Tim Tash's Blog

 

 

Hi, all! This is Leslea, just wanted to drop in and let you know what’s new with Tim and myself and the kids. It’s been an extremely busy year here at the Treehouse, but a good year. Tim and I often talk about how we need to stop and record a podcast, but we just haven’t. We’ve gotten out of that routine, and I hope to turn that around in 2018. Even if nobody else listens, I love our podcasts. I love hearing the kids growing, changing, the phases our family goes through…so hopefully, I’ll succeed in my goal of returning to podcasting in 2018.

I’ve decided that Facebook has become like the Eye of Sauron for me and I need to break myself of it for the foreseeable future. I’m not saying I’m never coming back, but I can say that since I deactivated my profile a few days ago, I’ve edited six chapters of my book and started listing things on Etsy again. Even though I’m having withdrawal from social media addiction, I think it’s for the best.

To that end, I hope to keep getting a few chapters a day edited of An Honest Woman (Montana Brides #2) so I can finally release that book. I thought I was going to release it in 2015, and here we are closing out 2017. I’m doing my best to not beat myself up about it. I think it’s the true procrastinator’s trap: the longer you put it off, the worse you feel about it, and then the worse you feel about it, the more you feel like it’s pointless to finish. Well, that kind of thinking is a negative spiral, and I’m tired of it! It feels good to work and get stuff done.

Hope you have been enjoying an amazing season. Tim and I have been doing a lot of WoWing and a lot of family time. In the cracks in between, I have managed to publish a couple of books. One is a kiddos’ chapter book along the lines of Junie B. Jones, titled Chicken Impossible. It’s on Amazon right now in paperback and ebook, and will be on the other bookseller sites by the weekend. Hope you enjoy it.

The other book project is a summer birding journal (really, fine for spring and fall, as well, as many of these birds are migratory). I used my own zipcode because I made this book and stickers on request for YOU KNOW WHO, the little one who always interrupts our podcasts.

Christmas is just a few days away. Hopefully between then and now, we will be able to record another podcast. We tried last weekend, but it just didn’t work out. Shouldn’t be surprised, really…we’re on round  of 4/6 are sick since Thanksgiving. BLEH. Wish us luck that all are healthy for Christmas.

Here’s a little entertainment in the meantime, if you are still looking for gift ideas. You may have time to squeeze some of these gifts in under the wire!

The best coffee mug for a gamer, cosplayer, or Viking! ~$40

A glow in the dark toilet light (blue, perfect for Tim) ~$10

Shower head with built-in bluetooth speaker (Leslea needs this!!!) ~$40

For the messy hot beverage drinker on the go (We’ve never seen anything like this!) ~$20

To keep your sofa nice (too late for us, lol) ~$50

Every home with teenage boys needs a two pack of these ~$20

That’s it, folks! If you can’t find something above worth giving someone, then you’re no fun and your friends are boring.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Hey! Are you enjoying fall leaves? Maybe you missed it, or you’re on the other side of the world where it’s springtime? Get your changing leaf fix at our Instagram page. Look for the hashtag #leafcam if you wanna–I think we’re the only ones who use it, most of the time.

Treehouse #leafcam

A photo posted by Treehouse Time (@treehousetime) on Nov 9, 2016 at 9:05am PST

Treehouse #leafcam

A photo posted by Treehouse Time (@treehousetime) on Nov 8, 2016 at 10:46am PST

Sunrise

Pretty unhappy right now. A few weeks ago, we discovered a new (to us) auction site called Everything But the House. It’s an estate sale / auction site that specializing in reselling high-end items with an artistic, etsy-ish flair. Any variety of stock from classic to kitsch can be found on the site, and the photography is fantastic. Additionally, they have a stylish app and website interface. Of course Tim and I immediately fell in love.

Several hundred dollars later, we’re not in so much love anymore. Hidden fees, late shipments (still waiting on 7 won auctions we won two weeks ago), and bad customer service have soured us on the EBTH experience. Don’t be lured in by the photos and snazzy app. It’s not worth it.

I do hope that I won’t have to file a complaint with my credit card company to get my money back on those seven missing auctions. I did go ahead and pay them a $30 fee for the privilege of picking up an auction that we won locally–even though a similar auction the week before had no such fee, and no fee was listed on this auction’s page. I’m not happy about it, though. When bidding online, everyone knows that you take delivery/shipping, fees, and buyer’s premiums into consideration before you bid. Hidden fees are just unscrupulous. I am so disappointed with this company. They have such a nice inventory that I really wanted them to be my new “go to” website for all kinds of things for the home, personal collections, and even to resell.

Considering that I am still waiting on those seven auctions to ship from mid-October, I don’t plan on ever using this site again. It saddens me, because I’d already given them another chance after my very first purchase from them showed up broken (a piece of art, a signed enamel on copper piece that we paid $70 for.

That’s three strikes for us: a broken piece of art, non-shipped/late shipped auctions, and now hidden fees.

Beware EBTH!

Under terms & conditions:

If you can find a $30 fee on this page I will eat my vintage, designer hat.

Added lots of new (vintage) stuff. Waiting on some collectibles to arrive in the mail…in the meantime, how about a sale on vintage jewelry $19.99 and up? Use code LESBDAY at check out!

Wow, what’s this? Two blog posts in a row? What a revolution.

It has been a busy fall season around here, as usual, but I wanted to stop and make a quick announcement: after a 16 year hiatus, I am back in the vintage jewelry business. If you are in the mood for something funky, pretty, cool, and definitely unique, check out my recent estate sale finds on TreehouseTimeVintage.etsy.com

Right now we’re offering a selection of jewelry, but we also have trading cards and souvenir spoons on the way. I’m sure we’ll continue to find unique treasures as we peruse local estate sales, so keep coming back.

A new Treehouse Time podcast will be coming soon. We wanted to do it this weekend, but I’ve been struggling with allergies & a cold, so it’s not the best time for my throat! Soon, though.

Tim has challenged me to start blogging again about our DIY stuff, so how about an InstantPot recipe?

If you are a listener of our podcast, then you know we are a super busy family of 6. Yesterday I was faced with an hour and a half window in which to make dinner before getting my kid out the door to play practice.

Not my meatloaf, but looked much like this when done!

(If you’re not familiar with us, here’s the deal in a nutshell: one of my kids has food allergies. I have chronic illnesses. Thus, we eat pretty healthy, almost all the time to keep from screwing up our health. I do a lot of other things, but at the end of the day, I’m pretty much a full-time cook. I think that even if I had no food allergic kids, just having 4 growing kids at home would mean I spent half my time at the grocery store, you know? If you don’t know what I mean, wait til your kids are teens!)

Last night I had a craving for meatloaf, but no time to wait for it to bake–and no lunch meat in the fridge to send play practice kid off for the evening with any protein power. PLUS, he won’t eat eggs. So here’s what I did!

(Foodie friends, please be gentle…this is more of a mom recipe than a haute dining Rx)

Here were my ingredients:

For the smashed potatoes:

Two pounds of organic, locally grown potatoes (purple and white)
turkey/chicken stock (or water)
sour cream
butter
milk
salt & pepper

For the meatloaf:

2 lbs ground beef (ground chuck, I think)
2 eggs from our backyard (one from Jamie, the other from one of those Canadian chickens)
I was out of onions, so skipped that and fresh organic garlic (which I have in bulk), because I had a packet of Onion Soup Mix!
Old fashioned oats
Fresh & fresh-frozen locally grown organic spices on hand (Sage, Basil, Parsley…accidentally almost threw in some lemon balm, fished it back out)
carrot/spinach/lettuce pulp leftover from my juicer bc I am sneaky like that
ketchup
aluminum foil & a loaf pan, or other baking dish that would fit inside your InstantPot

So, what I did was…THOROUGHLY WASH the potatoes. If I were just peeling them and boiling them, then I’d skip this part, but I like smashed potatoes with skins on, and I was on the clock, so I needed everything to be clean, safe, and yummy when the timers went off. If you have a potato scrubber, washing potatoes is pretty fast!

Throw the potatoes into the Instant Pot and add a little water. Like, a cup. If you have turkey or chicken stock on hand, that would be better, but I have used all mine up.

Place the metal rack on top of the potatoes.

I turned my pantry upside down looking for some smallish silicone cake pans that I’m sure I once owned, but to no avail. The clock was ticking! I had to think fast…(wouldn’t this be hilarious as a meatloaf?)

Line your loaf pan with aluminum foil. (My loaf pan is too long to fit in instant pot, so I just ended up shorting the loaf on both sides of the pan by about an inch.Worked out great.)

In a mixing bowl, throw in all your meatloaf ingredients. If I were taking my time to make meatloaf, I would have added diced mushrooms, onions, carrots, green peppers, Worcestershire sauce, and the works! But the DAMN CLOCK WAS TICKING. And these boys, they are growing! They need to eat! Use your (thoroughly washed) hands, man/woman! Mix it up, go go GO!

Put the meatloaf into the lined pan and cover with ketchup or whatever you like on top. I then crimped the ends of my foil, but I didn’t seal the loaf inside or anything…what was the worst that would happen? Some of the tasty drippings would end up in my mashed potatoes? Fine.

Place the foil on top of the wire rack, seal the InstantPot, and turn it on for 30 minutes on manual.

When the timer goes off, let the steam out, dish out a piece of perfect meatloaf, and let your hungry kid salivate over it while you remove the wire rack, add a stick of butter, a glop of sour cream (a half cup?), and salt/pepper to the potatoes, right in the pot. Mix it with a power mixer if you got it! Use a wooden spoon if you don’t! Keep the milk on hand in case you need a splash more liquid. You probably won’t need it, but just in case.

Dip out some potatoes and let your kid eat his awesome dinner on the way to 3+ hour play practice!

YOU DID IT, MOM! YOU FUCKING WON THIS ONE!

It was quick, it was messy, it wasn’t high brow, but the kids said the mashed potatoes were as good as the ones I make on Thanksgiving (their budding palettes have yet to realize I add horseradish to the Thanksgiving ones…which are definitely superior to these, lol). Sam reported that this meatloaf was the best I had ever made. It was certainly the fastest! I generally detest “add packet of soup mix” recipes, but meatloaf and hamburgers are the exception. And those fresh spices were really something else! All of their essence remained trapped in the InstantPot to really pack flavor into that meatloaf.

I didn’t even miss the garlic.

SPEAKING OF THE INSTANTPOT, I love that it’s stainless steel. Cleans up so easy in the dishwasher, or I can scrub it out by hand fairly quickly.

About to go use it right now to replenish my turkey stock! Wish me luck, thanks for reading, and I hope you found this recipe idea useful!

 

teaser

Sometimes you must say YES to YOU

How many times have people told us we couldn’t? I don’t know about you personally, but for me…countless times.

I’m going to give you three examples. The one that just popped up on my laptop has to do with coloring books. A few years ago at a terrific writing conference, a terrific writer WHO SHALL REMAIN UNNAMED really took me under her wing. Despite the fact she had every reason to forget me, she not only made a connection with me personally, but she remembered me. I can’t tell you why it’s significant that she remembered me, because that would remove her anonymity, but suffice it to say she is unable to remember most people she meets for a valid medical reason.

Now that I have likely already said too much, allow me to go on. This writer was everything I wanted to be when I grew up. Pretty, smart, successful, funny, sexy, FREE, a mentor to the young, and above all else, accomplished! I adored her and adored her work. She gave me many wonderful positive inputs…but you know what I can never forget? The one big, fat NO she gave me.

Why do I remember that no? Because it took away something from me that I loved. Coloring. I was spending the weekend alone at the conference, away from my husband and children, so to keep myself busy in the hotel room, I had purchased a huge Harry Potter coloring book and a new box of crayons. The coloring pages were like movie stills with the color removed (that’s exactly what they were). The book was thick and fat, so I had my pick of hundreds of different movie scenes to color. I was overjoyed. (Hey, these were the days before internet phones and wifi, okay?)

In one of this wonderful teacher’s lectures, she mentioned that all writers should do other creative things. She meant gardening, painting, music, auto mechanics…and when I piped up, buoyed by her previous affection and approval, with, “I have a brand new coloring book!” she did not approve.

Be WILD! Gardening is always approved. (Although this is a wildflower.)

She shook her head, a half-smile playing on her face. “Oh, no,” she said. “That’s not really creative, because you’re only coloring in what someone else has drawn.”

I went back to my room and put the coloring book in the suitcase, along with the crayons. I gave them to my children when I got home. I never wanted to color again.

It’s silly, isn’t it? When you lay it out like that online, it seems like, “Well, Leslea, if you wanted to color, you should have just colored, and to hell with what that woman thought!”

The thing is, it’s hard. It’s hard when you want someone to like you, when you want someone’s approval, when you want someone’s validation and love. The more you look up to someone, whether mother, best friend, teacher–whatever–the more power they have to influence your choices. It was my choice not to color after that, but the part of me that idolized this woman didn’t see it as a choice.

Today, if you jump over to Amazon’s best-seller list for Crafts, Hobbies, and Home, the top 20 books are almost exclusively coloring books. Adult coloring books.

So maybe my desire to color wasn’t so silly after all. Otherwise why would millions of buyers be shelling out for these? They’re LOVELY, that’s why, and coloring is lovely.

The second example of NO I’m going to give you isn’t as lengthy. It has to do with family of origin stuff. I come from a weird, blended, messed up family. A lot of other people do, too, so I bear no shame in this. I love all my relatives, but I can’t say that I know for sure they love me back. To be honest, I doubt they think of me at all, but at this stage in my life, I accept that as a superior status quo than a whole lot of other families I’ve known.

Well, this NO came from my mother. I have always loved art. I love to draw, I love to color (even though…?), I love to do it all, basically. I’m not wonderful at it, but I’m good enough for me. I love photography, and above all else, I love to WRITE.

“Your sister is an artist. Do something practical.” That was how my mother said no. She could have said, “Your sister is an artist. Maybe you have similar talents,” but that was not what she had to give. She had a big NO.

Something I drew for my daughter today, to keep her busy. Elsa, in marker, on flannel, freehand. Not perfect, but she’s just going to paint on it.

Not that I’m trying to elevate my talents with a paintbrush to this level, but can you imagine if someone told the Wyeths that no one else could paint except N.C.? There’d be no Andrew, no Jamie. (And honestly, stone me if you must, but Jamie is the one I like best.) The truth is there are dozens of painters in that family. They are a family that said YES. They didn’t say no for no good reason.

James Wyeth, Portrait of Orca Bates, 1989

By the time I married an award-winning photographer, I already knew better than to explore photography. That was his thing. I wasn’t allowed to enjoy that, myself.

I have since gotten over that NO

For years I wrote, but without permission or sanction. I went to school for accounting (“Do something practical!”), but online, I was an advice maven for lonely hearts. I got a lot of YESes for that. For AGES, really, I spent hours every day writing dating advice. Eventually I got away from writing advice columns and threw myself into full-time accounting work, and full-time family-raising. These were the only YESes I had received since high school, so I went for it whole hog.

I’m a fantastic mother, but I was never a talented accountant. I do okay. It just didn’t bring me joy. Matter of fact, it depressed me terribly. Eventually I started writing again. First blogging (blogging was a new thing!), then advice columns for parents of kids with food allergies, then advice columns for all parents, then more generalized freelancing, then a newspaper column just about my life with kids…the YESes really started making themselves present. Eventually I didn’t need permission to write novels. I just worked at that really hard for years until I had something I felt was good enough to release.

I got a lot of NOs from New York. Everyone does. I got YESes from California for some non-fiction books, and from small presses for poetry. But the kind of book launch I wanted, complete with books shipping nationally to big, retail bookstores? To denizens of indie bookstores like Powell’s? Nope. Just big, fat NOs.

So I went indie, myself. Eventually that became a thing and everyone and his brother has done it now. I’m finishing up my ninth novel now, and have published upwards of five dozen short stories solo and in anthologies, magazines, and comic books over the past four years. I am, by all rights, a serious professional writer.

http://www.treehousetime.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/seriouswriting.mp4

A serious writer, writing^

I am a serious writer despite the NOs. People say “Let your haters be your motivators,” but sometimes people say no not out of hatred, but out of ignorance. They don’t know that a sci-fi/dark fantasy, genre-straddling book about a reality-traveling monster is going to suck them in. They just think it’s going to suck. If it said Stephen King on the cover instead of Red Tash, it would be a slam dunk YES. But who am I? People want to say NO.

Four years later, the book still has a four star average…but I haven’t published the sequel because of the (less frequent) reviews that aren’t nice–the reviews that pull the average down. They’re NOs. Why have I let them stop me? I don’t think I want to let them stop me forever. I think it would be nice to finish that story with the sequel that sits half-written on my hard drive. Maybe I will get to that when I have finished the latest Leslea Tash book. (Red Tash = monsters, fairies, & wizards / Leslea Tash = smart girls gone country.)

(In case you did the math…I learned a few years ago that one way around the NO was having a secret pen name. And NO, I won’t tell you what it is, because I like having that freedom to screw around without consequences. Oooh, that makes me sound wild or something, doesn’t it?)

The third and final NO I will share is about birds. I posted this on Facebook the other day, so I’ll just repost it here:

It seems to be human nature to say NO. We say no to other people’s woodpeckers. We say no to our children’s talents. We say no to our students’ hobbies. Through all that, we learn to say no to ourselves. We learn it through experience because that is what everyone is teaching us to do. We learn to seek approval from outside ourselves, due to the overwhelming number of unsolicited NOs. We learn not to trust our gut, but to trust the gut of someone else who we admire. Someone else who we emulate, who we aspire to be like. We beg for the attention of those someones, seeking validation like so many hungry orphans.

I don’t like that. I reject that.

Today someone asked me to write a series of short, non-fiction books about my lifestyle. My first instinct was to tell myself (and her) NO. “But you can’t DO that!” I thought. “You’re writing books, already! You did stuff like that before, sort of! Everyone is bored of your voice, you’ve said it too many times, already. Enough with the Leslea advice, right?”

Thank heavens, I came to my senses. I replied to my friend’s request with, “I love my life and would love to write about it.” Then I asked her for more input.

I didn’t say no. I explored the idea.

I didn’t make any promises, either…but I’m leaving that door open.

I’m tired of saying NO for no reason. I like love the life I have, the things I do, the people I spend time with, and the results of the life we’ve put together here at the Treehouse.

Why not say YES?

If there is something you would like to read, my ears are open. Feel free to leave a comment on this post and tell me what kind of book you’d like to read, by me. I’m not promising I’ll write it, but, hey…I’m listening!