Tightening the Belt

One of the perks (did you know that’s actually short for “perquisite”?) of working in a home goods type store is that it’s Christmas every truck day. I run the truck at our store, meaning that every Wednesday I drag myself out of bed at 3:45am to go spend 8 1/2 hours hefting very heavy things. Not only is an excellent workout, but it means I get to see all the new goodies before everyone else does.

All our new furniture and gift items and dinnerware and decor passes through my little fingers before the rest of the world gets to see it. Recently, I was unpacking some new napkin rings when my sleep deprived brain had a brilliant idea. Why not use some of the napkin rings as belt buckles? 

You may be thinking “not so much, Eliza...sounds weird” but think about it: belts are expensive. Vintage is back in style and interesting belt buckles can make a real statement, so you end up with a zillion black or brown belts that you bought just for the cool buckle! And that means a lot of wasted $$$$$$. But what if you used a regular belt like this one:

And just made interchangeable clips for it, like these? 

No one would ever suspect it was the same belt. Napkin rings are pretty cheap, especially if you can find them on sale (or if you have an employee discount *eyebrow waggle*). A pair of wire cutters, some wire and an inexpensive clip from the craft store and ta da! A clip-on piece of flare to cover the original, boring belt buckle.

I put my theory to the test and wore my new flower belt buckle to a wedding. And guess what? No one asked me why I was wearing a napkin ring. In fact, I received three compliments on it.

So would you rather pay $15 for a new belt or $3 for a napkin ring? And the best part is, it’s so much easier to store one belt and 5 interchangeable clips than it is to store 5 belts. Your closet and your wallet will both thank you.

Every nester needs their signature. Martha has her poncho, but I have my bling belt clips. 

Guatemala

Hola readers!

Today’s post is a bit of a change from the usual (though of course nesting is still involved). Today, I talk about my OTHER passion: human rights. 

I just spent a week and a half in Guatemala, a country I’ve studied intensively for a number of years but never actually been to. As a specialist in genocide studies and lover of all things Español, the human rights situation in Guatemala has been on my radar for quite some time. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of this Latin American country, here’s a brief overview:

Guatemala has suffered from a history of military coups and dictatorships in combination with conflict over land rights and conflict between its Maya and ladino populations. From 1960 to 1996, tensions boiled over and Guatemala was embroiled in what is now called the Internal Conflict, or La Violencia. During this time, 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during this time and hundreds of thousands were displaced. In a report filed by the Historical Clarification Commission in 1999, 93% of the atrocities were committed by the military and 83% of the victims were Maya. Between 1980 and 1982, a scorched earth campaign was conducted in the Western Highlands, a primarily Maya region. It was later found by the international community that the actions of the military constituted genocide. During the internal conflict, violence against women, particularly sexual violence, was used as a tactic of “war.” 

In the years since La Violencia, many of the military leaders responsible for the genocide have continued to hold positions of political power, and one of these men is currently favored to win Guatemala’s primary elections this September. This culture of impunity is one of Guatemala’s biggest problems.

Today, levels of violence in the country are as high as they were during the Internal Conflict. Domestic violence and femicide are growing problems, and as the price of nickel, oil and other natural resources continue to rise, foreign extractive companies are pushing indigenous people off their land, displacing thousands of families in often violent, brutal ways. Women, and particularly indigenous women, often pay the heftiest price during these confrontations. Community leaders who stand up for their communities’ rights put themselves in grave danger, and many have been threatened and/or brutally assassinated.

I went to Guatemala to flex my anthropological muscles. After a year of being unable to find a job in my field, I was feeling disconnected from the subject I am most passionate about. When the opportunity arose to join a human rights delegation sponsored by the ever wonderful Guatemala Human Rights Commission (based in Washington, DC), I jumped at it. 

Myself, six other delegates and two GHRC employees spent 9 days in Guatemala meeting with Guatemalan human rights groups and indigenous leaders to learn more about their struggle against femicide, genocide, sexual violence, misogyny and the culture of impunity in modern day Guatemala. Seven years of studying genocide is nothing compared to 9 days of first person meetings. Reading the transcripts of genocide survivors’ testimony can never compare to hearing it straight from their lips. Studying about the land ownership struggles indigenous communities face cannot compare to meeting with displaced communities who have lost everything. 

We met some incredible men and women, people who put everything on the line because they care about their communities, their families and their country. We talked with women whose terrible ordeals helped them become stronger, more empowered and more conscious of what it means to be a feminist. They are redefining what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, a Maya and a Guatemalan. We laughed and shared meals with these people, listened to them sing and watched them dance, played with their children and left hoping they felt a little less alone in their fight for justice. 

On the last day of our trip, we took a mini vacation to Antigua, the ex-capital of Guatemala. Antigua is a beautiful city filled with cobblestone streets and lovely green spaces. For a few hours, we could pretend we were tourists too. I wanted to buy myself a souvenir, something that would not only remind me of how amazing Guatemala is, but the reason I went there. I finally settled on a little half-apron. Guatemala is known for its textiles, so the weaving and embroidery will always remind me of the country. In addition, I realized on this trip what a blessing it is to be free to choose to be a nester. I am not forced by cultural restraint to be domestic. I do not have to serve the men in my family or ask permission to go to the store or the park or to work. My home and body won’t be violated just because I live on resource-rich earth.

My little apron is a reminder of all these things. When I wear it, it reminds me why I continue to pursue a career in human rights work. Perhaps most unexpectedly, it reminds me that being a feminist is something I have always taken for granted, and shouldn’t any more.

For more information about the history of Guatemala and the current human rights situation there, go to: http://www.ghrc-usa.org/

It's a Dog-Eat-Shoe World

This past winter, my boyfriend adopted an adorable Boston Terrier mix from an animal shelter. Tara is about 2 years old now and has the body of an adult dog but the energy of a puppy. When my boyfriend runs with her regularly, she is an angel. When he doesn't, she's a whirling dervish of bouncy playfulness. Lately, my boyfriend has not been running her.



This morning I woke up to discover that Tara had chewed up my good work shoes. This was a first. She has been known to eat chapstick and pencils, but has never shown any interest in shoes before. The real travesty is, since I didn't catch her in the act, there's not much I can do in the punishment arena. Phooey.

At my job, I'm on my feet nonstop for eight hours. When I first started looking for work shoes I refused to cave in and buy any of the overpriced "practical," aka ugly, shoes I saw everywhere. Instead, I spent three weeks scouring the city to find a pair of comfortable, supportive, well-priced yet cute flats. Compounding the problem was that I have funny toes, a wide foot and narrow heel. Finding a comfy pair of flats is very difficult for me. And now, after all that work, my work shoes are destroyed...the perky bows chewed off, the patent leather toe fanged, and the rest covered in general doggy slobber. Have I mentioned I'm a cat person at heart? I do love that bad little doggy though, darn it.

Of course, the store I bought my shoes at doesn't carry them anymore, so I can't just buy another pair. And I really don't want to conduct another city-wide search, so I've decided to put my craft skills to good use and fix the mauled ones. My plan is to removed the mangled bows and find a patent leather flower or something to affix to them instead. The fanging on the toe isn't too noticeable, and the worst of it would be covered by the flower. With that and a thorough cleaning, I'm hoping they can be revived.

It's a dog-eat-shoe world out there, and we have to be prepared for such inevitabilities. But with a little creativity, I think my shoes might just pull through to see another day. I'm keeping my fingers crossed and my shoes in the closet.

On to Pie

My last posting was about cake (metaphorical, but still...). This one is all about pie.

I love pie as much as I love cupcakes, which is a lot. Especially cream pies. However, the multitude of backyard BBQs I've been to this summer have failed to impress me in the pie arena. No offense, but cream pie, to me, does not equal store-bought crust, instant Jello pudding mix and whipped topping. I think I'm just spoiled.

There is a little diner called Stott Brothers on the highway between Upper Hillsborough, NH and Stonington, CT (where we have relatives) that makes HANDS DOWN the BEST cream pies in the world. I mean 5lbs of tender, flakey crust, thick homemade pudding and real whipped cream (NOT out of a can) good. I grew up eating this pie. Jello just doesn't cut it for me.

After yet another instant pudding based "pie" appeared on our break room table at work yesterday, I had a hankering for a real pie. Plus, I really wanted to use my coveted Emile Henry (pronounced "Emeel Onree," not "Emilee Henree") ruffled pie dish. I dug out my mother's tattered copy of James Beard's iconic cookbook and got to work.

The end result wasn't very pretty, but it was delicious! For all you perfectionists out there, I suppose I should have cleaned up the edges of the (beautiful!) pie plate before photographing it. But this isn't some Stepford Wives blog. This is about real people nesting. And real people have messy pie plates. Right?

Next stop? Banana cream.

I'll Have My Cake and Eat It Too

July 19, 2011

Now is the summer of my discontent. My ideal life and my ideal career are butting heads.

I have never made it a secret that my career is my first priority. I zipped through undergraduate and graduate school with the intent of getting some valuable job experience before continuing on to do my PhD. Upon completing that, I would move to the East Coast and secure a great job designing culturally sensitive, sustainable post-conflict community reconstruction policies. In my spare time I would work as a volunteer excavating mass graves to gather evidence for war crimes prosecutions. Eventually I would get married and have a couple kids. A pretty great life plan if you ask me.

Then the reality of the job market, particularly the non-profit human rights job market, took me down a notch. Over a year after graduating with my Master’s degree I am living with my mother and working as a manager in retail. Somewhere along the way my plan was derailed. I am still career oriented. I want the cool job and the PhD. I keep being told I have to go to where the jobs are. For my field, that means Washington DC or New York. At the immediate level, I find these places exciting but not wholly appealing. Living at home I’m surrounded by kitties and my family and am ten minutes away from my boyfriend. Awesome. What impetus do I have to pick up and move to a major city where I don’t know anyone and have to live with 4 other people in a tiny apartment and work three crappy jobs to pay my rent and deal with the smog and noise of a people-packed, concrete jungle?

I’ve also been thinking a lot about where I want to settle down in the future, and I’m realizing that the places that offer the great job aren’t the places I want to raise a family. I always imagined myself being a cosmopolitan adult, but more and more I find that I like the sound of cicadas and the glow of fireflies. I like grass and trees and having my own space. I like being able to hop in the car and drive to the Badlands of South Dakota or the mountains in Colorado. I want to raise my kids in a nice house with enough property that I can have a garden. I want a small grove of peach and pear and olive trees. I want a pond with water lilies and an arbor with grapes so I can make bad homemade wine. I want to try raising a few chickens and a duck or two. I could never have that kind of lifestyle in the DC or New York areas.

Fortunately, I’m more of an action kind of girl than the brooding kind. My new plan? Keep plugging along until the great job and the PhD are mine. I’ll work for a few years in the “proper” locations, get the experience I need, then move someplace I actually want to live and start my own non-profit. Who says a successful international organization can’t be run from Oregon or Ohio or Tennessee or Maine? I shouldn't have to sacrifice one dream to satisfy another.

After figuring out my new life plan, I am feeling both refreshed and optimistic. As my favorite fictional heroine, Amelia Peabody, would say, “Righteous indignation has that effect on my character.” I want total quality of life, dang it, and if the world isn’t prepared to offer it to me I’ll just have to create it on my own. So there.

Aesthetic Eating

When I was little, my family’s house in New Hampshire was small and very old, having been built in the early 1700s. To keep us entertained and out from underfoot, my mother insisted my brother and I spend the majority of our time playing outside. Being in the country, the house had an acre backyard with woods behind it. With the exception of the  weather (snow 7 months of the year and biting black fly swarms for another 2 months), it was an idyllic environment to grow up in.

My mom kept a large vegetable garden and we had a hedgerow of wild raspberry and blackberry bushes. When my brother and I needed a snack we could forage amongst the available roughage. Green beans, snap peas, lettuce, carrots, tomatoes and berries were our primary staples, but I also loved to graze in the flower garden. Many of the flowers my mom grew were edible, and I used to nibble on nasturtiums, carnations and violets, along with bok choy flowers, squash blossoms and herbs from the vegetable garden. 

While using edible flowers on cakes has been popular for quite some time, over the past few years more and more restaurants have started adding edible flowers to their soups, salads and appetizers. The effect is not only delicious, but aesthetically appealing. 

For the even more adventurous, there is also the option of making rose, violet and other “floral” jams and jellies!

Of course, not all flowers are edible and it is important to do your homework before using flowers in your cooking. Poisoning one's dinner guests is generally frowned upon. The internet has a number of “eat this, not that” flower websites and there are several cookbooks available regarding the use of flowers in cooking. The best of the ones I’ve seen so far is this one:

The recipes are pretty straight forward and the pictures are beautiful. I found it at a half-price bookstore and nostalgia demanded I buy it. Sadly, it is really only useful for a few months out of the year. As lovely as poinsettias and holly are, they don’t make for tasty (or safe) eating. Still, for those who want to get the most out of their summer garden or local farmer's market, I highly recommend adding more flora to their cuisine. Make squash blossom soup, nasturtium salad,  or rose petal-almond scones. Even instant pudding looks impressive when served in little glass cups and topped with sugared violets. It's so "green", so chic, so incredibly easy. Throw a backyard garden party with floral foods and herb-infused cocktails and everyone will be calling you the next Martha. 

No Mere Coffee Table

My brother recently moved into a new apartment and we have been furniture hunting as a result. In particular, he needed a coffee table. My brother is a tad...well...particular. He didn’t want just any coffee table, he wanted the perfect coffee table. Six furniture stores later, we finally found one. 

In short, over the past week I’ve seen a LOT of coffee tables. Glass ones, wood ones, metal ones, round ones, square ones, large ones, small ones, modern ones, traditional ones...you name it. I never knew there was such variety! However, my personal favorite by far (and by this I mean the one that amuses me most, not the one I would actually buy) was a coffee table that opened up into a TV tray. 

That’s right. A TV tray. Eating on the couch in front of the television is now even easier! It struck me as the kind of contraption one sees on a late night infomercial...“This may seem like a mild-mannered coffee table, but no! There’s more! Wow and amaze your friends and family!” Part of me feels like it’s one more harbinger of humanity’s downfall. Fewer than 100 years ago people used to change into formal dinner attire just to eat family dinner. This seems a bit overboard to me. But now? Just pull on your sweatpants and pop up the leaf on the coffee table (for a person living alone, this is forgivable; for everyone else...not so much). 

Mostly though, I found this coffee table incredibly amusing. I picture it being most appropriate for the kind of person who never really outgrew the Transformers phase they went through as a kid and now loves multi-use furniture. Complementing the coffee table/TV tray would be a futon sofa and those storage ottomans that also double as extra seating. Perhaps even a reversible rug. Dinner would be served on those dishes that aren’t deep enough to be a bowl but are too deep to be considered a regular plate. 

Forget the rewarding feeling of helping my brother set up his first solo household. The real highlight of furniture shopping was definitely the discovery of this coffee table. Thank you to whomever came up with the idea...your hard work has kept this nester highly entertained.