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Category: Research

Posts in which we talk about research

The Day Job Project from Heck has been woefully behind on every aspect of my life. I’m having a hard time catching up.

So, today you get a post from 2010 on tea. Enjoy.

As most of you probably know, the English drink tea. Tea was introduced in England after 1650. I’m sure that most of us have read a historical in which the phrase “a dish” of tea is used rather than the more familiar “cup” of tea.  This site tells us that the first tea cups were Chinese in origin and were shallow saucers, and did not have handles. From the same site:

100  years after the introduction of tea in England, handles were not yet  seen on tea cups, but English potters had introduced saucers to the  bowls. The tea-drinkers thought the saucer was there to pour the tea  into to cool it and then they would sip the tea from the saucer. Later  the saucer was used to hold spillage and the use of the cup and saucer  became the tradition used today with the addition of handles.

Britain Express has a good overview of the history of tea and coffee houses. Tea was taxed by 1676. A hundred years later, we know how that taxation thing worked for the British when they were across the pond. According to this site, the tax rose to 119% and guess what?!  Tea smuggling, that’s what. And guess what else! People put stuff that wasn’t tea in the tea. What’s that thing the French say about change and the same old thing?

Check out The United Kingdom Tea Council for their amazing History of Tea, including the The London Tea Auction
And there’s this from 1826:
My favorite tea ever is Lapsang Souchang. I love the smoky flavor. At work, however, I drink Lipton. It gets my day going.  What about you guys? Do you drink tea? What kind?  If you were a tea smuggler where would you hide your tea?

Do I have links for you!  And stories.

Swallow!

Here’s the strange thing. This first link goes to the blog of my good friend SonomaLass. (Not her IRL name!). Her partner is British and they go to the family farm in Scotland or to Britain proper once a year. This year (and last, actually) they did a canal boat trip and her pictures are wonderful. You will love them. By the way, she brought me back the most beautiful coffee cup:

I LOVE that coffee cup. She says considered getting me the Blue Tit, but decided Swallow was better for a romance author. She is very wise.

Go look at her Canal Trip Pictures, think about Regency folk floating along, but also read about her trip. When you come back, I’ll tell you how we got to be friends.

Fun, eh? Yes, I want to go, too!!

How I met my Good Friend

Two or three years ago now, I kept seeing someone in the comments at Dear Author saying funny, smart stuff and given her handle of “SonomaLass” I finally replied to one of her comments and asked if, by any chance, she lived in Sonoma County. The answer was yes! So, short story even shorter, she lives about 20 minutes from me and works in my town. We’ve been meeting up for conversation and European Sipping Chocolate ever since. And, also as it turns out, someone else turned out to live very close by and now we all three meet regularly and talk about romance novels and all kinds of stuff. I love the internet.

All About Lace

My next link is to A Most Beguiling Accomplishment for a post about lace. I love her blog. Don’t forget to check out the side bar (left and right) for more great links.

When I was 16, our Italian-born neighbor took my sister and I with her when she went to Italy to visit relatives. Some of her relatives lived in VERY small villages in the Alps. It was like sitting in the middle of someone’s ridiculous fantasy about quaint Italian villages. We sat outside their stone house at a table shaded by enormous grape vines and I watched a plump old woman hand make this lace:

Hand tatted Italian Lace. Photo by Moi.

She was unbelievably fast at the lace making (done with bobbins). Like an expert knitter, she didn’t even have to look. She sat with us, chatting with her relative and her American visitors and her hands were constantly moving. My sister also got a lovely hand made lace doily.

Maps

From lace to maps: The David Rumsey Map Collection. Connected to Google maps, too.

Oh, my goodness. I have a thing for maps. It’s almost worse than my thing for looking at vacation photos.

Extraordinary People

My next link is outside our period but it’s an article well worth reading about an American woman physician who also did some early sex research beginning in 1892. Celia Mosher was an extraordinary woman, and this Stanford Magazine article makes me wish I’d know her or that she’d lived miraculously long enough to know that other women came after her and they did not have to make the sacrifices she did. Because of women like her, other women got to have bigger dreams and to see them come true.

What strikes me about this article about Dr. Mosher is the sense of how isolated she felt. How many extraordinary women of the past also felt isolated by their ambition and brilliance? It’s a tragedy.

Which leads me to my last post, which is totally outside our period because it’s from just a few days ago (August 2012). An Unexpected Ass Kicking. A touching and inspiring article. I hope you take the time to read it.

Stories

When I was young, my grandmother came to live with us for a few years. She got homesick and eventually went back to Oregon where, a couple weeks after locking herself out of the house and climbing through a window to get in, she passed away of a heart attack at age 87.  She was a woman who talked a lot. And I mean a lot. It could be very tedious, to be honest.  As a young woman, my grandmother, not that it matters, was heart-stoppingly beautiful. She certainly is in her wedding picture.

But over several evenings, I sat with my grandmother (who was in many ways an extraordinary woman) and listened to her talk. I didn’t have to say much, but I learned an awful lot about her her family that no one else knew. In fact, I was the first one to hear the story of the family ax murderer, later confirmed by my sister who found the article about his trial. But I LOVE listening to stories.

In fact, I once went to a party where I sat next to a man I figured was probably approaching 80, and he started telling me all about his life growing up in Poland. His family tried to rescue me, but I didn’t want to be rescued. I’m sure they’d all heard the stories before, but they were new to me. It turns out he was 104. Which is why all his stories had no cars or electricity.

I hope to make it to a doddering old age without doddering, and I hope there’s someone around to listen to my stories.

Got any stories about extraordinary people? I would love to hear them!

Super Secret Surprise for people who read this far:

I’m giving away a copy of my September historical Not Proper Enough here.

Rules: Void where prohibited. Must be 18 or older to enter. No purchase necessary. Post a comment to this post by Midnight Pacific on Friday August 17, 2012. International OK.

 

Male duds as in clothing.  Why? What were YOU thinking? If it’s colorful, please mention in the comments.

What Color Is your Boa?

Most of you know that last week was the Romance Writers of America national conference, in which Romance authors the world over meet to eat bon-bons, compare our boas, and send our assistants off to do all the work. I drove down to Anaheim with the marvelous Isobel Carr, by the way.
Anyhow, the weekend before the road trip, Isobel, Miranda Neville, and Pam Rosenthal drove up my way so we could have High Tea at Patisserie Angelica.  (OH MY GOD! I am officially a name dropper.) Have I mentioned that Jo Bourne once came to Patisserie Angelica for High Tea? She did. And then she won a RITA. Just saying.

Patisserie Angelica: where all the cool historical romance authors have High Tea.

I’m still working on Jennifer Haymore. I got Grace Burrows as far as Petaluma after RWA. We had an amazing dinner, but the meeting was a bit ad hoc and she had Big Trees to see so the jaunt to Sebastopol was not possible. Not so long ago, Liz Maverick was here and now her life is sparkly. Our very own Risky Megan has been here.

Sonoma County:  Where all the cool writers come to visit. Or live. (I am not kidding.)

 
If you’re ever in Sonoma County, hit me up and I will show you the awesome.

Right. So, Isobel Carr, on the pre-RWA trip to Sebastopol, was telling me all about this book about male fashion that was super cheap for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Isobel Carr is, as many of you probably know, something of a history of fashion expert, so when she identifies a great reference book, it’s wise to listen up.

Since I had my iPad handy I immediately went in search of the book, found it after a bit of trouble with the spelling of the author’s last name and saw it was indeed available for $5.00.

Dear Readers, I bought it.

My Book Has Come In

Today, the book arrived. It had to come all the way from Canada. I think a dog sled was involved. The Male Image, Men’s Fashion from 1300-1970 by Penelope Byrde. It’s hardback and in excellent condition since it has a library binding. And guess what??? This is so low tech I’m giddy.

It’s an old fashioned Library Book!
Look! The pink thing comes out.

I can’t wait to go through it looking for pictures of men in high boots (definitely not male duds!) or gentlemen in tights and that dead sexy frac. Also, I see there is a lengthy section on the history of the neckcloth.

Also, I can’t wait for publishers to get their acts together and start doing books like this in color.

I was trying to figure out what I would blog about and I thought that, in honor of it being Wednesday (“Hump Day”) when you read this, I would find out something about camels in the Regency. So I Googeled Regency Camels. Sometimes the Internet surprises me.

The #1 Regency Camel related result?

Regency Camel Toe.

I am not kidding.

Of course I clicked. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/regency-camel-toe So should you. It’s safe for work except for the part where if you click it won’t look very work-related.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I almost died laughing. Camel toe indeed. Pink breeches!

It Gets Better

The link above will guide you here: Regency Camel Toe. Essentially safe for work except for the not working part.

Here is a picture of a real camel.

Via Adam Foster | Codefor

You may read about Camels here:

Yup. Sometimes the internet surprises me.

First some News

I just turned in my story for Midnight Scandals, a historical romance anthology with Courtney Milan and Sherry Thomas. I immediately started work on Book 5 of the My Immortals series. Now that Free Fall, my My Immortals novella is out of Kindle Select, I’ve also worked on getting it published to all other vendors. It should start showing up shortly.

Naturally with all this writing to do, I’ve been reading a lot because I can tell myself it’s practically work and almost writing! Writers need to read!

One of the many books I’ve read recently is Eric Jager’s The Last Duel. I’m really surprised I never heard about this book when it first came out in 2004. It’s exactly the sort of book I would have bought right away.

The gripping, atmospheric true story of the “duel to end all duels” in medieval France: a trial by combat pitting a knight against a squire accused of violating the knight’s beautiful young wife.

I loved this book. It’s everything I adore about history books and more. While I read the Kindle version– more about that later –I bought it in hardback for my dad, who I think will like it a lot, too and will also get my mom a Kindle copy. I’ve been pimping it to everyone. Even you. Especially YOU!

Based on extensive research in Normandy and Paris, The Last Duel brings to life a colorful, turbulent age and three unforgettable characters caught in a fatal triangle of crime, scandal, and revenge. It is at once a moving human drama, a captivating detective story, and an engrossing work of historical intrigue.

The quote sounds like it’s overblown, but you know what? It’s not. I finished this book nearly 10 days ago, and I read it steadily until I was done. I’m STILL thinking about it. At times I forgot I was reading about something that really happened. And then I remember that lives were truly at stake.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was the meticulous research. The duel and the circumstances surrounding it were sensational at the time and for centuries afterward. There is, therefore, an unusual amount of surviving documentation.

I fell in love a little with LeCog, the attorney for the defendant in the matter. It was plain that he was a meticulous man and quite insightful. I changed my mind once or twice about the two men, by the way. When the duel took place, I was glued to my chair, because not only did I have to know what happened, I was very much aware there was no guarantee that the outcome would be the one I hoped for.

The Kindle version was, in the main, very well put together. The footnotes actually worked, for example, in that I ended up at the right footnote and that footnote took me back to my place.

My Gripes

I have two gripes and one of them is a big one. At normal size, the images in the text were crisp and clear, but too small to read. Once I expanded them to examine maps and artwork in more detail, the images were blurry. Text in the images was unreadable.

My other gripe is that the images were in black and white. I was reading on my iPad 3, by the way, so this mattered to me a lot. Unlike print, color in an ebook does not cost a cent.

Let me say that again: color in an eBook does not cost a cent.

Those source images, many of them contemporary artwork, are in color in real life and my guess is that the original photographs were probably submitted in color, too. The image IN COLOR on the cover is also in the book. In black and white.

I would have paid extra for an eBook with those images in color and in high-resolution.

If you have any interest in the Medieval period, this is a great book to have.