Tag Archives: home economics

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Pastimes

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I am so happy to join my blogger friend Sue (Mac’s Girl) in her photo challenge! We share the experience of living in the Chicagoland area and became WordPress colleagues several years ago.  We have visited many of the same nature areas and museums.

For this challenge, Sue invites photos of pastimes or hobbies.

Yes, I collected stamps for a while as a child. I was a Girl Scout and learned skills like embroidery and knitting. I never spent a lot of time doing crafts (I generally don’t have the patience), but when I worked as a costumed interpreter at Old World Wisconsin, crafting was part of the job. It helped pass the time between guest visits, and it helped create artifact replicas that could be used by that living history museum.

Back in the 19th century, spinning and weaving and sewing wouldn’t really be pastimes or crafts, they would be necessary activities.

Home economics has changed dramatically with technology, but these basic skills represent sustainable living, in my view, and I’d be glad to see them passed down for future generations. 

My favorite pastime, however, is jigsaw puzzling. My grandmother owned several Pastime Puzzles, the kind made of wood and intricately designed. They contained iconic shapes like apples and hats and wheelbarrows and hearts along with curly “gazintas” – the piece that “goes in ta” the others. 

Growing up, my family would work together on these beautiful puzzles while a fire roared in the fireplace, staving off the winter chill and the Christmas vacation boredom.

I later discovered that this passion for puzzling could become a cottage industry. When I was a partner in Scholar & Poet Books, we bought over 300 cardboard jigsaw puzzles at a church rummage sale, put them together to ensure that they weren’t missing pieces, photographed them, and sold them on our e-Bay store.

I couldn’t begin to calculate the number of hours we spent together talking and assembling these puzzles, sometimes late into the night. Our biggest one was 3000 pieces. We developed a kind of system that played to our strengths. Steve was the “sky expert”. He was adept at matching shape and didn’t mind that all the pieces were the same color. I was the “detail expert”. I looked at what was visible on the piece and how the colors and objects made up the whole picture. I was also the “sorter”. I would pour out a few handfuls of pieces into a shallow box lid and find the edge pieces. I would use 8″x10″ box lids and stack them so that they didn’t take up too much room on the dining room table while still displaying the pieces in a single layer. Once the framed edge was in place, we’d fill in the rest, consolidating box lids as they emptied out. Eventually, we’d get down to sorting the almost indistinguishable ones by shape – the two-knobbed, the 3-knobbed, etc. We made up names for the standard shapes like H-pieces and “spadey-feet”. We didn’t come across very many with “gazintas” unless they were puzzles of a certain vintage.

During these hours of sorting and assembling, we would talk over all sorts of subjects and ideas. Often, we’d listen to music together as well. We don’t own a TV, so this was our evening and weekend entertainment, especially when the Wisconsin weather was dreary or harsh. I imagine that pastimes were developed just to create such intimate time in a household. I hope that one grace that emerges from these quarantine times is that more people leave screens behind and develop the ability to spend quality time creating something intimate and sustaining, face to face. 

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: History

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When I saw that Patti’s challenge to us this week was History, I knew just where to look in my photo files — Old World Wisconsin. I was a historical interpreter for this 480-acre living history museum for three seasons. I interpreted 19th century life in Wisconsin dressed as an Irish immigrant, a German immigrant, and a church organist in a settler’s Village.

Photo credit: Steve Wiencek
photo credit: Kim Schultz
Photo credit: Steve Wiencek
Photo credit: John Meyer
Photo credit: Carol Toepke
Photo credit: Jay Filter

When I was allowed to bring my 21st century camera on site, what I wanted to capture was the simplicity of that life and its harmony with nature.

The ideas of “progress” and “technology” were quite different in the day. I used to ask school children if they saw any technology being used, and they always said, “No.” What I quickly pointed out was that there was plenty of technology, just a different kind – mechanical or hand tools instead of electronic ones.

It’s important never to neglect or abandon the simpler items in our tool kit. It’s quite possible that we may depend on them again. In fact, the U.S. military sent a division to the museum to learn how to use 19th century farm equipment so that they could assist in re-development projects in Afghanistan. Watching them walk down the dirt roads of the Village dressed in their desert camouflage uniforms was mind-boggling.

The lesson of history is that wisdom takes a long view.

80 Years in Eight Days — Day Number Six: Ten Administrative Aids

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My mother’s birthday is but 2 days away now.  I’ve told you a bit about her specific talents in music, cooking and parenting, but she also possesses a general talent for being organized and efficient.  She is a Domestic Engineer, by her own reckoning.  She comes by it honestly, for her much-admired father was a professional electrical engineer.  Her administrative skills are well-developed and have been applied to a multitude of volunteer positions, from Girl Scout leader to chamber concert coordinator to clerk of the Vestry to museum archivist.  She has raised money, written newsletters, cataloged artifacts, designed living and office space, kept detailed financial records, chronicled events, communicated, consulted, collaborated, and carried on for so many organizations that I could never recall them all.  To my knowledge, she has not received any remuneration since graduating from college.  Nevertheless, she is highly professional and knows how to get a job done.  Because of her, my awareness of basic functional habits goes back to my early childhood.  Here are 10 of her specific instructions.

1) Write it down.  Whatever it is, a shopping list or a line of poetry, if you want to remember and refer to it, write it down.  My mother’s tiny notes could be found in any number of spiral bound flip pads in our house.  She’s not so untidy as to leave them on single Post-Its or envelopes.  I now carry Moleskine pads in my hiking backpack because even on the trail, my thoughts are harmonized with the echo of my mother’s admonition: write it down. 

2) Use double-entry bookkeeping for your finances.  With numbers, it’s better to write it down twice.  (Sorry, Mom.  I stopped doing this a long time ago, and I also don’t balance my checkbook anymore.  Online debit records are all I’ve got now.  Don’t worry; it’ll do.)

3) Label it.  Remember those label-making guns that punched letters one by one onto a plastic strip?  That was a bit much for Mom, but her laundry marking pen, white cotton bias tape and adhesive tape were always on hand.  With four girls in the house and summer camp every year, you can bet she was keen to keep everything straight.  Even our dolls were marked at the nape of the neck with our initials.  Why else would my doll be called ‘P Baby’?

1965

4) Never go upstairs empty-handed.  (You’d laugh, Mom, at how many times I have said this to Steve as he’s moving books up and down from the attic.)  I went so far as to purchase stair baskets when I had 4 kids and a big house.  Making every effort efficient was my mother’s goal, within the house and in the broad world.  So…

5) Plan your errands well in advance.  For most of their marriage, my parents shared one car.  On the one or two days in the week when she had a vehicle, her route was specifically engineered to save time and gas.  There was no “running out to pick up something” at odd times of the day.  Everything — bank, library, dry-cleaners, grocery store, filling station, school, church office — was expertly orchestrated in one trip.  I have internalized this mode.  I do not “shop” or browse or dilly-dally when going to procure something.  Even a Christmas tree.  (ask Susan)  This trait drives Steve nuts sometimes.   It’s not spontaneous; it’s not in the moment; it’s not an interesting way to travel.  I have to turn off the “get the job done” mentality deliberately when our purpose is experience.

6) Clip coupons and keep them organized.  This is part of planning your errands and shopping trips.  Mom’s library scissors were always in the center drawer of her desk.  When Dad was done with reading the paper, she’d get to work.  It’s a habit that can get out of hand, though.  I always kept a card file box full of coupons, most of which had expired long ago, in my kitchen.  Finally, when I moved, I pitched it, but not without hesitation.   I now keep just a handful under a magnet on my fridge.

7) Waste not.  This is deep in Mom’s blood and deep in mine, Scottish heritage and all.  Keep those bones for soup stock.  Keep that packing material for your next mailing.  Keep those worn jeans for shorts and patches. And you can bet that with 4 girls, the youngest (me) was always in hand-me-downs!  I think most Americans have lost this value long ago, much to the disadvantage of the planet. 

the couch

8) Recycle.  Mom was doing this before it was convenient.  There was no curb-side recycling in the 60s, but along with her other errands, she’d visit the recycling center with paper sacks of old newspapers, boxes of aluminum cans, and glass bottles separated by color.  There was no plastic recycling then. 

9) Load your appliances correctly.  Dishwashers and washing machines and dryers take lots of energy…your own as well as the power company’s.  Learn to pack them well.  My mother was always able to get more into the dishwasher after I’d loaded it.  I’ve gone back to washing dishes by hand, but I’m always trying to figure out how to use less water and fit more on the drying rack.  It’s a good practice. 

10) Put the kitchen to bed before you retire.  A clean kitchen in the morning is a lot nicer to wake up to.  A clean house is nicer to come home to after a vacation.  I think of the ending scenes in PBS programs like “Upstairs, Downstairs” and The Boston Pops concerts: the char woman cleaning up before the lights go out, and the stage is ready for the next installment.  It gives me a very settled feeling to follow this example.  Of course, tidy endings aren’t always attainable.  That’s life.  I do my best. 

photo by Steve

photo by Steve

Weekly Photo Challenge & Photography 101: Triumphs Converging

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Yesterday was a wonderful day, a triumph of change, of many changes coming together.  Thanksgiving is Steve’s favorite holiday, and what’s not to love?  Fall colors, harvest time, lots of great food, a crisp chill in the air, wood smoke, and an all-pervading sense of gratitude for the process of life. 

triumph 2We’ve hosted Steve’s family for dinner at our place for the past 4 years.  “Our Place”, however, is not just a home.  It’s an online book business, which means that our inventory is stored under the same roof.  That roof was replaced this year, bringing inches of old cedar pieces and dust down on top of our piles of books.  It was a mess.  The clean up and resorting was enormous.  But Thanksgiving was the deadline: we wanted to host as usual.  Piles of books, CDs, video tapes and packing materials carpeted all the rooms and stairwells in the house.  We literally had to pick our way through for months.  Steve took infinite trips up the narrow, steep stairs to the attic, laden with heavy boxes and stacks.  But yesterday was a triumph!  The place was clean, the table glistened, the food was colorfully delicious, and everyone had a great time.  And Steve got to put his feet up and read aloud in Italian.

triumphWe are really getting good at team work.  The next triumphant convergence will occur tomorrow, when we get together with all my children and their ‘significant otters’ for a holiday which we call ‘Galassoween’.  Five couples, two generations and as many various lifestyles merge to create a feast of conversation and edible togetherness.  And it will take place in the house that my daughter and her fiance have rebuilt. (see this post, “Harvesting Hope”)  I’m looking forward to it!  (but first, I have a lot of dishes to wash…)

triumph 3

 

Harvesting Hope

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I have just finished reading a very informative book by Jane Goodall on the subject of Food.  Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating has led me to reconsider the way I buy and cook and eat food.  Much of it is based on common sense and natural practices (What would a chimp choose to eat?  Have you ever seen an overweight chimp in the wild?), and much of it exposes the insanity that is our factory food production here in the “civilized” world. How civilized is it to cram thousands of chickens together in a cage, remove their beaks so that they can’t peck each other to death, pump them with antibiotics and force them to cannibalize their own kind by giving them non-vegetarian feed?  And then to slaughter them, ship their polluted flesh over thousands of miles burning fossil fuels, and eat it?  I was not thinking about that when I bought Super Saver packages of chicken breasts at my local super market.  I think about it now.

And here is the surprising gift of hope: my children have been thinking about this for years.  I didn’t lead the way. 

Here is another arena of hope: reclaiming, salvaging and recycling living space.  My daughter and her fiance purchased a home that had been severely water damaged and mold and mildew infested.  The inhabitants had moved out to hospice care and died; the house was abandoned, but the water wasn’t shut off.  In the winter freeze and thaw, the pipes broke and flooded the place.  What a mess!  But Joe comes from a family line of carpenters and construction wizards.  He has completely re-worked the house: plumbing, electric, heating, floor plan and surfaces.  He’s gotten neighbors, friends and family involved in the labor and in donating fixtures. The final step will be relocating the back yard garden.  You see, this house is just a few doors down the street from the one they’ve rented for the past 3 years.  So, by their wedding date one year from this month, they will have their own home and garden.  They are marvelous role models for sustainable living, and I am so proud of them! Yesterday I went down to visit and take pictures.  They sent me home with a bunch of produce from their garden.  I am so grateful and awed by how life unfolds.  The next generation is certainly capable of taking responsibility and working hard in a sustainable direction.  Let’s just hope many of them choose to!

The Griessler House
The back porch
The bathroom tile looks great even if the photo doesn’t
The basement with shiny ducts and pipes
Joe & Becca

Model Behavior

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I don’t have a television, so I don’t see a lot of commercials. Still, I find NBA games on the internet and catch a few ads in the process. There’s one for a fried chicken franchise that particularly bothers me. Here’s the set-up: two teenaged kids have made a rare venture out of their rooms to join their parents for dinner. They are still plugged into their media devices and never speak or make eye contact with the camera or their parents. The African-American family sits in the living room with a bucket of chicken on the coffee table. Mom & Dad tell the camera that the chicken is the occasion for them to have this special “family” experience. Dad jokes that if the batteries run down, they might actually have a conversation.

 Sigh. Is this an accurate snapshot of our current culture? Rewind about 100 years.

 I’m reading a book called Nothing To Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother by Carrie Young. The author describes her life in North Dakota during the Great Depression. Her mother had acquired land as a homesteader, married and raised 6 kids on the farm. Her sisters struggled to become educated and get jobs as school teachers in local one-room schoolhouses. One particularly brutal winter, their parents found it more sensible to drop off the 18-year-old daughter, the teacher, with the two younger sisters at school and let them stay there during the week instead of transporting them back and forth through the snow drifts by horse-drawn wagon. The week turned into months. Fresh supplies were delivered every week, but these 3 young ladies spent that winter relying on their own resourcefulness for their daily life — with no electricity, simply a coal-burning furnace in the basement and a woodstove with one burner in the classroom. How is that possible? I’m sure that life was one that their parents had modeled for years.

 Compare these two snapshots and imagine the changes that have swept through our country. What has “adult living” become? What do we model for our children these days? What skills are being delegated to machines or service companies or ‘experts’ that used to be more universal and personal? Besides modeling tasking skills, how do we model social and moral skills in this decade?

 When more families were farming, children grew up alongside their parents and were incorporated into communal activities. They helped milk the cows, tend the garden, and make the food and clothing they all needed to live. In the 50s, when more families lived in cities and suburbs, Dad would drive off in the morning and work out of sight of his kids all day while Mom would turn on appliances to do the chores around home. The kids learned consumerism. Then the Moms left the house and went into the workforce leaving the kids in daycare. In 1992, someone came up with “Take Your Daughters To Work Day”. That was expanded to include boys a decade later. What was first perceived as a Feminist issue of role modeling was recognized as a parenting void: children had no clue how adults spent their work days.

 Musing about these changes made me consider what my own children had learned from my husband and me. My daughter made a calligraphy sign when she was in High School: “My father didn’t tell me how to live; he lived and let me watch him do it.” (Clarence B. Kelland) She was 23 when her father died. What we intended to model and what she actually learned are most likely two different things. One thing I do know. She did learn to cook her own chicken.

joy 2

© 2014, essay and photograph, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

Weekly Photo Challenge: Home

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Home

Home.  A weighty concept in some ways, but also tending toward the sentimental.  It can connote fortification, shelter….and yet, homey can be quaint and trivial.  We invent and reinvent our relationship to home throughout our lives.  A place to go to, a place to run from, a place without, a place within.  Maybe the truth about ‘home’ is that it is changing and fluid.  That’s what I want to illustrate. 

This photo was taken out of my bedroom window, from within the warm nest where I find safety, comfort, and respite.  And yet, the window is transparent.  It doesn’t completely shield me from the cold visually, nor does it keep me from feeling it (it’s an old drafty house, not well insulated at all!).  It lets me come face to face with the physical realities of frost and even pulls me beyond the immediate perimeter of my house, across the street, up into the trees, and all the way out of the Earth’s atmosphere to the Moon.  And still, this is all my home, too.  The Universe is where I live.   Home is near as well as far.  And why should I not feel safety and belonging in all of the world’s manifestations?  Cold and death and distance and infinity do not annihilate me, nor do they exalt me.  They are familiar and comforting, too.  I do not control my home as I do not control the weather…I live in it.  And life is bigger than most of us imagine.  

For another picture of home, mundane and temporal but nevertheless real and interesting, my last post was about our home business, Scholar and Poet Books.   Please click here and take a look!

 

Scholar and Poet Books – Announcing Our E-Bay Store!

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Our online store is up and running with over 200 items — finally!  Check out the link in my sidebar to visit the site and find out what I’ve been photographing.  Our Rocky Horror Picture Show Scrapbook is up for sale for the next 6 days.  Buy It Now or give us your Best Offer…the perfect Valentine’s Day gift!  Or check out our Vintage Toys and Games & Puzzles.  Our first vintage toy sale was a thrill for me.  He was a little Schuco wind up toy, a clown faced monkey that played the violin and shuffled around in a circle, made in US zone Germany right after WWII.  He was in his original box and in excellent condition.  We asked what we thought was a reasonable price after having researched other items of the same ilk…and there weren’t many!  Within a few hours he was snapped up by a buyer in Braunschweig, Germany.  It made me very happy to think the little guy was going back home!  We shipped him off and just received confirmation that he arrived safe and sound and is making his new owner very happy.

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This is the latest adjunct to Steve’s online book business which he’s been running from this location for about 5 years.  In the process of buying books from estate sales, he’s also been in the position to pick up other items as well.  He used to rent an antique mall booth to display and sell these things, but now we’re doing it all online.  I am his new business partner, and so far, I’ve been “specializing” in Children’s Books, Toys, Games, Puzzles and Hobby Kits.  That means I get to research where all these curious things originated and when they were manufactured.  I tell you, I’m learning a LOT!  Frequently, it’s a LOL experience, coming face-to-face with humorous cultural idiosyncrasies and fetishes.  There’s a lot of history thrown in as well, which I find fascinating. 

So pop on over and satisfy your curiosity.  There’s much more to come!  Haven’t even begun to list the German LPs, stamp collections, and QSL cards…

Home Economics

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It’s ALIIIIVE!!!   It’s in the kitchen, and it’s growing!  I’m waiting for it to double in size, then I’ll screw up all my courage and give it a good punch!  I’m gonna break it in half, then I’ll let it alone for about an hour while the two halves grow again.  It sounds kind of like an amoeba, but actually it’s whole wheat dough.  Yup, I’m making bread.  By the time I get it baking, I’ll be making split pea soup as well, but I have to take a walk to the grocery store to get some dried mushrooms for that.

We have about 4 cubic feet of cookbooks in the dining room.  I often just look up a recipe online, but that makes Steve cringe.  He thanked me this morning for asking him to direct me to one of his books.  So I am celebrating my participation in lower-tech food preparation.  I will not get into my car and drive to Panera for bread and soup.  I will make it myself.  And I don’t want to pat myself on the back for this.  This is not a revolutionary step.  This is what almost every woman was able to do 100 years ago.

I’m not exactly sure what the comparative benefits are to this approach.  I haven’t researched the whole economic picture of Panera restaurant vs. homemade.  I just know that I’m not making an income (aside from being paid for giving one private voice lesson a week), and so I don’t want to spend much.  Is it possible in this day and age to live without spending?  Well, just yesterday, I ran across this news article about a grandmother in Germany who hasn’t used money for 16 years. http://wakeup-world.com/2011/07/18/happy-69-year-old-lady-has-not-used-money-for-15-years/     I really like that idea.  Capitalism isn’t my best friend.  WalMart makes me shudder.  I read about theft in my town paper every week.  What would happen if more of us were able to get off that treadmill somehow and live without using money or coveting goods?  Would we be able to scale back on damage to the environment?  Would we be able to scale back our population?  I know all these issues are intertwined, and I’m still wondering how they effect each other in the big picture and in my personal life.

Steve & I have been thinking about going to a conference on Population that will be held in Telluride, Colorado over Memorial Day weekend.  It’s called Moving Mountains Symposium: Population.  It’s a film festival as well, and features Dave Foreman (of The Rewilding Institute) as one of its keynote speakers.

So all this is just rising in my consciousness as the bread is rising downstairs.  I’m not quite ready to present it all sliced and buttered for this blog, but I like to think that IT’S ALIIIIVE in me in some way.  Stay tuned!