Susan Wise Bauer's Blog, page 28

May strawberries on the farm

The early strawberries are in.

So I thought I'd give you Meme's strawberry shortcake recipe (Meme was my mother's foster mother, a Depression-era chicken farmer, and an amazing cook).

Slice the strawberries and stir them in a bowl with a few spoonfuls of sugar. Let them sit (they start making their own sauce).

Mix:

2 1/2 cups flour

1 Tbs baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/3 cup sugar

With a pastry blender, cut in 1 stick of butter until butter is the size of small peas.

Mix in 1 cup of sweet milk...

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-25

DS18 is in China. At wrong airport, unfortunately. #DS18 has arrived safely in Nanchang. Whew. #Trying to get service at Verizon store. Will never get these hours of my life back. #Dear Verizon: when a store has 15 salespeople and 1 technical service guy, you are sending a clear message about priorities. #Verizon techie, after we've spent over hour waiting in store: "Well, we don't actually FIX phones here–" #If one more person who should know better misspells my name, I may have to steal a...

So maybe I won't do that after all…

My colleague Justin sent me a link to this story today.

Oh, my.

The future of one of Britain's leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as "fascinating" and "uplifting" while rubbishing that of his rivals.

In a row that has scandalised the academic world Orlando Figes, one of the stars of contemporary history, had issued a string of legal threats to academic colleagues, literary journals...

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-18

Turned horses out in (unfenced) front field this morning to eat spring grass. They haven't lifted their heads/moved more than 15 ft so far. #Packing up for sales conference. #In New York. Beautiful clear cool day. Great for walking around the city. Or, alternately, for staying in pajamas and writing all day. #Dinner tonight at La Grenouille (http://www.la-grenouille.com/). Long ways from the farm. Strong feeling of visiting from an alien planet. #Getting ready to go down to Cornell Club and...

Sales conference time!

Yesterday was sales conference day for Peace Hill Press, which means that I'm in New York. I don't have any great photos this trip, but here's the view out my window this morning:

(It's kind of a grey day.)

During sales conference, I'm not in New York as an author; I'm here as a publisher with books to promote.

Most small presses have a distributor–a middle man who shops the books to the bookstores for us and takes a commission off the top. We can't possibly make contact with all the...

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-11

Back from shopping trip with mother (75) and daughter (9). Except for stop at Hanes outlet, both pretty much on the same shopping page. #Just turned on the air conditioning. Let me check the calendar again. Yep, still April. #Eww. It has no pants. http://www.wm.edu/news/stories/2010/new-mascot-announced-123.php #Heading to class: the bricks in front of Tyler Hall are coated w/green and yellow pollen. Like an enormous alien slime monster sat there. #On the ground in Cincinnati, heading for...

Dispatch from Cincinnati

I've been at the Midwest Homeschool Convention in Cincinnati since Thursday. This has turned into one of the largest conventions in the country–I heard an estimate of eleven thousand people here. Big busy vendor hall, multiple meeting rooms, scary escalator which was always filled with a constant stream of people feeding into it at the bottom and spilling out at the top. I kept having visions of someone at the top falling backwards like a human domino.

Mom and I got to travel together to t...

One of those conversations…

Yesterday I took my mother and my daughter shopping. Ladies' morning out: new bathing suit for daughter, conference clothes for Grammy and me, ice cream. We're sitting on the bench outside Baskin-Robbins, licking our ice cream cones thoughtfully, when Emily asks, in a very loud voice, "What's a prostitute?"

Now, although we've had a basic version of what a friend of mine calls The Plumbing Talk, I don't think that her understanding is going to stretch to encompass a complete answer to this...

Tee hee.

This email apparently made the rounds in a classical education discussion group…and was forwarded to us by a worried reader (who didn't click on the link first).

April 1, 2010

Friends,

I'm sure you were as disturbed as I was this morning to read about the statement from the authors of The Well-Trained Mind, Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. The have apparently renounced the classical approach outlined in their writings and are now, in support of the President's "Race to the Top" political...

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-04

Wind is HOWLING outside third-story windows. Must think of better verb for March. Bellowing, blustering, swaggering, sweeping, vociferating? #It is a Very Rainy Day on the hundred-acre farm. #Heading out for a soggy run. Seems like I've had a lot of soggy runs recently. #The soggy run was only the beginning. Have been sprinting (metaphorically) all day. But at least it's dry now. #Up at 5 AM to work. Clear dark sky straight overhead; morning stars; huge bright moon on horizon all wrapped up...