index card, and printed on only one side, on good old-fashioned laid paper, with visible chain lines and everything, it has all the look of an original from the eighteenth century or earlier, but I've never been able to fully banish from my mind the possibility that it might be a nineteenth-century replica or souvenir of some sort. But the two-forms of the letters r and s, and the treatment of u and v as alternative forms of the same letter (to say nothing of the old-style "and" symbol after the lower case z) give it a very old black-letter look indeed. Early seventeenth century?  Could be, but I can't be at all sure.

And that's one of the great pleasures and frustrations of collecting things so old: they tell us so much with their very presence and realness, but there's often so much that still demands research.

Bottling day

You might recall that Tom and I recently embarked on a home-brewing experiment, thanks to the holiday gift of a starter kit he got from my mom and sister.

Well, today was bottling day.

This required boiling a little more than half a cup of sugar in some water, putting that in the bottling bucket, and then siphoning the fermented beer into the bottling bucket.  Remarkably, when we took the lid off the fermenting bucket, it actually smelled like...beer!  So far, we don't seem to have screwed things up.

The beer, after being siphoned into the bottling container.

--and the icky sludge left over at the bottom of the fermenting container.

Bottles in sanitizing solution, waiting to be filled.

It took us awhile to get the hang of filling the bottles, especially shutting off the valve in time and moving the siphon from one bottle to the next without making a mess.  Well, without making a huge mess.  I'm pretty sure that beer bottling is going to be messy no matter what.  Here are some highlights (?) of the process:

It did get easier, fortunately.

This has been a really difficult and depressing week for both of us--the kind where excruciating, seemingly endless minutes alternate with long stretches of numbness.  An ice storm last night prevented us from getting out of town today, or even out of the house, for a change of scenery.  So what else to do but finally get around to the bottling?

Strangely, it proved to be an ideal activity for the moment.  Bottling is the kind of task that is both mindless and deeply absorbing, and eventually it becomes so mechanical it takes on a kind of Zen-like, meditative quality.  I was almost sorry when it was over.  In the end, we had 46 bottles of beer ready to put up.

The beer has to condition in the bottles for two weeks before it'll be drinkable.  That gives us something to look forward to in a couple of weeks, and with any luck, will also give us a sense of being rewarded for our hard work.  At the moment, I'm deeply grateful for those simple gifts.

Helicopter attack, part 2

Regular readers might recall a post from about a year and a half ago about an encounter that I had with a  helicopter dad who came in to the advising office with his daughter, and the family drama that ensued.

Flash forward to today.  First day of spring semester, and I'm in my usual two-hour Monday afternoon shift doing advising.  It's very quiet--too quiet--for the first day, which probably should have been my first clue that some fresh hell was about to break loose.  I only had one scheduled appointment, at 3:30.

Around 3:15, a middle-aged guy sticks his head in the door, and asks if I can meet with him.  He looks familiar--I've met him before, I know he's been in the office before, but I can't place him until he says he's here to talk about his daughter's schedule.  But she's nowhere to be seen, and he has to call her several times before she finally answers and shows up in the office.  Oh yes: it's that family again.  And Mom's along this time, too. 

The student herself?  As soon as she plops into the chair, she whips out her phone and starts texting.  As the dad starts asking me questions about what classes she needs, I turn to her to get her input, and she's totally tuned out, texting away and clearly expecting mom and dad to do the heavy lifting.

The long and short of it is that the student is expecting to graduate this semester, but she's forgotten to enroll in the last class she needs, and got a D in another required course last semester, which means she'll have to repeat it and get a C or better. 

I could go on and on about the drama, part 2.  I'll spare you the details, and just say that it was very clear that the dad knew the requirements for the English major inside out, and the daughter not at all.  When the student bothered to put the phone down, it was to make snarky, petulant comments about how she didn't care what was required; she just wanted to finish and graduate. 

As before, I was mad at myself for not being more assertive--since, of course, this all took far longer than 15 minutes, leaving the poor guy who had actually scheduled an appointment sitting in the hallway. 

In my dream world, I would have channeled my maternal grandmother and said something snappy like "Young lady, this is your future we're discussing here, and you need to pay attention."  And maybe say something similar to the parents, like, "Tiffany Sue [not her real name] is the person who needs to make these decisions; why don't you wait outside?"

But of course, none of that happened. 

What really strikes me this time around is that this student is a graduating senior.  Presumably, she's on the brink of adulthood and independence.  But there's no evidence that that's even within the realm of possibility for her. 

Even more than feeling angry, the encounter left me feeling sad, and bewildered.  It seems like this child has been permanently damaged by her parents' concern.  And it strikes me as pathetic that any college senior could be OK with having her parents schedule her classes and generally organizing her life for her, much less seemingly expecting them to do it, and behaving as if she couldn't be bothered to worry about such trivial concerns.  Had it even crossed my mind to ask my parents for that kind of assistance, I would have been utterly humiliated to do so.

I just don't get it.

Is being a grown-up that unattractive to this young woman?  Or is it that it's just so, so much easier to keep doing the same old thing?  It just seems to me that by the time you were 21, you'd be tired of behaving like you're 16.  And that you'd want to feel like you were capable of managing your own life (whether you were or not). 

Damn, she didn't even show as much initiative as Veruca Salt.  At least Veruca always knew what she wanted, and asked for it by name.

Sigh.  And so begins another semester...

Happy brew year!

Or maybe that should be "Happy new beer"?

Tom's toyed with the idea of making his own beer for a long time, and thanks to my sister and my mom, he got a home-brewing kit for Christmas.  So, today was our first brewing day!

Fortunately, the kit came with everything--and I mean everything--you might need to get started, including a well-produced DVD with step-by-step instructions.  After watching that, we felt confident enough to get started.

So, first we had to empty the brewing grains into a mesh bag and steep them in warm water for 20 minutes.

Remove those, then bring the water to a boil and add a half-gallon (!) of malt syrup and a packet of dry malt.

Bring back to a boil, and boil for an hour, adding the hops as you go.  There were three different kinds of hops: one that went in at the beginning of the hour, one that went in fifteen minutes into the process, and one that went in 45 minutes in.

After the hour of boiling was up, the pot went into a cold-water bath to cool down.  Fortunately, I'd been defrosting the freezer, so there was lots of ice available for that.

Once the pot cooled down to room temperature, it was time to add the yeast. 

That's it.  We snapped on the lid, put in the valve that shows if fermentation is happening, and hauled the bucket off to the basement to do its magic.  Fingers crossed that we had the right temperature for the yeast to grow!

There were several other crucial steps involved, most of which involved sanitizing everything, including the bag of yeast itself and the scissors used to cut it open.  And something about using a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of the mixture so that you can compare the initial reading with later readings to know when it's done fermenting.  Thank god the brewmaster here has a bachelor's degree in physics, because that's the point where my brain shut off.

Once the fermentation stops, it'll be time to bottle it, and then the beer needs to be bottle-conditioned for a couple of weeks.  But we should have our first batch in about a month!  So, expect more updates as the experiment continues.

Cheers to all our readers, and best wishes for a very happy 2012!

P. S. Many thanks to my former student Rebecca for the tip about Northern Brewer's idiot-proof kits and supplies. 

What a long, strange trip it's been

In tenure-file hell (thanks to Cath Gouge for the photo!)

A few days ago, Romantoes marked its four-year anniversary.  Our inaugural post focused on the end of our first semester here at West Virginia University, after Tom and I both ditched tenured jobs in Colorado to move back east.

Yesterday, I turned in my tenure crate.  Yes, crate.

Don't let appearances fool you--that's not just any plastic milk crate, but the College of Arts & Sciences "official container," as the e-mail from our Department admin described it.  And, indeed, it has stickers all over it identifying where it came from, and who it's to be returned to. 

Because I'd gotten tenure at my previous university, I figured it'd be no sweat to be untenured again.  To some degree, that was true: it was certainly less of a scramble to figure out how to juggle the teaching, research, and service parts of the job.  And I was largely unfazed by a lot of bureaucratic snafus that might otherwise have derailed me.

But in other ways, the experience of being untenured was much the same.  I've worried about making some huge mistake that would cost me my job.  I've been paranoid about whether people think that hiring me was a bad idea.  I've compared my own productivity unfavorably with pretty much everyone else on campus.

The tenure file itself, as you can see, is a monster.  We're required to include all of the materials that were in our past annual evaluation files, but they need to be disassembled, reorganized chronologically, and re-numbered and re-inventoried.  That part of the process nearly drove me mad, and I'm actually the kind of person who loves organizing stuff; I mean, one of the perks of this scheme was that it gave me an excuse to wander the aisles of Office Depot, debating the relative merits of reinforced hanging folders versus expandable ones.

At the end of last week, this is what my desk looked like.

Yes, I'd arranged everything into piles for each section that conveniently spelled out the word "PARTS":  "Preliminary" materials, "Administrative" materials, "Research," "Teaching," and "Service."  Clearly, I'd gone round the twist, as the Brits say.  I can't tell you how many people stopped in my doorway to laugh at me.  (This is one of the downsides of having an office located directly across from the first-floor women's restroom.)

But at any rate, I finally got everything printed out, numbered, inventoried, put in its correctly labeled folder, and transferred into the crate.  And then I hefted that bad boy down to the office and officially let it go. 

And you know what?  I knew I'd feel relieved, but I figured I'd just feel relieved in the same way you feel relieved when any big project is over.  After all, I'd gone through this before, right?  So it's not like it's a novel experience. 

But the thing is, turning that file in felt very different this time.  It felt not like an ending, but like a beginning.  In many ways, it felt like I was emerging from a four-year purgatory.  Seriously.  I don't think I comprehended just how tentative my position has felt for the past four years until I reviewed it, articulated it, packed it into that crate, and sent it off to someone else to evaluate.  All day today I've had a sense of placid liberation. 

I'm sure the anxiety will rear its ugly head again eventually, as I await the decision of the Chair and the faculty evaluation committee.  But anxiety is absolutely what I don't feel at the moment.  The word that springs to mind, oddly, is "sanctified," though for the life of me I don't think I could explain why. 

At Northern Colorado, after a couple of folks in our department got tenure, a colleague bought them a congratulatory cake that said "Greeley Forever."  Everyone laughed, and grimaced, and knew that inscription was half joke, half grim reality.  It was one of the many moments that led me to question the sacred cow that is tenure: why work so hard to get it if you assume it means you're stuck in a place and a job that you don't like?

Looking back on this blog's first entry from the vantage point of having just applied for tenure again, I'm happy to report that the sense of trepidation that comes through in that first post is gone, while the sense of wonder and pleasure about being here has only grown.  Here's to taking the leap.

At the Seneca Center

Today was the last day of school before "dead week," when we're not supposed to assign any real work, and when I came home from collecting papers in two classes today, Rose suggested we go out to the local antique mall in the Seneca Center, the former glasshouse down along the river.   It's a small antique mall--I think it may have only three or four dealers, and we figured we could easily get in and out in less than an hour.

But Rosemary, as she says, has one of those faces where sometimes people will just want to talk her ear off, and the woman behind the counter at the mall today certainly wanted to talk.  We browsed for a while, and eventually, I ended up snooping through some boxes of old valentines and postcards, while Rosemary got treated to a remarkable series of stories.

First, Rose was looking at some Irish Beleek porcelain cups and saucers, and she was asked if she'd ever drunk tea from a Beleek cup.  When Rose said she hadn't this woman said "Well--it's really amazing--it's just like...drinking tea from...a really thin china cup."  --which very nearly made me laugh out loud.

Then we got to hear about the woman's husband, and a strange story where he cut himself shaving, then went out to eat at the Elks Club with the whole family, where he ate all the food off their plates, then came home and said he hadn't eaten anything, only to realize with some mortification that he'd only shaven half his face (and then, for unknown reasons, he went to the neighbor's house).

We also got to hear about how this woman used to buy glassware seconds at the Seneca factory, when it was still open, and how drinking from real glass was superior to most other things, which led to a discussion of what sorts of gin and vodka she liked to drink, and it kind of went downhill from there.

But while all this was going on, I did pick out two postcards to buy, one of the remarkable looking gentleman at the top of this post, presumably someone from West Virginia.  I got another of a family in their horse-buggy, dated 1914 on the back.  For some reason, I've become a bit intrigued with these old "Real Photo Post Cards" which were often probably printed up in a dozen copies or less: they are often family pictures, really, just printed up as postcards. You can often see the silvery glare of the emulsion, and they are truly ephemeral.  And once in a while the image is just arresting.  And I have to admit, I grew even a bit more intrigued by old photographs recently, when I followed a chain of blog-links to the 'My Daguerreotype Boyfriend' site, which I think one or two readers of this blog might find interesting enough to check out.

I also found this cool piece of vintage string art, a little picture frame around this old photo of a young woman on the phone.  The string is wound with incredible precision and intricacy; the whole thing is only about three inches across.  And, as the woman at the checkout told us, her mother used to make these.  Naturally.

Lucky for me, these things are small, and they don't take up much space in the physical world.  Three more items for the flat file.

Puttering

This morning, we jumped in the car with every intention of going to Pittsburgh.  Since my cell phone needed to be recharged, I plugged the splitter into the cigarette lighter, and tried to connect both the car recharger and the Sirius satellite radio.

The radio promptly died. 

This happened when I tried the same trick just a few weeks ago, so I knew that we'd blown the fuse for the radio and the cigarette lighter.  Instead of heading for the Interstate, we drove around the block, parked the car, and changed the fuse.

By that time, my interest in going to Pittsburgh had evaporated.  But we did need to pick up some weatherstripping tape at Lowe's, and I needed to return something to the mall that's out that way, so we ran a few errands and--as usual--came back with more stuff from Lowe's than we'd set out to buy: the tape, and also a folding stepladder that I've been wanting for awhile, and some bulbs that were on clearance, and a package of shims...because, as I found myself saying, "You never know when you might need some shims."  Man, if ever there's a middle-aged pronouncement, that's it.

Anyway, we came home and used the weatherstripping tape to put the plexiglass in the front storm door (we've never been able to locate the actual sliding glass mechanism).  Then I decided to fix the fireplace screen, which has always been a rickety piece of s**t, but recently fell apart completely when the wood split around one of the dowels that holds it together.

Down to the basement to fix that up with some wood glue and a clamp.

And then I thought: that rug in the sunroom really needs to be cleaned.  So, I hauled it down to the basement, put it on some plastic sheeting, and went over it a few times with the Little Green Machine.

As long as we had the rug out of the sunroom, I wanted to sweep in there, and maybe rearrange the furniture.  It's been seeming very crowded to me lately.

This, of course, involved cleaning out a garage-sale credenza that was full of old New Yorkers (which went into a box for recycling), and then the credenza went out to the garage.

While we're in the garage, might as well get out the plastic to weatherproof the screen porch (though that did not happen today).

At some point, Tom said, "You're puttering today, aren't you?" 

And yes, I was.  My dad was a great putterer, and after he died my mom realized how much he accomplished in any seemingly agenda-less day. 

I clearly got the puttering gene, though unfortunately I didn't inherit his mechanical skills (or just didn't learn most of them). 

Still, I felt like I'd accomplished a lot today, including a task that honored Dad: I watered and cut back the leggy, overgrown geraniums that we put up in the attic a couple of weeks ago.  He grew them from starts, and loaded me up with a fresh batch every spring.  Though most of the trimmings went in the trash, I did save some blooms to add to my Dia de los Muertos altar.

At the end of the day, I actually felt like I'd earned a brief respite on the little red stool at the basement workbench.  It's the one that I always remember Dad perching on in his basement workshop, and now it graces mine.

Now, lest you think Tom was doing nothing all this time, he was making a fabulous dinner: homemade whole-wheat pasta with kale, white beans, and tomatoes.

It was yum.  And, with a big glass of red wine, a nice reward for a long day of this and that.

By the way, did I mention that it's Thanksgiving Break?  Nice to have a Sunday that really feels like a weekend for a change, instead of being a day for grading or course-prepping.

Griswold Corn Sticks

We love our vintage Griswold Corn Stick Pan.

Today, as we walked home from work, snow was in the air, and not too long after we got home, it was sticking to the ground, for the first time this fall. Winter is here. So we decided that we'd have chili for dinner and that we should make some cornbread to go along with it.

So I dug up Paul Prudhomme's cornbread recipe, which we always use: it's sweet in just the right way, though we only use about half of the recommended amount of sugar. We also never use the corn flour (because we never have any in the house, and frankly, have never seen it for sale anywhere), and we just substitute a 50-50 mix of regular corn meal and regular flour, and it works out fine. Our pan is plenty old, and it's pretty well 'cured' like cast iron should be, so it cooks just fine, even though it looks a little grungy.

 

The first time we used it, I wasn't very sure about the old pan: cornbread baked in an ear-of-corn pan just seemed a little corny, I guess. But the corn stick is actually the perfect shape for a piece of cornbread: the right size for a serving, with a lot of surface area to give the sticks a tasty crunch.

Half a recipe (including only half an egg) works perfectly to fill up the seven ears of the corn stick pan. No pictures of the sticks out of the pan, I'm afraid: I didn't grease the pan up quite enough this time, and they came out in chunks--but very tasty ones.

Vintage Griswold cast iron (made in Erie, PA) is always collectible, but there doesn't appear to be any shortage of these on eBay, where you might be able to pick one up for ten or twenty bucks. But when winter comes around, and you want cornbread, it's worth every penny.

Boo.

"Boo" to the month of October, that is, which has been stressful and busy in ways both expected and unexpected. One of those months that you'd want to end quickly except for all the stuff you have to get done before the 31st, and your anxiety about what lies ahead.

Still, we took some time to make holiday marshmallows, in our continuing tradition.

Bring on November!