Category: Ladybusiness

Ladybusiness

Pioneer Girl

Shelly

If you’re in the U.S. and have access to CSPAN 3, I strongly recommend looking for a re-run of Pamela Smith Hill’s talk on Pioneer Girl.  

I have the book, which is quite good. It contains the text of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s first, previously unpublished autobiography which she used as an outline for the Little House books, along with a ton of photos and scholarly research by Pamela Smith Hill about Laura and her writing.

ETA: You can watch the video online, here. I couldn’t find an embed code, alas, and I don’t know if it’s region locked to the U.S. only.

Ladybusiness, Meta

Blog Excavations

Shelly

When my old blog got hacked a couple of years ago, I went back to Blogger. I was fed up with the lack of help from my web hosts’ alleged help department, and I was fed up with trying to stay on top of back end stuff I didn’t really feel competent to be in charge of. But Blogger is clunky as hell. The mobile app is especially exasperating, because it does not know how to handle HTML. The WordPress app does, though, so I decided to give WP another try, only this time NOT self-hosting.

It was the best blogging decision I have made. If there are draw-backs, I haven’t seen them yet. I expect I’ll eventually need to pay for space, because I’ve gradually been adding back the content lost when my old blog was eaten. I’m having to do it manually, though, copying text from the actual database, so it’s a slow process.

Which is all to say that I have finally excavated the Covered Wagon Women entries. Also the few entries I did on Laura Ingalls. I regretted losing those the most. My photos and artwork are all available on Flickr, so they’re accessible whether the blog is here or not. The writing, though, was not.

Also! Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon is coming up. I wasn’t sure what I was going to read this time around, but the blog excavations have nudged me in the direction of more ladyjournals. I have a ton to choose from, and I’ll likely be sharing my favorite bits here.

Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

Seven Limes?

Shelly

I think it’s really tone deaf and patronizing for someone as rich as Gwyneth Paltrow is play tourist with poor folks’ lives. Surely she has an imagination and some empathy and can figure out for herself what it’s like to live on food stamps, without turning poverty into a side show attraction?

But if she really wants to do this right, I have some suggestions.

1. Do this experiment for a month, at least.
2. Cook all her food on a single hot plate. No oven, no microwave, no fancy kitchen. Bonus points for not using a refrigerator.
3. Take the bus to the Aldi across town. Don’t forget to have a quarter handy for the shopping cart.
4. Take her kids with her while shopping.
5. Do her shopping after a full work day, and after picking up the kids (on the bus) at daycare/sitter/school, but before the kids have had their supper, so they are at maximum crabcake. Oh, and they want ALL THE THINGS. Which you obviously can’t afford, so you have to deal with the in-store melt-down when you have to tell your tired, hungry, cranky four year old that she’s getting oatmeal instead of the fun cereal with the toy in the box.
6. Have at least one meeting with a welfare counselor who makes her feel like she’s a worthless piece of shit.
7. Zero dollars for non-food items, because those are luxuries. Maybe she could sell plasma for money to buy toilet paper and tampons?

But seriously, seven limes? Is she having margaritas? It makes for a pretty picture, but that’s just not how poor folks shop.

(To be fair, she doesn’t actually say she will be doing the NYC Food Bank challenge.  She just posted a photo of what she believes $29 worth of groceries looks like.)

Art, Collage, Ladybusiness

Wine and Glue

Shelly

There was wine. And then there were two arts.

The top one has a line taken from an Alfred Tennyson poem, The Princess. It is tl;dr, yo. The poem is about higher education for women. The image is photos of an academic honors society, from a 1957 high school yearbook.