I am a lackluster and dilatory blogger these days to be sure. My apologies, I shall endeavor to be more interesting in public where people can see me rather than doing what I have been doing, which I must admit has mostly consisted in being uninteresting in private, trying to write and do eldercare and keep house and get ready to hit the road for a conference and book events.
Apropos of which I suppose I should mention them, no?
I’ll be at National Women’s Studies Association Conference in Atlanta next weekend. I’m giving an as-yet-unwritten paper that you can read about here, if you’re so inclined. It’s got a fabulous title so I’m sure I’ll come up with something delightful, and in any event I do have lots of things to say on the subject even if they’re currently not as organized as I’m sure they will be by Saturday morning. I’ll also be hanging out some at the booth for my speakers’ agency, Soapbox Inc., so if you’ve ever wanted to meet me — or talk to me about booking a talk — and you’ll be at NWSA, go see if you can track me down.
On Friday night, the 11th, I’ll be doing a Big Big Love reading/signing at Charis Books in Atlanta, so if you’ll be around, c’mon out. It’s free and I’m usually pretty funny, often intentionally.
In other news, I have been engaging in various autumnal rituals like getting the furnace replaced, rediscovering just how much I hate it when the cat not only crawls in underneath the covers but insists on snuggling up between my knees, and making sauerkraut.
I am a kraut fiend. If I’m honest, I get kind of excited about almost any pickled or fermented vegetable, but sauerkraut has a special place in my heart. And my stomach. (I will happily eat an entire bowl of raw kraut fresh from the crock. And not infrequently do.) We pulled the season’s first batch of kraut out of the crocks last week and are almost done yumming it up. I put another three heads of cabbage into my crock on Saturday so that there will be kraut again in time for Thanksgiving or thereabouts. Someday I will obtain one of the super-fancy-schmancy German fermenting crocks that has a little water channel that the lid sits in, thus allowing gas generated by fermentation to escape without letting air from the outside in. But for now I do just fine with my little 3.5 gallon pickling crock (with matching drop-lid!) I commissioned from my friendly neighborhood pottery a couple of years ago. It makes enough for my small household, although if I were smart, I’d get them to make me another one so I could stagger the batches and never run out of kraut.
A task, perhaps, for later. After I’ve written this paper. And done a few other things.
Oh and! Two further tidbits of information:
Tidbit #1: There are still a handful of copies of Inappropriate Crush available via Etsy. They’re all signed and numbered, there were only 75 copies in the edition.
Tidbit #2: If you’ve read Inappropriate Crush and would be up for writing a short (350 words or shorter) review of it that I could post on my soon-to-be-revamped website, I’d be delighted to feature it. Send ‘em to crush@hanneblank.com and be sure to include whatever name you want on it, and if you’ve got a website or something that you’d like me to link to, send me that URL, too.
