Kansas troubles

Around the middle of March I got ensnared in a completely asinine conversation with my mother-in-law, the gist of which was how she resented paying higher taxes for other people's kids to go to school & not learn anything because the schools are completely broken.  While I do have issues (many, many issues) with the state of public education, I had never entertained her solution-that the whole system should be privatized or pay-as-you go.  My only response (I was a bit unprepared- not that I couldn't anticipate her opinion but that her son would ditch me with her for so long) was that didn't she think it was good thing that the person who handed her her medication could read?  She countered that no, she did not think that was important because the doctor can read & the pharmacist can read & she can read & papa can read & they can all check that the medication is right.  OKay then.

What she mostly kept flapping on about was some internet e-mail thing-y of an exam students used to have to take to graduate high school.  I cannot link to the original for you to view because the document was formatted landscape but my in-laws printed it portrait, making the headers & footers & therefore the source unreadable to me.  As for what did print, they could only read that mostly because the type was waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy oversized (but they don't need glasses, no sir).  The whole thing boiled down to her assertion (& that of the chain letter, I gather) that no one could answer these exam questions today & therefore public education was completely decayed & should be trashed.

For future visits to my in-laws, I am thinking of carrying a copy of the equation sheet given to students taking today's FCAT so the two of them can use it while they answer those questions on-line (I am not printing the whole test & killing all those trees just to make a point that will not be taken), but on the day itself I was lucky enough to spot the one & only complete question (completely printed question, that is):  Discuss the origins of the State of Kansas.

It was a gift, I tell you.  I (& pretty much every other person who has ever had a glance at a quilt history guide of any kind) can do 15-45 minutes on Kansas...Kansas Troubles that is.  & it all began today in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.

I will spare you the history highlights & get straight to my favorite part:  the quilt blocks.  That is except to say I think the intention of the original exam question was to probe the students' understanding of the ratification of an abolitionist state that could have gone either way (free or slavery I mean).  I can do neither the history nor the quilts justice, but you can see quite a bit more here if you are interested (& you should be, it is interesting).

Kansas (OKay, a few more highlights are necessary) went on to make itself miserable, while trying to achieve a higher moral standard through narrow definition of the idea "high moral standard", by maintaining prohibition way longer than any other USState.  Voters approved the state constitutional amendment 30+ years before the change was made to US constitution & kept it on the books until after WWII ended.  Much more restrictive laws than any other state were still enforced well into to 1980s.   It is just the shortest step from prohibition to Carrie Nation & her legendary hatchet.  I have the vaguest recollection that the Kansas Troubles block is intended to represent her (hatchet, specifically), but I promise my mother-in-law was not listening any longer anyhow & never did get the quilt block connection.  Also, I think I might be wrong & the hatchet of the block is actually...something else.  History by quilt block is not an exact science.

Anyhow, we now arrive at the Carrie Nation quilt block, which looks like a cross between Puss in the Corner & Jacob's ladder to me, but hey, why not?  There are all kinds of other temperance related quilt blocks including the Temperance T & Drunkard's Path.  You could spend quite a while on this branch, but let's get back to Kansas, shall we?

There are other lovely Kansas-specific quilt blocks; Kansas Star is one of my favorites (although I did not know it was called Kansas Star until I started writing this blog entry-kind of like a FBQBS member who works for The Hartford but did not know the block she had chosen was called Hope of Hartford, not that I think the quilt block is about the insurance company).

It is hard to know exactly why quilting & Kansas are so linked; I know the Kansas City Star was one of the primary sources for quilt patterns (newspapers with declining subscription rates today don't have to buy a clue-I give them this one for free).  It was probably one of those crucible things.  For whatever reason, the Kansas City Star pretty much set the high-high standard of quilt patterns for decades & not surprisingly named many of the blocks after, well, Kansas & things Kansasian...Kansasite?    If I really wanted to know (& I do, now, kinda) I could get the book by Barbara Brackman.

Finally, I decided I should make some Kansas blocks of my own so I went to Quilter's Cache & printed the directions for Kansas Trouble (sic) & the variation & made one of each.  They are constructed on the same 4-patch idea with the swinging hatchet look.  I (& again, most contemporary quilters) can see how the variation could become more popular with the tools & techniques currently in favor, but I think I prefer the look of the traditional block.  To make the original, make four of the block on the left, to make the variation, make four of the block on the right.

The other life

The final exam for A's physics class was Saturday afternoon so bright & early Sunday morning he got to work.


Coco is always scratching her big horse rump against something.  After she did this, she moved down the fence line to the corner post & started rubbing on that.  As the fence sawed back & forth, this particular piece wold flex open & closed like an elbow.

& I am not sure who did it but someone kicked a chicken-sized hole in the back of the hen house early Friday morning.  I went out & found one small bird in the opening looking out.  By the time I got the materials for a temporary repair, the biggest fattest birds were trying to force themselves en masse through the opening. 

The donkey entertains himself on cold winter nights pulling down fence boards; this winter being what it was entire stretches of pole & board were just hanging off of their neighbors or gone entirely. But by lunchtime yesterday the fence looked like this:

What would Adolf do?

Yea, I mean the Nazi icon himself, Der Führer.  & there is absolutely no reason to ask what he would do because, well, we know.  A better question is what would we do without him.  That's right, let's imagine a 24-hour period in which no one called anyone else a Nazi/Fascist/the New Hitler.  I am thinking we could roll-back all those cable channels to just the evening news.

Early last year I got so fed up I crossed all Nazi references off my radar.  If a book had Nazis or Hitler references of any kind, I didn't read it, movie-I didn't see it, song I didn't sing it... Sorry about that last one, I've been listening to a lot of Petula Clark lately & apparently it is rubbing off.  Which brings us to why I have not yet read The Girl With/Who Whatever books (or seen the movie Inglourious Basterds); I was trying to have a Nazi-free year. 

It is harder than it sounds.  Okay, parts were easier.  Not that I was ever likely to watch much Glenn Beck, but now I had a reason because the Nazis come up a lot.  Also, I no longer had to even pretend to read the books my in-laws try to foist on me because well, they are all about Nazis.  But there are some perfectly other-wise unobjectionable books with Nazis:  Pink Slip for example (where the Nazis are oh-so-incidental but still quite vivid for all that), & The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society (which I had just read, so I was Okay with that).

Which bring me back to What Would Adolf Do? & I guess I should be embarrassed to say he just might do exactly what I am doing, throwing perfectly good literature, art & science (Okay, I tossed no science, but you get my point) out because it contains a reference I don't like.

By any other name

When we first moved here, someone had planted three roses (of different colors & types, although I did not know that until later) in a very narrow, smallish space right next to the main gate out of our backyard.  By main gate I mean the one we used from the cars, the one the meter reader used, etc.  The couple we bought the house from had made many positive changes in the few years they lived here; this was not one of them.  By the following spring, the first rose bush had grown the 2.5" inches or so required to start interfering with the gate itself.  Digging out all three of them for replanting (as opposed to just hacking them out) was quite a task & I am not sure would not have bothered except R***** said she wanted them & it seemed churlish not to pass them on.

Anyway, they got planted outside the bay window in her kitchen & that is how we learned one of them was a yellow climbing rose (it was eventually moved to her back fence), one of them was lightly bushy with very few large red blooms (Mr. Lincoln, I presume) & one produced a lot of the tiniest pinkish, yellowish little flowers you ever saw along with many, many, many thorns.  I have not thought much about roses from that spring to this.

That is when the local community education catalog came & there was a one-day class on varieties of antique roses.  One day I could manage & something more obscure (& frankly denser green without the super-abundance of fast dieing blooms that need a super-abundance of deadheading) appealed.  Let me stop here & say this is what I thought antique roses were:  less work, fewer flowers, more likely to be fragrant, not the same rose every local housing development would have somewhere in the landscaping of their show model.  & surprise, surprise I was mostly right.  I might be wrong about the fewer blooms thing, that depends on what varieties you compare.

I came home with an overload of information-I was without question the least gardening person there; which is not to say they were not all excellent & experiences gardeners, the truth is I do not set the bar very high.  So I had several handouts & a list of vocabulary used in class to look up later (I'm not shy but it seemed obnoxious for me to keep interrupting with "& what does that word mean?").

I also came home with three small roses to plonk down somewhere I can smell them & the name of the once-a-month antique rose dealer within walking distance of my front door (I know, right?).  I will let you know how we do.

Le Grand Coeur Galoot

There is, as you may know, a lot of chatter about pitbulls:  how they are dangerous, how they make great family pets, how there no such breed as pitbull, how they are a clearly identifiable set of physical characteristics linked to aggressive behavior, how long do I need to keep this up before you get the picture. 

I am rather ambivalent on the whole thing.  I know lots of lovely pitbulls (there, I said it) & for each one I have met one whose owner got it BECAUSE he/she hoped it would be aggressive.  I think maybe it is just possible that all this profiling has made pitbulls (said it again) ATTRACTIVE to people who want to look badass.  The upshot is that the laws that are passed are challenged left & right (that's your tax money defending it people) & heartbreaking &/or unenforceable even where they are not challenged.

So I have decide to take another road, not a higher road, but certainly one less traveled.  When asked if my flat-headed, under-slung-jawed spaz is a pitbull, I react with horror.  No of course not, he is a Grand Coeur Galoot. I have even toyed with the idea of doctoring papers (from L'Académie de Chien?  The Óstlann Gadhar-dhiúité? The sky is the limit, really).  The reactions are mixed:  "Oh, he looks like a pitbull, but he's so friendly" is the most frequent,  my vet & his tech laughed out loud, & my personal favorite "what's wrong with a good old american dog?  Why do you people always get some fancy french thing?"  Actually that last one was paraphrased; I took out at least one Gawd dammmm.  

As it happens our boy did not get as big as we thought he would & when standing next to a male *ahem* pitbull of the same age he looks kind of puny.  So we have revised it:  Petit Grand Coeur Galoot.

This breed renaming thing did not start here for us: this little girl on the right (your right, my left) is not a dachshund mix (dachshunds being the biting-est breed there is, just look at that other killer in the picture,  No, not me, although I was quite the biter as a child) or even a chihuahua mix.  She is Schnitzel de Hua Hua (prounonced Vah Vah).  & my brother has a Wall-eyed Dingo...OKay, it's not his dog it's just visiting...for two years & counting.

While I didn't tell you that bit to tell you this one, it seems like as good a time as any.  You know the show The Big Bang Theory?  I L*O*V*E it.  Love it love it love it.  The first time A saw it he was irritated.  Why do people make fun of physicists, why is it OKay to make fun of physicists, there has never been a more stereotyped group than physicists.  He said this to me, his wife, an actual natural born blonde.  I pointed out all the implied dumb blonde jokes in the same episode & oh by the way, get over yourself, which to his credit he did.

My final point is to all the people wringing their hands over unfair canine stereotypes, there is a small ungenerous part of me that wants to say "tell it to a french poodle".  Yea, I know there are no laws saying poodles must be shot on sight, but when you start tracking the breeds of the dogs coming into vet clinics because some one kicked them, threw them out a window, tried to microwave them, etc. miniature poodles are winning.  Or losing.