Ancestors and Applesauce

Feb 12, 14 Ancestors and Applesauce

Posted by in Family

A few months ago, Mel spent the evening making some home-made applesauce with the apples from our tree in the backyard.  He used his grandmother’s recipe.  The apples are tart and small and delicious if you have a lot of time to work with them.  He peeled and chopped about 40 apples and we ate all the applesauce for dinner.  I remember my grandmother having containers and containers of home-made applesauce.  I wonder how my ancestors managed to preserve so much food. For the last couple of years, I have been working to try to put some food away.  I am shocked by the volume of food that is required if I want to eat it during the winter.  I buy what I consider large quantities of things–a bushel of tomatoes, a flat of strawberries, and they disappear as I make jam or sauce.  That is kind of what happened with the apples. I have been judging myself by a tough standard, I realized.  I am the first woman in my family to continue in a career after I married.  The women I admire who were fantastic at putting food away were housewives.  If it were my job to put food away, I imagine I would be a fair bit better at it.  I picture them never really sitting down, but then I think of the handwork my grandmother did–always making something–and I realize she had to sit down for that.  And she watched her soap operas.  I am not sure her life was quite as full as I thought it was.  She had some down time I think. I spend my time in front of a computer.  It is ironic that I work and feel lazy because I can’t do all the tasks women from previous generations...

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What’s a Bookii Anyway?

May 02, 13 What’s a Bookii Anyway?

Posted by in Ask Melanie, Featured, Free

I was hanging out with a crazy Brit named George when I first had the idea of the bookii.  I had been working on writing a book and was finding it incredibly 2 dimensional.  I wanted multiple topics and more visual than I could accomplish in print.  I wanted my reader to be able to explore my book rather than reading it one page after the other.  In a conversation with George we were talking about an online technology called Prezi that allows you to explore deeper and is a more flexible presentation platform than Power Point.  Somehow talking about that helped me start to visualize a dynamic memoir that had pictures and color and video and wasn’t bound by the boundaries of a printed book.  Prezi didn’t end up being the medium, but the concept stuck with me. What makes it a bookii?  Well, it is a book that you read electronically   It is written by one author and instead of purchasing a book, you purchase an annual subscription to a bookii.  My bookii is creative non-fiction–a lifestyle, but I hope there will be lots of bookiis that are both fiction and non-fiction combined.  I imagine being able to read my favorite authors and about their characters while simultaneously being able to look up what they were thinking about when they were writing about it or what their inspirations were by exploring their bookii.  The Crucible Bookii is my bookii.  It is the world’s very first bookii.  It is rich with interesting articles about the stories that make up my life.  I hope you will become a member and share this journey with me as I create this interactive real-time memoir.   Melanie shares how the bookii idea...

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