My embarrassing ancestor

I sort of wish she'd been a pirate or a thief.  But my great-great-grandmother was worse than that.

great-great-grandpa and
great-great grandma

I've been organizing and collecting our family photos this year, trying to scan and label all the photos I've been given over the years, add stories and identification, and then digitize everything so that many people can have copies of it all.  Along the way, I stumbled into the story of my great-great-grandmother, who was apparently famous enough to make it into the New York Times and into several history books.

I'm going to withhold her name here, not to protect her, but because I don't want to give away my own name.  All the references to her in books and newspapers were by the very proper usage Mrs. [John Smith], never by her first name.  In fact, I don't know if historians knew her given name, and there seem to be no photos of her outside of the ones I have.  So I might be contacting scholars with offers of photographs.

Why was my great^2 grandma so much worse than a pirate?  She was an anti-suffragette.  And not just "an" anti-suffragette: she played a major role in delaying the women's right to vote.


Here is what one book notes about her.

Edited by Mrs. [John Smith], chairman of the executive committee of the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, The Anti-Suffragist's mission was to present arguments against woman suffrage and to provide a forum for the views of women who did not seek suffrage---a group of women that, according to the magazine, were in the majority. For nearly four years The Anti-Suffragist provided its readers with gratified reports upon woman-suffrage defeats in various states. It also supplied carefully selected examples of instances in which enfranchised women in western states had, from the magazine's perspective, failed to use their votes to better society. 

 A book by Kathleen Endres states that she had high political visibility:

  . . .  [S]he had organized the Albany Association Against Woman Suffrage in 1892.  She had gained national recognition by addressing both the Republican and Democratic national conventions in 1896, neither of which added a plank endorsing woman suffrage to its platform.

A New York Times article in 1907 quoted her extensively, show-casing that her views were mired in racism.

Mrs. [John Smith] of Albany, herself a taxpayer, but nevertheless a pillar in the anti-suffrage society, was one of the speakers at a hearing before the Cities Committee of the Senate. In a calm  and dispassionate manner peculiarly her own Mrs. [Smith] had piled fact upon fact to back up  her contention that to give the ballot to women would add immensely to the already perplexing problem of getting political questions intelligently solved at the polls.

"What!'' exclaimed Senator Raines, who had introduced the bill. ``You don't mean to tell us that women who have shown themselves capable of sifting this question as thoroughly as, for instance, your address here shows that you have, could not be trusted to exercise their suffrage intelligently?'' 

"No,'' Mrs. [Smith] replied. "On the contrary, I believe that probably all the women in this room, whether they be in favor of woman suffrage or opposed to it, would vote intelligently. But what about the 8,000,000  negro women of the South who would be given the ballot if this proposition should be carried to its logical conclusion? And what about the 60,000 unfortunate women in New York City alone? Could they be equally trusted to exercise that power conscientiously and with intelligence?"

It's hard to know how this woman would react to her great-great-granddaughter, who not only votes, but who also adopted "negro children" to be her descendants.  Indeed, her grandson (my grandfather), born the year after her New York Times article appeared, would become a lifetime member of the NAACP.

My great^2-grandmother died in 1923, three years after the nineteenth amendment was ratified.

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

I have no idea whether she voted in any elections during her final years.

The underwater dinner

Back by popular demand (in particular, K-daughter's insistence that this dinner is "traditional"), last night we hosted our traditional annual Underwater Dinner.

The weather cooperated all-too-perfectly, giving us torrential downpours all day long.  

Indeed, here's me as a shark, swimming through the waters of our living room:

We made some changes from last year's menu.  Last year, the menu included fish sticks, but this year I couldn't bring myself to purchase processed-food-wrapped in trash, so we had tilapia and shrimp. And it was really easy to ask our local fish market to put the food in our glass containers instead of in paper/plastic.

  

Of course, we weren't entirely health-conscious.  We also got trash-free Swedish Fish (caught fresh this morning???)

And pasta shells and goldfish crackers, both in recyclable cardboard containers.  That together with teriyaki collard greens disguised as seaweed rounded out the meal.

The other change from last year was how I used the Swedish Fish.  Last year, I had the brilliant idea to submerge the Swedish fish in individual glasses of blue jello, like fish in an aquarium.  Totally adorable, except (a) my family doesn't really like jello, and (b) the fish started dissolving in the jello, getting a icky texture.  So this year, we opted for a school-of-fish cake.  (I used paste-food coloring to dye the icing).

This little half-cake was the perfect size for us, and worked great as K-daughter's birthday cake!

She's 24 . . . like the candles?

Who all showed up at the dinner? (J-son is off at a boxing match, and my husband was at a fathers' group). So in addition to our host daughter Y and N-son (somehow I didn't get pictures of them), we had Ursula the Sea Witch . . .

Love those tentacles!

. . . and a lifeguard with a little swimmer (Ursula is holding a lobster that was Baby-A's costume last year).

Good thing the lifeguard was there!  Because she could protect everyone from dangerous sharks!

Afterward dinner was over, we had a great time listening to the Beach Boys; Baby A and I danced a lot.   Baby A found a book on my shelf and started "reading" it to her mother.  You can see that Baby A totally takes after me.

"Your Money or Your Life".  Never too early to start thinking about personal finance!

A reason to look forward to a colonoscopy

Spoiler alert: Ice Cream!

When people try to encourage other people of a certain age to get colonoscopies, they either do it by minimizing the negative ("It's not that bad, really!") or by offering the dubious hope ("You'll find out whether you have a dread disease early!").

But here, I'd like to offer you a reason to have a colonoscopy that would make any 7-year-old beg to be allowed to get one, too.

Ice Cream.

Because, the day before the fun procedure, you're supposed to consume only "full and clear liquids".  And it turns out that "full liquids" include things you might expect such as vegetable broth, chicken broth,  and milk, but also things that might surprise you, such as Ice Cream!!!!!

Yes, that's right. It's possible to fulfill that childhood dream of having a day of eating only ice cream, and do that self-righteously because it's good for you.

If I'd known that long ago, I would have had yet another reason to look forward to my 50th birthday.

 And that's all I'm going to say.  Well, that and . . . it's not that bad.  And I found out that I had two minor polyps that my doctor removed.  But really, the day before makes it all worthwhile.  I'm sort of sad that I don't have an excuse to do this again for another ten years.

Our summer of Many Corners Turned

It's hard to get a good picture of someone flipping a drumstick.  I'm not so good at the picture-taking part, but N-son happens to be pretty good at the stick-flipping part. In fact, he just won a pair of drum sticks from his teacher in a stick-flipping contest.

It's also hard to give a good picture of what's going on in our family life with so much changing so quickly.

N-son, for example spent the spring in what I can only call a low-initiative state.  Lots of game-playing on his phone, but very little exercise or homework or other, unless his dad and I put in almost more energy than he did.  And sometimes, even when we threw ourselves into high-energy-parent mode, N-son took the boulevard of least resistance.

The worst of it happened when he (a) did not turn in his a major school assignment---in fact, did not even do it---and (b) repeatedly told us that he done it at school and  had turned it in and (c) told his teacher that he'd done it at home and would soon turn it in.


The story takes enough twists and turns that I'll leave much of this out, at least for now, but eventually N-son wound up helping with food preparation at the local soup kitchen, and falling in love with the place.  Now he's volunteering there whenever he has the time, sometimes spending 8 or more hours a day there.  He's got a bunch of mentors looking out after him.  So, that's a corner turned.  Flip, catch.  Flip, catch.

This time last year, there was a lot of dread and angst in the Miser Mom household.  Much of this dread and angst walked around in the person of my husband, who was nervous about his up-coming retirement.   Would he lose all his professional contacts?  Would he have to sacrifice his bike-racing time to rearing troubled children?  Would he have to live an overly-frugal life, now that his own income had stopped and his wife calls herself "Miser Mom"?

But in fact, he's thrilled with retirement. He still gets to go volunteer at events that his former employers hold (they even pay for his travel), and he loves the chance to gossip and have lunch with his former colleagues.  He's ridden his many bikes many miles (his newest bike alone has over 1000 miles on it, and that's since the end of March).  And we have managed to find a financial equilibrium that seems to keep us both happy.    His retirement is another happy corner turned, probably the most stable story in this lot.

But where my husband's change is the most stable, probably the biggest change of direction comes from J-son.  Where N-son's woes have come from a peculiar version of conservation of energy (his own), J-son's struggles have been largely driven by impulsive action and lack of focus.  Things with J-son were kind of hard last summer, and they got very scary bad last December.  But somewhere between his learning to apologize and his learning to beat people up, things got better.

Last summer, J-son asked to learn to box.  And over the fall, he got stronger and more skilled.  And in the same way that we rewarded N-son's drumming by giving him more drumming, we fueled J-son's interest in boxing by letting him do more boxing, eventually getting him his Junior Amateur license.  Along the way, he's started working odd jobs for his coach.  And he's had three fights so far (win/loss/win) that, together with all the training that goes into preparing for these fights, have taught him a lot about persistence.  In the last six months, J-son has learned humility, determination, and even a lot of self-control.  There's part of me that knows he could still veer off this path he's learning to tread, but I know the more he practices this, the easier it will get for him.  And it's so good to see him becoming a young man that I'm proud of -- and so good to have him be proud of himself.

And as for me . . . I know it's typical to view the summer after a sabbatical with a bit of a worried eye toward the fast-impending school year.  But I've managed to get much of what I wanted to accomplish (mathematically speaking) done -- to my surprise, actually. Things have gone better than expected in both my professional and personal life.  So I'm actually enjoying this summer a lot, futzing around rather than throwing myself into last-minute frenzies of research.

I might even ask N-son to teach me to flip sticks.  Life is good.

The Persistence Garden

Not "The Pestilence Garden" (thank goodness); good things are actually growing from the ground back there.

Not "The Subsistence Garden" either, though:  I'm not yet green-thumb-esque enough to feed myself out of my own back yard.

This year's garden has taken on the role of "The Persistence Garden".  Because, gosh darn it, even though I have killed more plants than I've raised, I'm starting to get the hang of this seed-dirt-sun-water thing.

For about five years now, the "back forty" (forty feet, that is) has looked sort of like this come May and June.

Last fall I moved the sidewalk in, next to the garage, and moved the garden out, where the sidewalk had been, hoping to give the plants more sun and me a bit more room to walk around the beds.  The difference is subtle in appearance, but significant in structure.

There are a few more raised beds to the right, that you can't see in the picture above; here they are.  (The cat in the second box back is a statue, not a pooper).

But "Persistence" is more than just "I've learned a bunch over the years".  You can see in the above boxes that some things are growing, and some aren't.  So this is the summer that I'm also giving plants a chance to sprout, and if they don't, I'm going back to the seed box and finding more packets of stuff to stick in the dirt.

Starting at the wrong time of year?  Who the heck cares?  I've accumulated a lot of seeds, and they're certainly not going to grow while they're sitting in the box.  Most of them are more than a year old now, and they're hardly going to be even more fertile next year.  "Bury the seeds" is the motto of the summer.  Seeds, water, sun, water.  That's the plan.  Even if I don't get food from this, I'll get some lessons in gardening, which are still much needed.

It's been such a cold, wet summer that plants have had a hard time getting a good start.  Most of my neighbors tell me their basil plants failed.  Mine did, too.  But then I just stuck more basil seeds in the ground. And look what I see!  Future Pesto of America, coming out of the mulch!

Persistence is paying off.  And if the latest round of seeds decides to roll over and die, I've got more seeds where those came from.  Because I'm just not giving up!

The Purple Dress Dinner

A few weeks back, while I was hitting the yard sales with my host daughter Y, I saw a purple gown priced at Miser Mom prices (less than $1).  "This looks like an incredibly fun dress," I told her, "but nowadays I never get a chance to dress up for fancy dinners.  I know I'd never have an occasion to wear it."  (Sad face).

I got ready to move on, but Y said, "Well, why don't you just make an occasion to wear it?  We could have a fancy dress dinner!"  A bit more back-and-forth, and the idea of "The Purple Dress Dinner" emerged.

My hero Judith Martin (aka Miss Manners) once wrote that you know you've created a Family Tradition when your children complain that you're doing things the wrong way.  So I was delighted when K-daughter, presented with the idea of The Purple Dress Dinner a few days later, protested that June is supposed to be The Underwater Dinner!  We've always done it that way!  (Which is true if by "always" you mean "two or three times now".)  So we decided to splurge and have two special dinners in June this year.

On the agenda for The Purple Dress Dinner:  purple dresses (but of course), fancy finger-ish foods, followed by "a stroll".  As the evening got underway, we also added candles (because, fancy) and my grandmother's dinner bell, because somehow we wound up with 9 people and with that many people having so much fun, we needed a way to call attention to time to sit down, and time to stroll.  And dinner bells are fun, too.

The menu was a lot of what-I-had-in-the-fridge, but fortunately I had some lovely fridge materials.

It's strawberry season, so I made strawberry-watermelon kebobs, plus had a giant bowl of strawberries to nosh on.

Plus we had "self-contained salad" (Swiss chard leaves rubbed with dressing, and then rolled into tubes), grilled kohlrabi chips, and some yummy muffin-shaped quiches, flavored with my recently made carrot-top pesto.

Not pictured here are another kind of salad and my favorite-to-make dessert, a Brazilian Chocolate Coffee Cake.  Scrumptious.

After dinner we went outside for the obligatory photo, . . .

. . . and then took a mile-long Stroll around the park bordering my campus.  Tons of fun waving at passers by.  N-son, who declined to wear a purple dress, rode his bike in circles around us so we declared him our "escort".  One of the serendipitous discoveries is that a nearby community rose garden happens to be in full bloom this time of year.  That alone made everyone decide that, not only do we have to do TPDD again next year, but we have to do it in June.  So.

Of course, there were other pretty (but not time-particular) sights; my campus has beautiful buildings, plus fun sculpture for climbing.

 
By the time we returned from our stroll, several very enjoyable hours had elapsed.  I rang my grandmother's bell and announced that The Purple Dress Dinner was officially over.  Hugs and farewells.

Vegetables you can eat

My family pretty much loves eating vegetables, so this time of year, with our CSA kicking into high gear, and the kids out of school, ought to be prime vegetable-eating days for us.   But vegetables have this habit of coming in un-noshable configurations.  We're constantly in danger of being in the situation that K-daughter once described as "the house full of food, but there's nothing to eat."  (What she said actually said was that the house had food that only mom knows how to cook.)

For example, here's a peek at our refrigerator this morning -- full to the brim.  But when my sons peek, what are they going to grab:  head of lettuce, or the jar of leftover scrambled eggs?

Containers and cutting things up make such a huge difference.  N-son grabbed a bagel, some sliced asparagus, and some eggs.  J-son grabbed the jar of eggs and also a jar of raw carrots, and decimated both.  

When I bring home the CSA produce on Tuesday evening, I spend about an hour with my cutting board and my food processor, chopping and container-ing the produce.  We were rich in lettuce this week, so one head got washed, chopped, and stored in meal-sized canning jars (the boys will make a quick and easy lunch salad from those jars).  The other head, I wrapped in a damp towel and stuck in the crisper drawer.  I've come to love the damp-towel technique, which keeps my lettuce/kale/spinach crisp for up to two weeks!

Here are some other recent new-to-me ideas.  Of course, I chopped up the watermelon to make it easy to grab-n-go . . . 

. . . but J-son encouraged me to freeze some of the pieces, which he and his buddies eat like popsicles. They love it!  (And J-son hates all other popsicles, except for frozen bananas).

Slicing the veggies, I've got down.  The new twist I've been working on:  Putting them out on the counter with a bowl of dip means that the vegetables become the go-to snack.  The dip I make at home, which the family goes ape over, is these three ingredients:  mayonnaise, mustard, and a splash of balsamic vinegar.  The vinegar is optional, but adds a nice tang.

And pesto.  I've loved pesto for . . . well, about forever.  But I had a pesto breakthrough (an "e-pesto-phany"?) when I discovered that it's possible to make pesto with things other than basil.  So the tops of the carrots (of which, the bottoms J-son is destroying) are now in a pair of jars labeled "carrot top pesto" (recipe here).  Which is truly yummy.  And likewise, some Persian Cress, which seemed to be too tangy for my family to eat straight, turned into "Persian pesto".  Not to mention garlic scape pesto, which I look forward to every year.  These jars are divided between the fridge and the freezer; I'll have summer garlic-y goodness even when the snow falls all around us again.