The Knitting Muse

New blog!

2010-11-23T17:06:00.000-06:00

It's time. A blog needs a focus, and this one has none. I started a homemaking blog months ago, and even for as infrequently as I blog, it was getting difficult to decide where to put which thoughts. Besides, "theknittingmuse" sounds like it ought to be a knitting blog, and I just don't turn out projects fast enough to have one of those. So, I point you to my new internet home (well, Facebook is my internet home, but maybe someday I'll be good at blogging too): http://afriendlyhome.blogspot.com/. And you should definitely stop by, because otherwise you won't get to meet my new daughter. http://afriendlyhome.blogspot.com/2010/11/introducing-heidi.html

Alternatively, you could just accuse me of being a serial blog-starter like my dear friend eatingbreadandhoney (ok ok you're right, that's not her real name). I prefer to think of it as experimenting while I find my groove. Though as I've mentioned before, I kind of think Facebook is my groove.

Moving...

2010-07-12T10:54:00.001-05:00

The 15th is the date of getting the keys. After weeks of searching, only to find that everything in our new town is woefully out of our price range or absolutely squalid and cockroach infested, or not dog friendly, and having all the houses that looked like they MIGHT be habitable and we MIGHT be able to stretch the budget to afford them mysteriously slip from our fingers, we finally made the terrible decision that the dogs are of secondary importance to our family life, and that continuing to drive an hour and a half each way is so bad for our family life that if the dogs have to go, the dogs have to go.

One day after making that decision, we found a wonderful downtown apartment, the entire top floor of a Victorian (architecturally, yes, but don't think gingerbread and wrap-around porches) house. It is old and charming, right across the street from a park, two blocks downhill from the church, and half a block from the best coffee shop in town. (The last was entirely accidental, though I WAS the one to find the house. I promise.) It needs much cleaning, and the landlords need to do some repair work, but I am excessively pleased, just the same.

NB: my husband doesn't think it's "wonderful." He walked into the foyer and saw the hole in the ceiling plaster where they'd fixed the toilet above and hadn't put the ceiling back, he saw the window that needed to be re-sealed, the one crooked door that the landlord had already told me they were going to fix, the window sill with termite damage, and the uneven floor in the original screened-in summer porch (whose floors are always uneven, at least in every old house I've ever seen - those porches were almost always afterthoughts, after all) and said "you thought THIS was CUTE??" Well, c'est la vie. He was desperate enough to tell me to look for mobile homes, but apparently not desperate enough to snap up an apartment that was affordable and livable but which needed repairs and cleaning from the nasty previous renters.

And the best part? We can still keep one dog! They have a 2-dog, 50-lb total pet limit, and if our dogs weren't Aussies we'd be keeping both, but unfortunately one dog just about meets the weight limit, so one dog it is. We don't know which one we'll be bringing, and which one we'll be re-homing, because it all depends on the homes we can find.

I know mostly only people who I can trust read this blog, so I will give a shameless plug for my dogs here.

Gwenivere (yes, spelled the Welsh way) is a year and a half old black tri, has had one litter of puppies, ASCA and AKC registered. She has followed a herding dog around and has proved her abilities/instincts, but has not been trained. She is absolutely sweet, loves people, loves kids, I have never seen her growl or lash out at any provocation. However, she is very very high energy, and needs space or an owner committed to giving her enough exercise. She's happiest when she has a job, and I'd like to place her with someone with sheep or cattle to herd, or at least a farm to watch over. She smiles with her teeth and loves to lick faces. I have not been able to break her of the habit of jumping up on people. She's the one my husband wants to keep because of her sweet temperment, and she's the one I want to re-home because I she would be so much happier on a farm than in an apartment yard. She would be an amazing show dog for conformation or agility.

Sir Gawain is an 8 month old red merle, intact, ASCA and AKC registered, and Gwen's half brother. He is much more laid back and lazy, and loves to sit and look at you adoringly. He is a wonderful companion dog, but his energy is much lower, and I doubt he has much of a herding instinct. He also loves kids, but he's bigger and clumsier than Gwen and more likely to knock very small children over. He is very patient, but he has one black mark on his record: he bit my husband once when he was a very small puppy. He has not bitten anyone since then, though he has definitely been provoked, but he likes to lick you with his whole mouth, not just tongue, so sometimes there is teeth contact though it's never nipping or biting. Again, these are considerations for having him around children, especially if children are likely to say "he bit me!" when all he was doing was licking. I have not seen him be aggressive once since the one biting incident, which based on the circumstances was definitely puppy fear-biting. He injured his shoulder when he was a puppy and it grew somewhat crooked, so he will never be able to peform for conformation. I honestly don't think he's smart enough to perform for obedience. He's just a perfect dog to have around a family, and he's never happier than when he's stretched out across your lap getting his tummy rubbed. He's the one I want to keep, because I think he'd be happier in an apartment yard with daily walks. Also, I'm his favorite person, which naturally makes me love him more.

It breaks my heart to have to get rid of one of these dogs, but it is so necessary for our family. If anyone who reads this is interested, or knows of anyone who might be, please send them my way. We won't be finally out of the old house till the 1st, and driving back and forth to pack till then, so we have a little time to work dog details out. It's my biggest priority just to find a good home for them. I'll be asking $100 for whichever dog I can find a good home for, not that that comes anywhere close to what we paid for them or what even their papers are worth, but my object is not to make money. I put a price on them more as a litmus test for their future homes, whether their future parents are willing to invest in them or are just willing to accept freebies.

A brief period of housewifery

2010-06-30T00:04:00.001-05:00

When my husband acquired a much more lucrative job an hour and a half from our current town, I bit my nails, crossed my legs, and waited two! weeks! before giving my two more weeks' notice at the Small Clothing Shop of Exhaustion and Sore Pregnant Legs. I celebrated the end of my clothing retail career this weekend by going to the Nearby Small Town Sweet Corn Festival and thence to bellydance, and now am closing the second weekday of my new and blissful existence as a housewife.

It won't last forever. The idea, once we move to the new town, is for me to work again, albeit under my own employment and on my own terms. While the last thing we want with a baby on the way is for me to be stuck in an hourly job that barely covers the daycare costs, if everything goes to plan I will have to spend some of my time out of the home, perhaps a good portion of it. Permanent housewifery is the ultimate goal, but not suburban housewifery - we want a farm, and farms cost money, and money must be earned and saved before it can be spent. I'm not complaining (ok, so I do complain) about being a working mother; at least, while I complain about it, I also know the necessity. I also know that while one must be discerning about giving one's child into another's care, it is possible to find wise, loving and caring people to help with childcare. People who understand that I will be sending breastmilk, and that they are not to use formula because it's easier. People who understand that the TV is not to be turned on while my child is in the vicinity; perhaps even people who make it their policy not to have TV at their establishments, because children should be playing and learning instead, and they are after all in the business of raising children. It's not ideal, it's not the same as being at home with a child all the time, but it is what looks to be necessary to break our family free of the wageslavery of suburban Wal-merica, and therefore I believe it will be worthwhile to go to the trouble and expense of finding a nanny who will not compromise the upbringing of her charge for the convenience of leaving the baby in front of a flashing box while she talks on the phone.

I digress with my speculations on childcare.

We are a little over three (is it possible? only three?) months from meeting our Heidi-pumpkin, and it appears we are a month away from being able to move and let my husband cease his ridiculous commuting. No house has been fixed on, and there is only so much I can pack until we are sure of a moving date. There is much, much to organize, but after all, the towels and plates don't need to be packed up for weeks while we eat on plastic and dry ourselves on two towels that are washed every couple of days. I know there is so much for me to do, but it is hard not to feel that I have plenty of time before me. It's a deception I've fallen for over and over again, and it so happens that if I actually begin all the things I need to do, I only barely finish them before crisis time. That didn't stop me from taking a nap this afternoon, though. Well, maybe I was entitled. I did only get five hours of (broken) sleep by the time I battled off my insomnia, woke back up to send my hubby out the door at 3 am, battled insomnia again, and woke when the sun got too bright. Regardless, I felt luxurous and rather lazy. I did work today; the house is much better ordered than it has been for ages. But... but.

There was a time in our culture when a woman's place was considered to be in the home. If her house was well managed and she could manage a midday nap to refresh herself and her unborn child, who could blame her for catching a bit of well-earned rest? I have yearned for such a time, for such a situation for myself. I have envied my friends who already have such a lifestyle. I have even argued with my husband, pushing for the "right" to be what most women nowadays consider either unattainable or degrading, depending on their ideological bent. But now that I have a short time of being able to live my dream, I feel like I'm not contributing, not doing enough to make our lives better, lazy. Am I just so used to the way things have been since the beginning of my marriage that I have a hard time adjusting to a change? Or have I really begun believing the lie that I'm only worth something if I have a corporate boss telling me I am?

Dear Heidi,

2010-06-21T15:53:00.000-05:00

While I know it is natural for flutters to turn into pummelings at about this point in gestation, there are some organs that I prefer to not have pummelled. Please learn to avoid them in the future.

Sincerely,
Mamma

Women should make less money than men

2010-05-04T12:18:00.001-05:00

My dear friend L posted a link to a consciously and humorously chauvenistic article about how women should not receive higher education - the sort of article that has a point, but delivers it on purpose in such a way as to make people mad, possibly because otherwise nobody will pay attention. The basic gist is that if women are biologically intended to bear and raise children, why are they going into debt to receive educations that they don't need? Do you really need a physics degree to teach your children to add?

Naturally, I am a well educated woman who believes that women do have the right to be educated, even if all they are going to do with their lives is raise children. I don't think that a college degree necessarily makes a woman more fit to be a mother, unless she majors in consumer sciences or home economics or some other such vocationally-oriented field, but that education makes anyone a more complete person. It all centers on the simple fact that humans have intelligence, and that it is a crime against human nature not to use it. Now, is it worth going into massive amounts of debt to get a degre that proves that you are intelligent? Absolutely not. Is it possible to stay at home and read good books? Sure, but we tend to be lazy, and the best intentions of self-improvement, without structure or guidance, often lead to sentimental Christian novels from Walmart as the basis of one's knowledge of culture. So I do think that higher education is a noble goal for women, even that subclass of women known as stay at home moms, and if I were to get into a discussion of the assumption of school debt in American society it would turn into a gigantic rant of all of its own, and I want to stay on topic. So we will leave loans out of the question, and take as a given the assumption that somehow this higher education is (though it's almost never the case) being paid for as it is acquired, in a responsible fashion.

So much for why I disagree with the article which sparked this inspiration. What I want to discuss is only related insofar as it began a chain of ideas which lead me to a completely different conclusion.

I actually want to discuss the issue of wages, and specifically the fact that women in the working world have fought for years to have the same wages as men. I'm sure it made much sense at the time. After all, a man could get a job and make enough money to support a family. A woman, however, might only make enough for a little supplementary income. This was criminally unfair, right? Women aren't a lower class of people than men, and they don't deserve to be paid less than men simply for being women. Obviously.

Only, it doesn't work.

It's a beautiful idea, that two people working could bring in enough money to effectively run two households, and could combine it to have a household of absolute luxury. Combine that with the fact that many families with two working parents have either no or relatively few children to spend money on, and it looks like it should necessarily be part of the American Dream. Wealth and luxury for a few hours of sitting behind a desk. What more could you want?

Well, I for one could have wanted employers not to have caught on to the fact that with wives entering the workforce, they could afford to equalize the pay scales by paying men less. It has long been a simple fact of our economy that it is very very difficult for one person to make enough money to pay for an entire family. Any time any girlfriends or I express the desire to be a housekeeper and a stay at home mom, the first reaction we hear from anyone except a very conservative person who already agrees with us is "nobody can afford that."

The sad thing is, they're almost right.

I do want to be a housekeeper and a stay at home mother. I am not lazy, and I am not unwilling to work. I have a full time job right now, and though life is more difficult for my husband and me, sharing housework and cooking when we are already dead on our feet from working our jobs all day, it's what we have to do, so we make the best of it. Our paychecks combined cover our modest house, our grocery bills, and a little to tuck away in savings. I will have a baby soon, however, and I anticipate that daycare costs will come close enough to matching my meager paycheck to make it completely unreasonable for me to continue working. I will probably have my dream of being a SAHM more from necessity than from a true ability to realize my dream.

And my husband will not receive a raise for being the sole breadwinner. There are higher paying jobs out there, and he is doing his best to get one, but unless we were willing (and we are not) to go into even more debt for even more school for him, he will not be able to get the sort of highly salaried job that would support us in anything more than very modest comfort. I am happy with this - I "don't want marble halls," and I didn't come up with the expression. But the fact is that he has everything he needs, except a hundred grand in school debt, to merit a higher paying job - he is intelligent, works hard, and is diligent and ethical. In other words, he has all the qualities to provide us with a comfortable life, not a meager just-get-by life, except for a workplace system which will allow him to do it.

And thus I desperately want the status quo to be for men once again to make twice as much as women. Or at least twice as much as married women. Or at least for my husband to make twice as much for me. Because, you see, if he could make enough money at his calling to be the breadwinner for our family, I could follow my calling to create comfort, beauty and efficiency out of a frugal home, and to be the wife and mother for our family.

Dogs who are too smart for their own good

2010-04-28T18:56:00.001-05:00

Before our girl dog went to live with a friend, I called our Australian Shepherds the Tailless Terrors.

Nika the Too Smart For Her Own Good

Every day when we came home from work, they had knocked over their food and water bowls and pulled them into the middle of the yard. I was just waiting for the day the Humane Society would come and take them away, since they were outside all day with no water. Nevermind the fact that it was entirely their own fault they had no water. "Whatever," I thought to myself, "dogs knock things over when they play. It happens. They're not doing it on purpose."

So I thought. Until one morning when I was out feeding them, and Nika was more than usually obnoxous about jumping up on me and wrapping me around with her leash. I stepped on her leash and put a stop to the rowdyness. The problem was, she could no longer reach the food I had just poured into the bowl? So what did she do? Reach her paw out and knock the food over, entirely on purpose.

It was later that we discovered that they had been meticulously removing the fastening pins from their kennel and taking it apart. Perhaps they considered the kennel a symbol of their captivity. Perhaps it was their Bastille. Nika had long ago figured out that if she tangled their tie-out chains enough she'd be able to pop the clip that fastened to her collar and run free, while Sir Gawain barked in rage and frustration and alerted us to the situation, if we were lucky enough to be home at the time. It was quite a surprise discovering her out and about with her collar perfectly intact that first time.

They dug up an arrowhead during one of their last days together in the yard. Half of it is gone. Knowing these dogs, I wouldn't be surprised if they had eaten the missing half.

However, we are now oh so thankfully a one-dog family, and I rather feel that we have the easier to control half. I'll tell you this, though: Sir Gawain is not above pulling his blanket out of his kennel and depositing it at my feet if he wants me to wash it. How he figured out that I'm the laundry lass I really don't know. He's not smart enough to figure out that I'm the one opposed to feeding him scraps off our plates, obviously, because he still loves me.

Sir Gawain the Very Expensive and Starry Eyed From Having Choked on a Persian Carpet and Needing Oxygen for 24 Hours

toothpaste and the healthcare bill

2010-03-30T12:31:00.002-05:00

Me: I'm starting a campaign to keep the toothpaste and toothbrushes put away instead of left out on the counter.
Love: Well, I'll have to see how the Democrats and Republicans vote on the issue before I determine whether I support your campaign.
Me: It's just toothpaste.
Love: But before you know it, the House will emend it to include taking out the trash, and the Senate will start talking about vacuuming.
Me: I promise, this bill is only about toothpaste.
Love: We'll see. I won't support it if it includes any other issues in the final draft.
Me: Like how the health care bill started out being about insurance companies and ended up being about student loans?
Love: Exactly.

Daffodowndilly

2010-03-10T20:21:00.002-06:00

I'm still planning on posting the fishy sock cable pattern. I just haven't felt like figuring out how to yet. Sorry. It's coming.

Last week I was walking my girl Aussie, the one with two healthy shoulders and way too much energy, and on a whim I crossed to the other side of the street from the one I usually take. What a surprise! In an wide empty space at the top of a little hill, there are large spreading trees and lush grass already, though it is early spring. As I walked along the side of the street, I noticed rows of daffodil sprigs popping up, though there were no sidewalks for them to border. They were perfectly parallel, and occasionally more parallel daffodil rows would wander off to the left at a perfect right angle. I amused myself for a while walking up and down the vestiges of forgotten sidewalks and trying to find bits of foundation where the houses used to be. I imagined the houses, probably like all the other old houses on the street, with little housewives planting daffodil bulbs in the fall, up and down the walk. I imagine they had no idea that their ephimeral flowers would survive their sturdy houses. How surprised they would be to know that the only evidence that their homes were ever there now is the sweet garden they planted.

And yesterday the daffodils began to flower! In a few days the empty hill will be full of a riot of yellow, in perfect rows along forgotten sidewalks. I also pulled out all the bulbs I forgot to plant last fall - daffodils, crocuses, hyacinths and tulips - thinking of putting them in the fridge, to find that many of them had sprouted like onions. I tucked some of them along the front of my house, though the soil is too rocky through most of my yard to allow a shovel to penetrate more than half an inch, threw two hyacinths in pots (ah, the beauty of soil that comes prepackaged at Walmart! Even the noble art of gardening succombs to commercialized lazyness), and, yes, packed up into the fridge the ones that hadn't sprouted too much yet. Many bulbs are still sitting in a basket waiting to have something done with them. Maybe I'll just find lush places here and there in the middle of the yard to plant them. After all, by the time the grass needs to be mowed, the flowers will be finished anyway, right?

I think I will plant bulbs everywhere I live, now that I know how a garden can be longer-lived than a home. As I thought of the thriving gardens that outlived their houses, I remembered one flower from this summer. My husband was showing me where an old house used to stand, right behind one of my favorite restaurants. Local legend said it was haunted, and high school boys used to go in at night for dares. It was abandoned for many years, and finally condemned and demolished. There is no trace of foundation to be found any more. Yet this summer, while we were searching for remnants of the old mansion, we found a single Amaryllis bravely holding its own against the weeds and gravel. The family who last lived in the house over 50 years ago has long been forgotten, and now even the house is gone, but the Amaryllis that once adorned a graceful garden still come up every year. The memory of that gardener will last as long as spring comes to that spot, or at least until the Cafe decides to pave the parking lot. (Sorry, even gardens can't be THAT permanent. Concrete trucks know little of poetry.)

Fishy socks!

2010-02-09T18:14:00.004-06:00

Last August a woman in my knitting club brought in skeins of alpaca yarn from her own personal alpacas, and my husband decided he wanted a sweater. With cables. Oh, wait, no, how about a sweater with a Norse colorwork pattern? Well, maybe there's not quite enough yarn for that... how about SOCKS with a Norse colorwork pattern?

I tried. If anybody knows how to make Fair Isle or other color knitting stretchy, please tell me. In the meantime, last August, I announced that unless he had size 2 feet and didn't mind his socks being completely slouchy, these stars and reindeer weren't gonna work.

So he drew a couple squiggles on a page that looked vaguely like a fish, and said, "do cables like these." And I said, "I don't know how to do cables like that!" And he said, "figure it out" and left the room.

He sounds really mean, doesn't he? I thought so too. Only, an hour later, I had completed a swatch that looked quite a bit like fish, which proved to me that I did in fact know how to do cables like that. So he wasn't being mean, he just knew my abilities better than I did.

Now, I am going to beg a favor from my readers. Please kindly ignore the fact that by my own admission this project has been on my needles since AUGUST, and be duly impressed at the completion of...

THE FISHY SOCKS.

They're not green, they're gray, but my phone was on life support, and the life support cord didn't reach from the kitchen table where the light was good to the plug in the living room. And I'm not about to let you see the state of my linoleum; it's embarrassing. Not dirty embarrassing, but should-have-been-replaced-fifty-years-ago embarrassing. Thus we have distorted colors. Such is life.

I'm modelling because, well, the socks are warm and fuzzy, and I wanted to try them out first. Am I a bad person?

Conversations about dogs...

2010-02-08T16:10:00.002-06:00

(I'm looking out the window)
Him: Are the puppies ok? Are they still fighting over their bone?
Me: They're fine. They're just eating some vines.

************
(He walks in the door)
Me: What are the puppies doing?
Him: Sir Gawain was chewing on glass.
Me: HOW did they get glass?
Him: You think I know???

************
Him: Well, I guess I have to go get the puppies in trouble. They're chewing on fiberglass insulation again.

************
Him: Sir Gawain isn't going to have any teeth left if he doesn't stop chewing on metal!

Little things that show me I'm loved

2010-01-30T17:25:00.004-06:00

My husband read my previous post and thought that "flowers on the table" was about his gift-giving skills, not my gardening skills, so he bought me a beautiful bouquet of flowers and tried to sneak them under my nose at the grocery store. I asked about them, but then he was so disappointed I had to lie and tell him I hadn't seen them after all. Shh, don't tell him. And then I carefully didn't look at them while we were putting the groceries on the conveyor belt. Well, maybe I sneaked a peek or two.

And now my living room is all yellow and pink and red and purple and more pink. Beautiful.

Tell me I didn't marry a wonderful man. Just try to tell me.

The rain is falling

2010-01-28T21:13:00.002-06:00

...and freezing as soon as it touches. Tomorrow the world will be covered with crystal frosting like a big crunchy wedding cake. Ice scrapers will probably be thoroughly ineffective on the car windshield, and the power lines will probably have fallen, like they do every time Oklahoma has an ice storm. Thus I spend the precious hours of electricity meditating online about the fact that at least my stove and water heater are gas powered. So technically is the central heating, but we'd have to figure out a way to bypass the electric thermostat. Any clues?

Before I got married, I expected wifehood to be a blissful world of aprons and baby-tummies. I figured that I would be the sort of wife who had fresh flowers on her kitchen table and handmade doilies on every surface, and who knew the natural remedy for every possible ailment. Somehow marriage would enable me to become this person, because obviously as a single girl I didn't have time for it. Oh, I had hours to dream about it, but no time to put it into practice. Besides, I was an ideological aspiring housewife who in practice tended to leave her socks in the living room floor. Laundry? People do laundry? Without having to wash clothes three times over because they sat in the washer so long they got musty? What? And doing dishes everyday? I thought this was why we engaged house-elves!

Intellectually, however, I knew that once married I would in fact still be the same person I was when I was single. I thus buried myself under countless resolutions to become the perfect housewife BEFORE I was married. They would generally last about a week before my messy habits would resurface. And those dreams of potted herbs? Still dreams. I have a brown thumb.

Does marriage really change you, the way I thought it didn't? Is it just because I've discovered from experience that with two people making the mess, if I don't keep it under control it will eventually reach nervous-breakdown proportions? That might be an explanation for why I do laundry on occasion, but does it explain the frustrated sigh at seeing dead grass on the carpet and immediate vacuuming frenzy when I came home from work this afternoon?

The fear of disproportionate messes also doesn't explain the simple satisfaction I get from perfecting my house. It must be simply because it IS my house: not my parents' house, not a house I share with roommates, but my house, mine and my husband's, and I am the wife and mistress of the hearth. The sunlight falling past the blue windowsill onto my drying dishes could only be more satisfying if there were a lace curtain (with roosters!) filtering the light (and hiding the ugly windowshades that the landlord won't let me take down, but we're not discussing that right now). I fold the blankets and arrange the pillows on the bed, taking care that the seams on the striped pillow shames mirror and don't chase each other, because it must be symmetrical. I turn on lamps, I open blinds, I arrange, I tidy, I stress out when things are messy and I can't help it anymore! There are currently a tissue, a jar of peanuts and two empty bowls on the cedar chest/coffee table and it's driving me CRAZY. However, I'm warm under a blanket and not going anywhere (c.f. note about the ice).

You might think I'm bragging about how I'm a perfect wife. I could demure and say that I don't cook very often, having been lucky enough to marry a much better cook than I am, and therefore I don't live up to wifely ideals. I could more justly say that there's a big pile of laundry, and then give the excuse that since my dryer is on the fritz, the clothes have to air dry, and there are only so many loads that can air dry at once inside a house in the middle of winter.

Instead, I think I'll be honest. The point of being a wife isn't keeping a beautiful home, or using your handmade apron to pull a from-scratch cake out of the oven, or having many children with starched pinafores and shiny clean faces. The point of being a wife is to love your husband. And how can I love my husband when all I do when I'm home from work is stress out about the mess in the house? I get so irritable when I'm distracted from a task that I feel is important; even (and I'm ashamed to say it) when what is distracting me is a tender caress. What I need to learn is that no task is more important than my man is.

How insidious pride is. I deceive myself into believing that I am performing acts of love and service by spending so much time and energy in minding my house, when in fact all I am doing is feeding my own newfound clean-freak ego. What I need to do is accept the fact that I am not a stay-at-home wife but a working wife, and my few hours at home need to be spent in giving my Lord and Master what he really needs: less of the sweet smell of Simple Green and more of my undivided attention.

That said, I have been boldfacedly lying all week when I tell my customers that I hope it won't ice as badly as the forecast says. I hope it ices fully that badly, and more. The more time I have at home, the more time I have to fulfill my cleaning bug needs and still have many hours in the day for cuddling and talking. And this makes everyone happy.

Why it's been forever

2009-12-10T11:13:00.002-06:00

...because Google doesn't let you just switch settings over to a new gmail account. You have to do it manually. And who wants to do that when there are Australian Shepherd puppies to chase around?

But I'm back, posting under the same old blog name (though I'm sure at some point I'll want to find a more appropriate title for a blog which is more about everyday life than about knitting projects), with a new email address. The old one still works so don't worry about it, but my new email address is my new name, formatted firstmiddlelast at gmail.com just like the old one.

As most of my readers know, I got married this summer to my best friend (man, I love these puns!) and I hope the excuse of settling into married life is a good enough one for my blogging hiatus. Except for the one we lost to miscarriage we have no babies yet, but we have had four Australian shepherds so far, one of whom stalked bugs until he got hit by a car, another of whom stalks deer at the in-laws' house now, and two who just tackle each other in our living room floor.

I'm happy to be able to blog again and brag about how beautiful every day is in my life. Hurrah for internet connections at home!

2009-06-22T14:36:00.003-05:00

Thank you, everyone, for your prayers. I have been overwhelmed with grace this week, and have recieved so much peace and guidance. I know it's because of all the prayers (and good thoughts, since I have some friends who don't pray) that have been coming my way.

I have much reason for sorrow in my life right now, but I also have much reason for joy. I have a wonderful man who loves me and is going to marry me just about as soon as I can finish making my dress. I have God's faithful promise that He wants me to marry my man, and to be happy with him. I have amazing friends who rally and prove their love for me, even when they don't know what's going on. The love of my friends is worth more than gold. Thank you. I've had a week-long retreat to get my spiritual life back in order and to pray about God's plan for me. And I sang at the wedding of two wonderful people whose love is an inspiration, and whose Tridentine Nuptial Mass filled me with a certain amount of Nerdy Catholic Pride for knowing the responses. Chelsea and Martin, congratulations, and may God bless your life together abundantly.

So thank you all for your prayers and good wishes, and please keep them coming, especially in the next couple of weeks while I wait for the inevitable-and-painfully-final. But don't worry about me. My life is still awesome.

2009-06-14T16:25:00.002-05:00

Three days ago, I feared and lamented people's judgment. Today, I would give anything to have the reason for their judgment back.

My Philomena Grace, pray for me.

Prayers would be appreciated

2009-06-12T19:31:00.002-05:00

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I'm clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of Heaven and Earth,
How can I keep from singing?

Love Story, Part 1

2009-04-01T09:30:00.004-05:00

School started, you know, sometime in the middle of January. I hadn't wanted to go back to school this semester. I was tired of it, felt it was useless, was ready to do more exciting and productive things than stress out about assignments I wasn't even interested in. As a result, I registered for classes just a couple of days before classes started, and discovered that my schedule didn't quite fit. Everything I needed was on Tuesday night, it seemed, and Tuesday was choir, and I knew I'd go crazy with another musicless semester. I juggled and schemed, and signed up for Curriculum Development, Educational Research, and Learning Styles (Part Two).

Enter the Learning Styles class Wednesday night. (I promise, it becomes a love story soon.) Jackie B walks into the classroom with her box of learning games (what would be the point of a learning styles class if we had to sit still all class and listen to a lecture, as if we were all low-mobility and auditory?) looks at me, and says, "but you passed this class last semester!"

Right. Learning Styles Part Two? Happening in Broken Arrow, on a totally different night. I signed up for the same class I'd already taken. And, as she pointed out, passed. With flying colors, I might add.

So, five minutes later I was in Dr. C's office saying "What do I do? I have to be full-time to get health insurance, and this was all that fit in my schedule!" And she said, "Do you have to be in choir?" And I said "YES." And she said, "ok, here's what we can do. I'll put you in this super-useful undergrad class which will actually teach you HOW to teach, and not just tell you about theorists, and you will contract with the professor for extra work for grad credit." And I said, "super."

Enter said undergrad classroom the next Monday. Actually, we're going to skip till the next Wednesday, since the prof was gone on Monday. There's a very opinionated auburn-haired boy in a baseball cap across the table from me. He has a charming smile. His nametag says "Ryan." End of story.

Several weeks later, he still had a charming smile, but this time he was smoking outside the Education building as I walked in. I waved and kept walking. He finished his cigarette and started walking behind me. I really wanted to turn around and say something, but I couldn't think of anything, so I continued awkwardly walking in front of him and pretended I wasn't acutely aware of his presence behind me.

February 16, I was wearing Leokadia's beautiful blue dress, a lacy white shirt, and black leggings.

Ryan: You look nice!
Mc: (didn't even hear him. Was staring vacantly at the wall, or something.)
Beth: I don't think she heard you.
Ryan: Well, fine then. Nevermind.
Me: Huh???
Dr. G: Just to remind you, we're not having class on Wednesday the 25th. Don't show up.
Ryan: That's Ash Wednesday.
Me: Catholic Identification Day!
Ryan: (huffy) Well, then I guess I'm gonna have to be identified, because I'm a Catholic.
Me: You are?? That's awesome! Me too!
Ryan: ...oh. (feels silly for being huffy)

And that, my chickpeas, is how we met. Later that day he asked me if I knew about Clear Creek Monastery, and I said, "oh my gawsh." You know, that's only why I MOVED here. He "knows the B----- family really well." Begin flashback to one of the B---- girls telling me, months ago, that "we have this friend who goes to (decently large school where hopefully I'm anonymous enough not to be stalkable, but I'm still not gonna say the name) named Ryan, and we really want you to meet him! He's funny, and you're going to like him a lot." So I decided to give him a chance, or at least to let him keep following me around like a puppy dog.

And the rest, as they say, is history. We started dating two days later, and two weeks later we'd decided to get married. Six weeks after we met, I have a ring on my finger, but that story is for a later installment.

The Passion of Christ in Lego!

2009-03-26T13:10:00.002-05:00

Please watch this. You will not be disappointed. Bonus trivia: the gigantically talented kids who put this together probably aren't even eligible for a high school diploma yet (though you never know, maybe they're homeschooled). Yet another reason why our present school system is S-I-L-L-Y.

http://www.faithandfamilylive.com/blog/the_passion_of_christ_in_lego#When:18:00:00Z

Ice storm photos!

2009-02-14T11:19:00.007-06:00

As promised, pictures from the ice storm a few weeks ago. On Monday, Jan. 26, to be exact, it rained, and that rain froze. Then it sleeted. Then it snowed. Then it sleeted again. And then we couldn't get out the driveway. Stranded! So... I played photographer! (Northerners, especially some I know on facebook, shut up about how much worse your winters are. There's a reason I live in Oklahoma.)

It looks very sweet and pastoral, but Lulu (the puppy) is really about to bite Esmerelda's (the cat's) head. Esmerelda doesn't fancy this fascination with the flavor of her head very much, but what can she do? Lulu is rather bigger than she is.

Some of the chickens huddled under the house. They don't have names, my dear readers, so you can't anthropomorphize them. More importantly, we can't anthromorphize them, which makes them easier to eat later on.

Bread crusts soaked in warm water is comfort food for chickens. Here Ridiculously Obese Rooster #1 (sometimes called Turkey, sometimes called Food) shares a moment with his favorite hen...

...and the guineas don't seem to know when they're not invited. They lack social graces.

Ever heard the phrase "Cocky as a bantam rooster?" It's true.

They don't have mirrors, and therefore happily live the fantasy that they are the biggest men around.

This (really) big man (Chanticleer) wants you to know that he is most emphatically NOT a bantam rooster. Excuse the dirty window - I wasn't about to clean it in this weather, and he would have stopped crowing as soon as I went outside. I've tried to catch him crowing many times, and he always stops as soon as he sees the camera. Standing on the porch railing , surveying his territory and crowing is one of his favorite pastimes.

You live in the country when you have t-posts keeping your mailbox from getting knocked down.

The porch at night. I was mostly playing with camera settings and getting the icicles at the same time, but check out the super-classy shoe organizer on the bench with the bowl of cat food on top of it where the dogs can't reach it. The chickens can, though, so we just chase them off the porch.

The end! More pictures are here if anybody wants to see them.

2009-02-13T15:12:00.003-06:00

Lookee mee, I'm posting!

oOmigosh I'm so accomplished. Today I have:
*put new bedding in chicken coop
*spread mulch over garden
*hoed rows in garden
*planted carrots, broccoli, mustard greens and cabbage in rows
*planted swiss chard, kohlrabi, spinach and a whole bunch of lettuce mixes in planter boxes on porch
*cleaned up kitchen
*baked bread

And it's only 3 pm!

I'm currently trying to edit pictures from the ice storm a few weeks ago and post them, so if anybody within several counties of me hears an unfamiliar soprano voice wailing "WHY THE HECK IS MY IPHOTO SO SLOW????" it's me.

Another chicken post

2008-12-07T18:08:00.004-06:00

All right, I get the point, I haven't posted in a while. And since the person who poked me and told me to post again is the same person who asked me forever ago for my advice about chickens, I'll just take care of both responsibilities at the same time (kill two birds with one stone? Only if they're guinea fowl).

Ok, so, you asked about breeds. I have Rhode Island Reds, and I love them. They're friendly and gentle, they're good egg layers, and they're a heavy breed so they do well in the winter. Perhaps you would want a light breed like a leghorn, since where you live it's significantly warmer, and since (I'm guessing) you won't be slaughtering these birds? Heavy breeds are good if you plan to use them for meat birds as well as layers, but I somehow doubt that you're planning to have them as meat birds. McMurray Hatchery has lots of info on the different breeds, and the reviews are helpful for finding out what breeds really are the gentlest, and won't attack your kid when he toddles out into the yard.

In the spring, I'm planning to get some Buff Orpingtons, Silver Laced Wyandottes, and Brahmas. I also really really want some crested birds, because OH MY GOSH they're so funny, but I'm afraid for their chances of survival, given that the poofs on top of their heads obscure so much of their vision.

I had a couple of bantams this spring (who died, and broke my heart), and I loved loved loved loved loved them. Since you're in the city and don't have a whole lot of chicken predators around, I'd really recommend them. You might be able to have more per your square footage since they're smaller - you should find out if your county has separate rules for bantam birds.

About the coop. Mine is a big elaborate contraption that came with the house. It can probably house about a hundred birds. I'm only using it to house about 35 birds right now, and most of my guineas sleep outside anyway. (Side note: guineas are LOUD and OBNOXIOUS and STUPID, and not an acceptable substitute for chickens. Not that you were planning on getting any anyway.) You said you were thinking of getting what, two hens? I'd say, just build a little shed, basically like a little doghouse on stilts, with nesting boxes and roosting bars. Or, if you're following the Garden Girl's plan for movable chickens, her design seems pretty good. Keep in mind that chickens (like most livestock) can handle cold, but not drafts or dampness. Make sure you have a way to keep the winter wind from getting them, and that their bedding is dry. And most importantly, make sure your coop will keep predators out! Racoons and possums will still get to your chickens in the city, even if bigger animals like coyotes won't.

About feeders: I have a lot of birds, so I have big hanging feeders and waterers, and my birds probably go through a bag of layer feed and a bag of scratch feed in a week and a half. My neighbor recently upgrated from two birds to all of five, and she has a little bowl with a jug of water sitting next to it which she refills whenever it's dry, and she keeps grain in a bucket (with a lid, of course) in the coop and drops it on the ground to feed them, about a handful per bird. I think your setup will probably be closer to hers than mine. Don't believe the feed store or the websites when they tell you you need expensive feeding and watering equipment - you don't. Chickens are smart enough to drink out of a bowl. Baby chicks are not smart enough not to fall into the bowl and drown, so you'll need a quart-sized chick waterer, which should cost you all of two dollars at the feed store. If you do want to use a regular waterer, the gallon sizes are still really not all that expensive. I've seen wall-mounted rabbit waterers for chickens advertised, but I still don't understand the point. Sure, they keep the water clean, but you have to go out there every day to fill up their water, so why not just rinse out the bowl then and keep it clean for much cheaper? And as far as feeders go, chickens prefer to scratch on the ground anyway, so if you have few enough to make it practical to just put the feed on the ground, why buy a feeder? Just make sure to feed them on bare dirt (which they will create in abundance around their coop - chicken manure is so nitrogenous that nothing grows immediately around a chicken coop) and not in their hay or pine shavings or whatever you're using for bedding, or else you'll just end up with bedding lined on the bottom with chicken grain, and hungry chickens.

One last point: Rhode Island Reds are super super active. You may or may not want active birds - I love them, but this year they did eat everything my garden produced except the corn (which they couldn't reach) and the cucumber (which they just didn't like). They ate an entire PUMPKIN, and picked at the other one so that I had to harvest it when it was still green, just to save some of it. And they didn't wait for my tomatoes to ripen - they liked the green ones just fine. My friend David babysat them when I went down to Dallas for graduation - they were still chicks - and kept them in his brooder, where he was putting his meat birds that had leg problems: he said they scratched in the bedding and buried the feeder, the waterer, the thermometer, and several of his lame Cornish Cross birds. Apparently, his poor sad birds' heads were sticking out of the bedding, and he had to dig them out and rescue them. The positive side to having active birds is that they're always doing something funny. My roosters like to stand on the porch rail and survey all their territory, and flap their wings and crow. They're such big strong men.

In other news, I danced on my birthday till my feet bled (I turned 21 again).

Goodbye to Ladies Against Feminism

2008-09-07T18:02:00.003-05:00

Ladies Against Feminism, I'm disappointed in you. So disappointed. Among all the Sarah-Palin-should-stay-at-home-and-raise-her-kids posts you've posted, has anybody thought to talk about how a Palin-McCain administration would, you know, be GOOD for the unborn babies, and maybe GOOD for other moms who want to stay at home by making that decision more financially viable, and maybe GOOD for families who want to decide where to send their own kids to school?

That is, McCain is pro-life and pro-cutting taxes and pro-school vouchers, but Sarah Palin is what he needs to get elected. You'd think you'd be happy that she's there getting everybody energized.

And much more importantly, what about that Christian idea of throwing the first stone? What, the idea is that we're NOT supposed to throw the first stone? You ladies could have fooled me. As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin is not beating her kids or turning them into slaves or selling her daughters off as young brides to 40 year old polygamist fellows. These are the sorts of things a Christian expects to see condemned, but a loving mom who tries to raise her family well and balances a job too, and maybe feels called by God to serve her country? Condemn the trend of mothers who abandon their families to their careers, sure, and there definitely are mothers who abandon their children to their career, but please don't presume that you can judge the individual circumstances of someone if they're not being immoral but just doing something you wouldn't do yourself. My cousin, for instance, delivered both her babies in the hospital (by her own choice, not necessity), bottle feeds, plastic diapers, feeds Gerber baby food, and works while her aunt watches the kids, which are all things I would not do with my children, but her children are so well behaved and obviously so well loved, groomed and polite and smiling all the time, that I have to say that even though she makes all the decisions I wouldn't, she is an EXCELLENT mother. Just, you know, to drive the point home that you might know everything about raising families, but you still probably don't.

I'm sad, I really am, to stop reading LAF. I've enjoyed the articles on homemaking and the attitude that one finds contentment and joy in living with love the life one is given, and not in trampling everything underfoot to make one's dreams come true. And a whacked-out article once in a while, I could handle that. Even when the first anti-Palin articles started coming out, I thought, "well, I don't agree, but it's a decent discussion, and whatever." But as more articles come out, they become more and more strident, and there have been no articles even suggesting that she could be doing God's will, or that God's will could possibly ever be different from what these writers expect. I don't know if she IS doing God's will, but the refusal to believe that she could be is worrisome to me. As more articles come out on the subject, I see gigantic pride. I see commentators saying "I'm doing it right, and I know she's doing it wrong," because she's not doing exactly what they want every woman to do. And that is why I will not read the site anymore - because instead of love, they're spreading condemnation and judgment.

My dear friend Sarah made an excellent point in the comments on the post below, which merits repeating: "I don't believe that women belong on the battlefield, and yet I'm sure that God knew exactly what He was about with St. Joan of Arc."

So here's to our own Joan of Arc. (I hope I'm not being sacrilegious by suggesting that.)

And finally, an opinion on Sarah Palin's motherhood from Faith and Family, which will replace Ladies Against Feminism in my sidebar.

I guess I don't really hate political posts as much as I thought.

2008-09-01T20:07:00.004-05:00

So who else is excited about Sarah Palin? I AM! My inbox today contained a gem, a whole list of Sarah Palin jokes, Chuck Norris style. Already, guys? I'm impressed.

And because they made me laugh, I'm sharing them here.

Did you know that…

Sarah Palin does not have 5 kids, she actually has 7. Their names are Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, Trig, Chuck Norris, and Jack Bauer.

The Northern Lights are really just the reflection from Sarah Palin's eyes.

The Russians sold Alaska to America because Sarah Palin would not submit to autocracy.

The Arctic Circle runs through Alaska so the Sun can have some relief from Sarah Palin's bright glare.

Sarah Palin is allowed first dibs on Alaskan wolfpack kills.

Sarah Palin is so pro-life that she personally hog-tied two reps from Planned Parenthood who came knocking at her door.

It's not raining in DC. Those are God's tears of joy that McCain picked Sarah Palin.

Sarah Palin's hotness is the largest single contributor to melting polar ice caps.

Sarah Palin is the "other" whom Yoda spoke about.

Sarah Palin's presence in the lower 48 means the Arctic ice cap can finally return.

Sarah Palin fired Jack Bauer because he was too soft in dealing with terrorists.

Sarah Palin's pageant career ended early so other women could have a chance.

Sarah Palin's son Track is going to Iraq after the Surge, because a Palin during the Surge would have been unfair.

Sarah Palin wears glasses lest her uncontrollable optic blasts slaughter everyone. (X-Men reference)

Sarah Palin actually has Big Foot in her freezer.

Sarah Palin gave a speech in Texas after her water broke before flying home to Alaska to give birth. (Actually true)

Sarah Palin doesn't need a gun to hunt. She has been known to throw a bullet through an adult bull elk.

Sarah Palin once spilled coffee on Joe Biden & one of his $400 ties from Pink.

Sarah Palin keeps her hair in a beehive to hide her ninja weaponry.

Sarah Palin will personally open a homemade can of whoopa** on Ahmadinejad, Putin, and Chavez as soon as she's done making mooseburgers for her kids.

A grizzly bear once tried to stare down Sarah Palin. Once.

Sarah Palin will send Joe Biden a pre-debate cheat sheet. The sheet will have tips on defending against Kung Fu Death Grip.

Sarah Palin became governor because five children left her with too much spare energy.

Sarah Palin will give birth to the man who will lead humanity's war against the machines. (Terminator reference)

Three of Sarah Palin's 5 kids came out sideways and she never flinched.

Global Warming doesn't kill polar bears. Sarah Palin does. Generally with her bare hands.

Sarah Palin was the original "Deadliest Catch."

Sarah Palin paid her way through school by hunting for Kodiak pelts with a slingshot.

Alaska is the 49th state solely because they knew even in 1959 that Sarah Palin never finishes last.

Chuck Norris wishes he was Sarah Palin trapped in a man's body.

Sarah Palin once won the Iditarod without any dogs. She simply willed the sled to victory.

Sarah Palin wears half the makeup that John Edwards wears and still looks like twice the woman he does.

Sarah Palin once guided Santa's sleigh through an Alaskan blizzard with the light from her smile.

Sarah Palin fishes salmon by convincing them it's in their interest to jump into the boat.

end email.
But really, that's not the point of my post. The point of my post is that, guess who's not excited about Sarah Palin. The left, predictably, but also, surprisingly, the super-right! Over at Ladies Against Feminism (which I usually like quite a lot, but they've lost mega points in my book over this issue), apparently, Sarah Palin is not the pro-family choice (trust me, it's a story on their page even though this link goes elsewhere) because she ought to be at home raising her kids. Also, really, click the "not the pro-family choice" link, because there's some fantastic stuff about how McCain isn't pro-family, he's just pro-victory. Because not being pro-victory is going to do much for us? Well, ok, I guess I could have guessed that that would be their line. But oh? guess who else thinks that? the feminists! (not counting the Feminists for Life, because presumably they would approve of one of their own) Wow, so, the feminists and the anti-feminists agree on this, and they're using the exact same talking points! (p.s., I love the Anchoress. And I'm going to let you read what links of hers you want to, but I'm tired of linking) (not to mention that the feminists are suddenly gigantically concerned about the welfare of five children of a working mom, because they've been telling moms to get back in the kitchen this whole time, right? right?? huh?) Weird, no?

So, to chronicle my list of surprises re: the appointment of Sarah Palin:
1) The left doesn't like her. Whatever, not a surprise. Actually, I get the impression that she scares the pants off of them, and rightly so. She's probably shot more large game than the whole Democratic National Convention put together.
2) The Ladies Against Feminism don't like her. What? Oh, right, she should be at home raising those kids. But what if she's what it takes to get McCain (and her too, natch) in office so's we can keep our ammo and bibles and continue being bitter people clinging to God and guns? Well, she can't because she's a woman. Fine.
3) But what now? The feminists also say that she can't because she's a woman? You've got me there, guys.

for good measure,

4) Her DS kid isn't hers, it's her daughter's. He was begotten in incest, and thus is severely disabled. Or, you know, just slow enough at learning maybe not to know how hateful people can be. Lord knows, we need to rid the world of these people. (didja know 90% of Downs Syndrome babies are aborted? I didn't until this news came out)
5) OH. But that daughter's pregnant. Five months pregnant. And Trig is four months old. Oops, guess we counted wrong, folks. But it's ok, we can still have SCANDAL! because there's a TEENAGE! GIRL! PREGNANT! And we know that the pro-abortion crowd doesn't know that teenage girls ever get pregnant. (Shall we also mention that she's keeping the baby and marrying the dad? That's ok, we'll just shun her for ruining her life and having a kid. Whatever.)
6) So maybe we have to accept that Trig is Sarah's son. We can still shun her for ruining her life with a Downs Syndrome baby.

As the Anchoress says, let's sew a red A for her. But wait, I thought this was what the feminists fought against, the sewing of scarlet letters?

WHO. KNOWS. You've got me, with your supperyur logik. Me, I'm just a country girl who's excited to have a potential VP who wants to save the babies and let me keep my gun, and who, sexy-wise, just might be able to kick Obama to the moon. And by sexy, I mean intellectually, of course.

The Lost Children

2008-08-25T10:35:00.004-05:00

This post from Conversion Diary was so good that I'm posting the entire thing. If you like it, go tell her (link to story).

"For as long as I can remember, it's seemed to me that something is different about children today -- and not in a good way. I know that children and teens have always teased one another, talked back to their parents, yearned for independence, etc. But it seems that over the past couple of decades those behaviors have gotten worse, and become somehow darker, more sinister.

"When we lived in Littleton, Colorado, at my junior high I would frequently see some group of kids corner one of the awkward, shy, "weaker" children in the class and torment him or her mercilessly (sometimes physically) as the teachers looked the other way. Kids were angry, hostile and cruel. There was an unnatural, "Lord of the Flies" type feel to the culture that went way beyond the type of behavior you'd expect from young adults. (Many my classmates from that junior high went on to a high school called Columbine, which you may have heard of.)

"I see teenagers sulking through the neighborhood as they walk down our sidewalks, usually alone, many of them dressed in a manner to present themselves as hostile, reclusive, or threatening. I would certainly know about that -- in high school and college I wore all black (including black lipstick), had a nose ring and dyed my hair various crazy colors, and listened to angry, dark music like Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains, Korn, and Helmet. I frequently felt depressed, and had a sort of inner angst that just didn't seem natural, even by teenaged girl standards.

"For a long time I've tried to articulate what exactly I think is wrong and what might have caused it, but I could never quite seem to hit the nail on the head. Then I came across the great book Hold On to Your Kids (recommended highly by commenter Steve G.), and I think I finally understand it.

"In the book, authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate describe this dark new peer culture, and lay out their theory that the problem is "peer orientation": children using peers instead of parents as their compass point for orienting themselves in the world, for discovering their identity, morals and values. The authors write:

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]

What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.

"The authors go on to explain that various conditions in our culture have combined to leave children with a huge orienting void -- that, unfortunately, they fill by orienting themselves to their peers:

In adult-oriented cultures, where the guiding principles and values are those of the more mature generations, kids attach to each other without losing their bearings or rejecting the guidance of their parents. In our society that is no longer the case. Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children's primary sources of orientation...Children have become the dominant influence on one another's development.

"And what happens when children no longer orient themselves to their parents, their families, and other adults? The authors offer a perfect description of modern youth culture when they write:

"Hey" is the universal greeting. "Sup" substitutes for "what's up" as the replacement for "how are you" or "how's it going"...Such "conversations" can and do go on at length without anything more meaningful being said. It's tribal language, foreign to adults, and it has the implicit purpose of making a connection while revealing nothing of value about the self.

"Today's teens are a tribe apart," wrote the journalist Patricia Hersch in her 1999 book on adolescence in America. As befits a tribe, teens have their own language, values, meanings, music, dress codes, and identifying marks, such as body piercings and tattoos. [...]

Although we have lulled ourselves into believing that this tribalization of youth is an innocuous process, it is a historically new phenomenon with a disruptive influence on social life. It underlies the frustration many parents feel at their inability to pass on their traditions to their children.

In the separate tribe many of our children have joined, the transmission of values and culture flows horizontally, from one unlearned and immature person to another. This process...is eroding one of the underpinnings of civilized social activity. [...]

"Children throughout Western civilization," declared an MTV announcer not long ago, "are coming to look more like each other than their own parents or grandparents."

"The results of this are disturbing not just because of the implications for society as a whole, but for the individual child. I found myself nodding vigorously as the authors described the defense mechanisms that peer-oriented children are forced to adopt. I moved around a lot, and in the schools I went to where there was a higher level of peer orientation, I saw these behaviors a lot more:

If many kids are damaged these days by the insensitivity of their peers it is not necessarily because children today are more cruel than in the past, but because peer orientation has made them more susceptible to one another's taunts and emotional assaults. Our failure to keep our children attached to us and to the other adults responsible for them has not only taken away their shields but put a sword in the hands of their peers. [...]

No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]

Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle. Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers.

"So how did we end up in this situation?

"This was the part I found particularly interesting. When I read the author's description of a small town in France that has a traditional, multigenerational, family-oriented culture (the type of culture that always existed in America until the breakdown of lifelong communities over the past 60 years), it became glaringly obvious that our society is nothing like that today, and that that is not a good thing:

[In Rognes, France] children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions...Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them...One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. [...]

The attachment customs are the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students...When the children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, with the teacher in the lead...Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren't many cracks to fall through.

"I don't think I need to detail the differences between this and our own culture today. The difference is striking, and it's clear which one is more natural and facilitates healthy bonds between children and their families.

"So what should we do?

"The authors have a wide variety of suggestions that all basically come down to putting structures in place to help foster kids' "attachment" to their parents, as would have happened naturally if they lived in a traditional village setting (e.g. eat dinner as a family, seek activities that include the whole family, don't let kids spend all their free time with their friends, etc.) I actually didn't get as much out of this last part of the book because I didn't agree with all of their suggestions, particularly concerning discipline. But that didn't really matter -- for all I care, they could have skipped the entire section on solutions -- because this is one of those cases where by being able to name the problem you're half way to solving it.

"Now that I understand the concept of peer orientation, I'll never see our society the same way again. So many things make so much more sense now. I finally understand what's going on with the kids who sulk around the neighborhood in their black baggy clothes, why I did that myself when I was younger, why so many kids at my high schools committed suicide over petty difference with friends, why I get a really bad feeling every time I watch MTV, and so on and so on. Sorry this is a longer post, but I found this topic so interesting and enlightening that I wanted to share it in case others find it helpful as well.

8/25/08: Updated to note that if you find the subject matter of this post interesting, Steve G. also highly, highly recommends the author's Power to Parent DVD series, which expands on these subjects. I'm looking forward to checking it out soon."

Again, if you liked the post, go tell her. (I wouldn't want to copy a blog post without linking to the original a million times, you know)

Georgia

2008-08-14T20:21:00.001-05:00

"We must make clear to Russia's leaders that the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world require their respect for the values, stability and peace of that world."
~John McCain

Damn skippy.

Global warming is such a lie.

2008-08-14T17:48:00.002-05:00

Current temperature according to wunderground.com: 84. Current temperature at my house: 76. And it's August 14. And yet in California you can't turn around without hearing somebody worrying about global warming. Seriously?

So Napa Valley is beautiful, and wine tasting is yummy, and we sang well and had all sorts of fun, but I'm glad to be home.

Film question

2008-08-02T17:34:00.003-05:00

Someday I'll have money again, and I'll be able to develop pictures. And then I'll be able to show off my chickens. Simple pleasures, simple pleasures. In the meantime, though, I'm postponing said simple pleasure for the much bigger pleasure of GOING TO ROME!! Which is the reason I don't plan to have any money until after January, because that's when the trip is. And hopefully I can have enough money to go to Joey's and Theresa's wedding, but they're being perverse and getting married in SC (right? the save-the-date is at the house and I don't feel like walking up there and getting it). Come on, guys.

So, here's the question: what does one do for long-term film storage so as to keep one's film from rotting or turning yellow or sprouting or whatever film does? Anyone know? Leokadia?

I'm raising my sons in the country.

2008-07-31T15:07:00.002-05:00

Things that have made me smile today

2008-07-30T13:18:00.002-05:00

Chesterton on babies and distributism.
Excerpt:

But there is a third, reason for my contempt, much deeper and therefore much more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be "free" to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word "free." By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires' notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or ijingling jazz tunes turned out bv the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Discovered at The Dawn Patrol

That most wonderful and fantastic page which every man of my acquaintance should read every single day, not because they're not manly enough but as affirmation of their splendid choices to reject the modern culture and be real men -- The Art of Manliness

"If you’re over 18 and you’re still using Facebook applications to let someone know you’re interested in them, you need to be punched in the face." Article here.

Not that I know anybody who does that. It just amused me. It also made me ashamed of myself, though, not because I chase prospective mates on Facebook, but because I neglect friendships under the assumption that I can catch up with them on Facebook. And then of course I don't, except for the occasional peek at photo albums to see if anyone has recently taken an exciting trip. And I could finish up by apologizing en masse to all the friends I've neglected, but that's a cop-out. I think I'm just going to write a million emails instead. A million. Because that's how many people I love and want to keep up with, and don't because I'm too lazy.

Affirmed by Dr. Mercola!

2008-07-29T12:20:00.002-05:00

My favorite healthy-living guru's take on sustainable agriculture

Sometimes I'm amazed at how much my interests have changed since I left college. But sometimes I do miss not caring where my food came from.

In other news, I'm planning to build an overhead trellis over my back patio and plant it with vines. Then I can drink coffee in its shade and feel nostalgic. Also, the kitchen won't get so bloody hot anymore.

What I'm really excited about nowadays

2008-07-26T20:48:00.002-05:00

Angora rabbits!

Seriously. Could you possibly resist these guys? I can't.

Besides, that wool's expensive! I could make a lot of money off them. All I need is a spinning wheel...

Sustainable Urban Living

2008-07-25T20:05:00.001-05:00

Sustainable Urban Living

I don't live in the city anymore, but this site has a lot of really useful information for me (even with 10 acres, life's just better if you know how to conserve space) and I know it'll be REALLY interesting for anyone who lives in the city and would like to live more sustainably. Sustainable living is important for the environment, it's super important for the economy, and your family will benefit enormously.

Sarah, Leokadia, and Genevieve, I bet you'll find some ideas you'll like a lot. See? Everybody loves sustainable agriculture, especially when it can happen on a back patio.

Also? She keeps crested chickens, which are just about the most amusing birds on the planet.

John Senior would approve

2008-07-22T16:15:00.004-05:00

At Berea College, (NY Times story) low-income students go to school for free, and the college is funded by a government endowment. (I'm not sure if John Senior would approve of the government endowment entirely funding the college, though he might, but the part I think he'd approve of is coming.) To make up a bit of extra money (though the endowment is pretty huge) and to lower the cost of living for each student, the college runs a farm and workshops for traditional crafts! These are some students who learn wonder at college! None of these students would fail to laugh at the Chaucer's Chanticleer just because they had never seen a rooster strut.

Now my question is, why is it only destitute students who have the privilege to go to this college? Don't students from higher-income families deserve the chance to attend a college where they can balance their intellectual endeavors with old-fashioned hard work at old-fashioned practical tasks, and graduate with the ability to denounce deconstruction with the best of them AND build beautiful furniture for their home, grow their own food, and forge ... oh my gosh, who cares if they're even forging anything practical! Look how gorgeous it is! I mean, I loved UD just about as much as it is possible to love a school (tangent: I had a dream last night about sitting at a cafe in Nafplion and discussing New Criticism with a total stranger, and then I started talking about a Freudian interpretation of Brideshead Revisited, and Sarah E. from the class above me, who was magically there, was horrified, and I said, "well, how else do you explain Anthony Blanche?" And when I woke up, I realized I wrote my entire thesis on Anthony Blanche and wasn't Freudian at all. So: proof that my subconscious was trying to tell me that I miss UD, but it was pointless, because my conscious mind already knew it) but I would have LOVED SO MUCH to have the chance to learn these crafts of our grandparents, and especially to have it integrated into the curriculum in such a way that I didn't have to choose between taking ceramics and EVER having time for homework.

Like, these kids work in the craft shops for work study. Work study! Making furniture! Wow!

So who wants to pressure a *real* (that is, tuition-charging, not that Berea is fake) college to open up a craftsmanship branch, and use it as work-study opportunities, the way this one does? Encourage all students to learn to farm and hand-craft? Or perhaps, the answer is to start one, a Berea for students who are above the arbitrary line of sufficient poverty, and therefore just as excluded as low-income students are from attending Harvard. And it seems to me that the Ozarks are the perfect place for such a college. Jimmy, Jonathan, Eric, Lacy, I'm talking to you.

Oh, and Lodz: the Foxfire Book? Totally changing my gestalt. Thank you for ever and ever, and when you visit me and I feed you hog's head stew that I've canned myself, you'll know it's entirely your fault.

In my Inbox

2008-07-21T21:45:00.001-05:00

"Allie named you 'Daedalus Diggle' in the group 'Screw it... I'm Transferring to Hogwarts!' on Facebook."

Allie, you made my day.

More teaching advice, pleeeeeeeeeease!

2008-07-17T21:33:00.003-05:00

I've made the heroic resolution to post every day because I have this idea that it's something people with blogs ought to do if they want anybody to read, and also because it will keep me from taking any one post too seriously, since it's just going to get buried in a bunch of other posts anyway. Of course, considering that it's only going to last until I get bored, I can't guarantee any long stretch of posts. But I can guarantee at least ... two days. Including yesterday.

And today I'm going to talk about my kids. Not my biological kids, though maybe tomorrow I'll post about my biological kids and how they're all going to be protegies and perfectly behaved, but today I'm going to post about the kids I teach. Who are also protegies, and sometimes they're perfectly behaved too.

Thus, this post is mostly for people who know something about teaching. If you don't know anything about teaching, you have my permission to get on with your life. If you do know something about teaching, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD tell me what to do! (actually it's really not all that serious, but I would like to know if you read one of my ideas and think "yeah. THAT'S going to work. with two five year olds in the class??)

So. Tomorrow, that is, not really tomorrow, but the next time we have school, we're introducing the letter A, which is our very first vowel. Big excitement. The textbook has them learning A AND learning to read 3 letter words all in the same day. Georgie, who's been through this part of the book already, told me that he cried on this lesson. So my goal is to make stepping stones instead of a quantum leap.

We've already been finding words that begin with letters that we've had already had, and listening exercises where they say whether the word begins or ends (or neither!) with the letter we're studying. You know, "clap your hands if the word I read ends in S. House, door, pony, walrus." Walrus and pony aren't really on the list - they're all monosyllabic words so far.

So here's my idea: (1) Introduce the letter. Hi, A. Practice writing it, find words that start with A. Apple, And, Antenna. Kidding about Antenna, unless one of them thinks of it. Art project in which we draw an apple with a worm crawling out of it, conveniently placed to resemble lowercase a. Construction paper, because they like construction paper.
(2) Introduce words that have only A and another letter that we've had so far. At, An, As, Am, Add (which has two ds, but that shouldn't be too hard to explain. It's just that way, accept it, kids.). Give them 3 words, see if they can find the others. End first day's lesson here, to give them time to sleep on the idea of two letters they already know making a word.
(3) The next day, put letters in front of the words we found yesterday. At - Cat, Bat, Mat, Sat. Again, give them three, see if they can come up with others. If they don't get it, I guess, just keep throwin' the words at them until they see the pattern.

My goal is for this series of steps to take some of the stress out of the leap from identifying letters to reading words. Does anyone have any advice, warnings about how my plan won't work, tips for more stepping stones?

A blossoming love for poultry

2008-07-16T21:18:00.003-05:00

I never realized how incomplete a yard is without chickens, until I got some. My chickens roam all the way up to the house, peacefully clucking and pecking at bugs all day, and during the hottest part of the day they hide under the big plants that Dad hasn't cut down yet or in the shade of the trees and sleep it off. I know they're looking forward to the cool weather, and so am I, because in September they should start laying. Mom says she's seen the random white one crowing and that therefore he must be a rooster, but as far as I've observed, only the little bantam rooster is a rooster. His name is Edward, and his sweet little mate is named Elinor. She sits on my shoulder and chatters, and pecks at my earrings or the neck of my shirt. Every once in a while she pecks at the corner of my eye because she doesn't know better, but I always blink in time. She hasn't pooped on me yet, because she's a good bird. She sits still while I fill up the feed and water, and I've learned to walk slower when she's on my shoulder, because she's not very aerodynamic, and when I walk at my normal pace she gets blown off. My Rhode Island Reds aren't quite as well socialized, but when they're hungry they follow me around and stand on my feet and peck at my toenails and let me pick them up. Only when they're hungry.

My guineas are unfortunately still alive, and every time I see them I tell them that they're going to taste really good one of these days. They're neurotic and stupid and ferocious, and my hands have sustained many cuts because of them. But I hear they're very tasty, and I'm holding out hope. I've also heard that they're supposed to be tick eaters extraordinaires, but mine are defective and laze around all day in the chicken coop.

Studying for the GRE is making me dumber

2008-06-20T14:04:00.003-05:00

The GRE prep page really (seriously!) wanted me to answer this question.

14. If 300 jellybeans cost you x dollars. How many jellybeans can you purchase for 50 cents at the same rate?

A.
B. 150x
C. 6x
D.
E. 1500x

The correct answer is A, by the way. Stupid GRE prep.

p.s. Just because I've posted on top of it doesn't mean I don't want teaching tips anymore. If you know anything about teaching, please scroll down, read my teaching post, and pass on your wisdom!

Things that made me laugh today

2008-06-19T21:12:00.002-05:00

It's a sign of maturity when you can laugh at yourself, right?

(during a thrilling exercise wherein I read a list of words and the kids held up cards that started with the same letter as the word, possibilities limited to S, P, N and T)
Georgie: This is fun!
Me: Are you being sarcastic?

Me to my cat: If you come near my chickens, I'm gonna throw you across the yard again!

(ya hear?)

Me to a chicken: STOP POOPING IN YOUR FOOD BUCKET!

Education

2008-06-17T18:08:00.003-05:00

So I've been thrown into the water without a life jacket.

A year ago, if you would have told me that I'd be teaching a class of 6-9 year olds in a Yurt in the middle of the country and picking blackberries during recess, I'm pretty sure I would have laughed. This is me, the girl who doesn't converse with anyone below the age of 14 because they're not smart enough to talk about interesting things yet. And here I am, telling these kids to clap when I read out a word that begins with "s." Good. Lord.

Things I've learned/started working out in my mind so far:
1) Kids need physical space to match psychological space. The school-Yurt doesn't have desks and the kids have to squish around a low table, sitting or kneeling on the floor. Consequently it's a lot harder to separate subjects from each other, and especially playtime from work time. There is a picnic table which is too big for them to sit at comfortably, but I make them sit there for reading lessons because I think it's important for them to have a place that's just for reading. But they do everything else at the round table, and it's hard to distinguish between what's work (requiring quiet and discipline, where they can't just get up without permission) and play (where they can talk quietly (ha! quietly.) and get up without permission).

Solution: long, low tables with adjustable height so that we can have a school table that's comfortable separate from a play table. Enough space on the school table where they're not crowded, so I can enforce rules about keeping their eyes on their own papers, which I haven't even tried to introduce yet because of the crowed space and circular small table.

2) Related to #1, circular spaces are not psychologically conducive to school. Square spaces are. (The second observation comes from my own memory; the first from direct observation over the past two weeks.) In circular spaces nothing is oriented in a particular direction, there's no front of the classroom, and therefore there's really no way to direct motion or guide it to appropriate places. You can't even make kids line up - how can they make a straight line with their bodies when all the lines around them are curved?

Solution: blue painters' tape on the floor, sectioning off parts of the room. One square will be the "lessons" part, one square will be the "free time" part, one square will be the "story time" part, and maybe there will be one more, but I haven't decided what that will be. Even though there won't be physical barriers between sections of the room, I'm hoping that having the floor sectioned off will provide psychological boundaries to help the kids understand that it's not playtime all the time, and also to discourage running.

3) I need a blackboard. Oh my dear sweet Lord, do I need a blackboard.

Stay tuned for more Adventures in the World of Making Up Teaching Methods as I Go Along and Pretending I Knew What I Was Doing All the Time.

I'm really not very good at being a country girl

2008-06-07T16:26:00.002-05:00

I don't like it when things have to die. Even when they're 5 foot long black snakes that are trying to eat my chickens. (note: this is the second snake I've had to ask my dad to kill. Dorothy says they come in pairs, so maybe this will be the end of the black snakes. A girl can hope.) Life would be a lot better for me if I could just catch them and throw them out into the woods and they'd get lost and not come back to the chicken coop. I'd be all for keeping them as pets (I mean, they don't bite people, so why not?) but my parents are antipathetic about the idea, and aside from putting them in an aquarium and feeding them crickets, the only way to keep them from finding their way back to the chickens is to kill them. Which makes me sad.

Speaking of chickens, I've always heard that guineas are social birds. If that's true, I have defective guineas. The chickens let me catch them and cuddle them, and they even stop flapping after a minute or two. The guineas flap and squirm for as long as I hold on to them, and seriously endanger my eardrums. Have you ever heard guineas? They're loud little bastards.

Many events, zero pictures to show for it so far

2008-06-02T17:34:00.002-05:00

So, I graduated. "But MC," you say, "you did that last year!" Yeah, you and the rest of the world. Fr. JD told me as I walked down the Mall in my cap and gown and the band was playing the Prince of Denmark March (side note: for a graduation?? whatever.) that I graduated last year. And I said, no, I'm graduating this year. And he said, "oh, you're doing it twice."

Anyway, it was a lovely graduation, complete with a fabulous speech by Dr. Lenczowski (text here). Re-reading it, I find myself thinking "he said that?" Obviously the rivers of sweat pouring down my back by this point distracted me a bit. But I was impressed at the time with the speech, and am more so now, which is probably as it should be. Dr. Lenczowski is the first graduation speaker in my memory to get a standing ovation.

Also, I went to DC for Amy's wedding, and my excuse of not having wedding pictures is that I haven't gotten them developed; also, there are 19 exposures left on one of the rolls so I'll probably try to finish it out before I go in to town. But it was a beautiful wedding, of course, because everything Amy touches is beautiful. Mary said so during her toast, but I'd like to point out that I had said it independently and previously and therefore am not plagiarizing. She wore her grandmother's wedding dress, which is just about the epitome of awesome and makes me really sad that neither of my grandmothers passed down their dresses.

We sang some stuff too. I'm pretty sure that this was the best group I've ever sung with. I think I counted two missed entrances, one of which was my fault, all weekend. I'm not saying there weren't more mistakes; I'm just saying I didn't hear them. Props to Sean for keeping the tenors on pitch.

And I met the American Papist, himself, in person, which fills me with all sorts of nerdy Catholic delight. Not only is he cool because he runs a fantastic blog, but he also knows all the words to the Winnie the Pooh theme song.

But I didn't get to visit the National Shrine.

Chickens! Livestock! In a 2'x4' box in my well house!

2008-05-05T20:06:00.002-05:00

My chickies! The hatchery threw in a random rare breed, but since most of the pictures of chicks on the hatchery website look the same, I guess I'll just have to wait till it grows up to find out what kind it is.

Ze chickies, zer coming...

2008-05-03T20:50:00.002-05:00

I'm nesting. Not pregnant, just nesting. You know, because baby chickens who live in a brooder in the well house care if the window is clean. (In my defense, it seemed pretty ridiculous to clean up the well house and rid it of hiding places for Big Scary Things like Spiders, and not clean the window.)

Also, the part of the brooder my dad built looks official, and the part I built looks ... well, not so much. He built the crate part out of wood; I stapled cardboard to the sides and bent up some small-gauge chicken wire I found to make a top. You say jerry-rigged like it's a bad thing. Again in my defense, how else was I supposed to keep the chicks from jumping out through the gaps in the sides?

So, they arrive in the post office on Monday. And then I will be an official country girl. I have feed for them and everything.

My fat white cat is sitting on my lap cursing me and you and all the rest of humanity. He thinks he is terribly neglected and abused since we made him a studio cat, and he is vocal in his disapproval of circumstances every time we come to use the computers.

This is terrifying

2008-05-01T17:01:00.001-05:00

...by which we mean Monsanto. What are these people thinking?!?!

GMO Info - it's a video, just so you're not surprised when the sound starts.

Don't read the part about Morgellon's disease if you get queasy.

The good news is, you don't necessarily have to spend buckets of money buying all organic foods to avoid GMOs. At the bottom of the page: "The PLU code on stickers for conventionally grown fruit consists of four numbers, organically grown fruit has five numbers prefaced by the number nine, and GM fruit has five numbers prefaced by the number eight." Super helpful. But I definitely think that from now on, if it's wrapped in plastic, it had better say organic or I'm not buying it.

Montessori links, lest I lose them

2008-04-24T15:04:00.002-05:00

Michael Olaf - all sorts of interesting reading material

montessori.edu

Where the training is

Bureaucrats? Nah, I'm sure they're nice people, despite having such an acronym

The Nearest School

Back to Dallas with you! (but I don't want to!)

Meet me in Saint Lou-weeee, Lou-weee, but please don't scare me with a huge face like that on the screen

Etsy, finally

2008-04-13T21:37:00.002-05:00

I have an Etsy! I'm so proud of me. Nothing's up for sale yet, but we'll get there. We'll get there.

2008-04-13T14:59:00.001-05:00

Instructions for Civil War dances

Stuff you learn when you add a SiteMeter; also, random musings

2008-04-11T21:15:00.003-05:00

Apparently the Waterhouse painting I had as my profile for all of two days is still getting hits from Google image search. Guys, it's not here anymore.

Also, Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex has me linked on their sidebar, which is funny because I never ever talk about Theology of the Body. Or Theology, for that matter.

Speaking of theology, anybody who was ever confused about why the sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell should just work with goats for a few months. Try catching them and pouring wormer down their throats. Then you'll know. Thus endeth the theology lesson of the day.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to play with my beloved goats (you do have to love them, even if they're obnoxious most of the time) for a while now because of the RAIN. Thank you, thunderstorms, for washing out my road and making it 4 inches wide, and therefore impossible to get anywhere I want to. And the hard freeze that's forecasted for this weekend? Not usual. Al Gore, are you listening?

In other news, I know entirely too many pregnant people. Not that I think they shouldn't be pregnant (of course!) but just that having this many pregnant people around is bad for my babyitis. I asked my mamma if we could go to the store and buy me a baby, but she seems to think that she should just keep introducing me to young men in hopes that one of them will fall in love with me at first sight. Thanks, mom. Because, you know, being introduced by your MOM isn't awkward. Maybe it's only awkward for me because I know what she's thinking.

I really do hate meeting people and going on dates, though. (What?? You want to drive me around town and pay for my dinner??? You don't even know me!) (also to clarify, I don't hate meeting people, and I don't hate going on dates, but I do hate going on dates with people I've just met.) But I want babies posthaste. Figure that one out, if you can.

You have to love cow jokes.

2008-03-25T20:27:00.001-05:00

Cows and Catholics...
http://holywhapping.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html#32952656378081010

Cows and politicians...
http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/jokes/bljokecowspolitics.htm

Happy Easter!

2008-03-23T20:53:00.004-05:00

He is risen!

I went to Dallas for Good Friday to sing - SO worth it. Got back to CC in the afternoon on Saturday, just in time to unpack, visit a bit with the sis, and head to the Vigil. I'd never been to a Tridentine Easter vigil before. At Cistercian the monks always made the bonfire in front of the church, opened the doors, and brought the candle in while everybody stayed in their places. Last night the entire congregation plus the monks shivered outside for 15 minutes and watched the bonfire, knelt on the flint rocks for the "Lumen Christi," and processed in by candlelight. I'll tell ya, though, holding a candle and turning the pages in your missal at the same time is quite a balancing act.

So two and a half hours later we were all significantly chilled, and most of the youngsters were experiencing the sleep-schedule-disruption-high that is so very thrilling while it lasts. I went home with my favorite goat herders, because we had plans at dawn for hymns on Eagle's Bluff.

Eagle's Bluff at dawn is highly recommended, more so if it hasn't been flooding a week or so back. Unfortunately, we did have flooding a week or so ago and the banks of the creek were washed out, so the truck couldn't make it through. But where there's a will there's a way, apparently, even if it means braving 40 degree creeks with sharp rocky bottoms in the clear pink light and all the consequent chill of near-dawn. But adventures make the heart grow fonder, or whatever, and I suspect that it was more of a bonding experience than it would have been had it been less painful. The view from Eagle's Bluff was well worth the inconvenience, though, and since the sun was behind us we got to watch the first rays of sunlight falling on the trees way down below us.

Easter at Dawn is such a special moment, but until today I hadn't ever been up for it. When you go to the Vigil you come out feeling rather like the two Marys when they first found the empty tomb - you know He's risen, but the rest of the world is still asleep and in darkness. But at dawn the light of the Resurrection puts the shadows to flight, and in all the world no ignorance or lies can stand for long against it. I guess it's a good lesson for our times, too, when it's so easy to believe that either the world is impossible to save (going to hell in a handbasket! or whatever), or that if the world is to be saved, it has to be through our own efforts against all odds. But if the world is dark with ignorance and lies, then we are the people living between the Vigil and the dawn, and while we hold on to our faith and the knowledge that He is risen, we can not even begin to imagine the Dawn that is going to break, when He comes again.

Here is a really beautiful description of the Tridentine Easter vigil, from the woman who is my ideal of a mother of a beautiful family. (Well, besides Mary, but there's the standard of perfection and then there's a model you might possibly hope to live up to, and Mary didn't have original sin, after all.)

(Every time I do links they disappear, so you're going to have to copy and paste)

http://vontrapp.wordpress.com/2007/04/06/easternight/

Excerpt:

"After the official liturgy is fulfilled, there still comes for us the observance of some ancient religious customs that belong to the liturgy of the home. In the lantern we take home some of the new blessed Easter light, with which we shall relight the vigil lamp at home. The bottle we fill with Easter water, and on the way out of church we take some of the blackened logs from the Easter fire and preserve them at the fireplace, where they work as sacramentals in times of danger from storms and lightning.

We try to keep up the customs we learned from the people in the Alps when they say the sorrowful mysteries of the rosary on Good Friday. Toward three o’clock of that day the father of the house goes to the corner where the vigil light burns before the crucifix and gravely blows it out; then he pours water on the fire in the fireplace. No flame is allowed around the house between the hour of Our Lord’s death and His Resurrection, in honor of Him Whom we call the Light of the World.

When we return, therefore, in the Easter Night with the blessed light in the lantern, the vigil light is lit from it and also the fire in the fireplace, and all the holy-water fonts are filled with Easter water. "

Announcement

2008-03-15T17:46:00.000-05:00

I am an official owner of Birkenstocks. I can't decide if I've sold out or arrived. I think I've arrived.

In other news, I was asked today for the fifty bajillionth time why I'm a farm girl, since I'm so smart. Would anybody like to enlighten me about why cities hold a monopoly on intelligence?

The answer I gave: I'm smart enough to know that eating natural foods, getting exercise and living close to nature really is a better life. (Not to mention, the monks are awesome, and don't make us hold hands during the Our Father.)

But, apparently, I fail in the world's eyes if I can't do it all AND have a law degree. Oh well, at least I'm a happy failure. Oh, and have I mentioned lately how many kids I want to have? Different standards of success, that's what they're calling it these days.

Proud of myself

2008-03-07T20:11:00.000-06:00

I figured out how to get the navigation bar back, even though this free template thingy tried to take it away. I guess they wanted a cleaner look, but I wanted my easy buttons. I am so so so HTML savvy.

By which I mean, if I were as HTML savvy as my dad, I could have done it in two minutes, instead of an hour. Oh well.

2008-03-03T20:43:00.000-06:00

Coach Cahill will be so proud when I tell him. I played soccer yesterday for the first time in SIX YEARS. And yes, I was terrible at it, but the point is, I PLAYED. And apparently, I'm a tough girl. News to me, but I'll take the compliment!

And oh, man, am I feeling it now. Gemma and I tripped over each other and I twisted my ankle, Michael kicked my shin (on accident, I'm sure, since he's thoroughly a gentleman when I'm not trying to steal the ball from him), Tommy tripped me and knocked the wind out of me (eleven year olds are so hard not to trip over!) and then Joey stepped on my glasses (oops).

So until I get new glasses, I'm trying the contact thing again, because, you know, maybe moving away from the Number One Most Allergenic City In The US will make me stop being allergic to contacts, too. I can always hope, at least. Maybe it was some allergy in the air that was irritating my eyes, and the contacts made it worse. Or maybe I can just learn to live with dry eyes. I might even be totally frivolous and go buy a bunch of different kinds of eye drops, to see if one of them works. I would be so in favor of having corrective lenses, peripheral vision, comfortable eyes, and eyelashes that are visible when I put mascara on them instead of hiding behind lenses, all at the same time.

In other news, The Barn is soon to be The Studio, which means everything in the barn is now Somewhere Else. Like, in stacks on the front porch, in the well house, by the wood pile, in the furniture shed, in the tool shed, and in the carport. Hope we don't have to find any of it between now and when it's all done and renovated!

The kittens are 4 weeks old, and while I don't have pictures of them, I can announce their names with great joy. (NB: sometimes you have to wait a reeeeeeally long time before you name animals, because when their eyes aren't open yet and all they look like is squishy, it's hard to tell what their personalities are like.) They come in pairs, because two sets of pairs look almost exactly alike, and the remaining two are lumped together by virtue of being the oddballs: Essie (named after her mother, Esmerelda, because she looks just like her) and Gandalf (the Grey), Louis and Jemima (black and white and very sassy), and Thing One and Thing Two (Thing Two has a funny looking white spot on his nose) (you can't name kittens without some sort of Dr Seuss reference, hello!). Maybe in the next few days I'll have pictures.

The Newest Obsession

2008-02-22T20:56:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Mrs. Lawless, I have ALL SORTS OF NEW THINGS to spend money on.

Caution: the things presented on this website are really super exciting, and cost money too. If you're trying to keep to a budget, I don't recommend clicking.

Sarah, I REALLY don't recommend you clicking on this. If you do, we may just have to make a club of People Who Will Never Have Money Again But Will Be Able To Can The Entire Summer's Worth Of Fresh Food, Not To Mention Cook And Heat The Whole House At The Same Time With A Wood-Burning Stove.

Those caveats being over, let me tell you that this website is cooler than Facebook, cooler than LadiesAgainstFeminism, and even (I can't believe I'm saying this) cooler than the Vermont Country Store. AND they sell real-live (real-inanimate?) wood burning stoves, gas-free lawnmowers, meat grinders, veggie grinders, fruit grinders, super canning supplies, everything one would ever need to make goat cheese and butter (except the goats, of course, but I'm working on that. Goatses!), and a whole library of natural-living knowledge.

And now you know why I don't think I'll ever have money again.

And so, without further ado, I present to you
Lehman's Products For Simple, Self-Sufficient Living
http://www.lehmans.com/

More Farm Girl News

2008-01-23T18:30:00.000-06:00

The Lawlesses are kindly letting me come over and follow them around during their morning chores, by which I mean experiment on their animals rather than kill my own. In honor of them, I shall enumerate:

Things Everybody Needs To Know About Goats:

1. Their horns are super-efficient handles. Don't think you're hurting them when you wrench their heads around to get them to go where you want; they secretly like it.

2. Another note about their horns: they get stuck on things. Like, in the middle of a fence. Goats are smart enough to get their heads through the fence one way, but not smart enough to get them through the other way. It works like barbs on an arrow, except it baas.

3. Every morning you have to clean the poop out of their food troughs. 'Nuff said. These are not particularly smart animals.

4. They're fast little boogers.

5. When you chase a baby goat and manage to catch it and it screams bloody murder for its mama, don't worry. It'll quiet down after you hold it for a while, and the next time it won't scream for such a long time, and so on until it doesn't mind being caught.

6. On a related topic, the goats always sound a lot more pathetic than they actually are. Don't let a goat make you think it's lost and sad and miserable and needs extra food; it's a lie.

7. When you're throwing hay down from the top of the hay stack into their feeders and you miss and hit a goat on the head with a fourth of a bale of hay, it probably won't even notice.

8. If you shock it with a cattle prod, however, it will notice. Then it will make a funny startled "maa-ap" sound and leap over the rest of the goats, and probably get stuck crowd-surfing, if you happen to shock it when they're all crowded around trying to stick their noses in the bucket of grain that you're taking to their trough.

Crazy week

2008-01-09T20:54:00.000-06:00

Lessons learned this week:

Lesson 1.

Country people carry chainsaws in the backs of their pickups just in case there's a tree down across the road.

Other country people cut trees and just leave them when they fall across the road.

If someone hasn't gotten there with a chainsaw to clear the road, it takes a REALLY LONG TIME to get to Mass if you don't know alternative routes.

The Moral: when you live on a dirt road, always know alternative routes.

Lesson 2.

That drain pipe that goes from the gully on one side of the driveway to the gully on the other side that empties into the pond is there for a reason.

When the drain pipe is full of leaves and the forecast calls for 8 inches of rain overnight, you ought to clear it out.

If you don't, your barn is going to flood and a lot of boxes are going to be ruined.

A snow shovel is a very efficient tool for moving water from your barn floor into buckets.

Lesson 3:

Sometimes one's front pasture turns into a river, when the skies let loose 8 inches of rain. There is no moral to be gleaned from this, just miscellaneous wisdom.

Also, when one's front pasture is no longer a river, sometimes it's still a lake for a while. And then you might not want to haul dead branches from the banks, because you might fall in. I didn't, but I might have.

I will post pictures of the flood once I finish this roll out. In the meantime, pictures are going here: pictures, so check back. I tried to embed pictures in this post, but I failed somehow. I'll try to figure it out again, because it's much more interesting to read posts that have pictures in them.

Adventures in a Very Chilly Wonderland

2008-01-03T15:11:00.000-06:00

You know why they tell you to run your faucets when it's cold? It's so the pipes don't freeze. But what if you have a well and you never know when the holding tank is going to run empty? You can't really waste water all night, can you?

Well, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you can't.

Turns out, if you're an inhabitant of the Cedar House, you get to spend the first half of the next day figuring out how the siphon works, collecting buckets, and siphoning water from the holding tank into the buckets and lugging them up to the house. Because the pipes don't refrain from freezing just to accommodate your desire to save water.

When your hands are all wet from siphoning water into buckets and you don't have a towel, and then you have to stand next to the bucket holding the plastic tube to keep it squirting into the bucket and not all over the floor of the well house and it's nearly freezing outside, it's a good time to get some souls out of Purgatory.

I really don't like getting souls out of Purgatory.

But about half an hour after lunch, after I had lugged another batch of water buckets up to the house and was washing dishes (with a bowl of lukewarm soapy water and a sponge, and rinsing the soapy water by dousing the dishes with icy water [remember what I said about the temperatures?] from a pitcher), the faucet (which was now open because you never know when plumbing will start working again) magically started to drip. The drip turned into a steady stream, and the steady stream got larger, until there was no doubt that the pipes were thawed. So now all faucets are running merrily, wasting water for sheer joy of having plumbing that works.

Tonight I am definitely setting the sink to run.

In which our heroine begins a new life, and finds it uneventful.

2007-12-26T12:35:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm a country girl now. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for this adventure, but I guess you're never really ready for anything; you just have to start. If the digital camera weren't at my aunt's house in Dallas, I'd post pictures of how quiet and rainy it is here - just my sort of weather. Perfect weather for curling up under a quilt and reading Narnia. I gave my parents lots of tea for Christmas, and brought my own as well, so there is no shortage of hot beverages; unfortunately, though, the well water is tasting sort of funny lately, so the tea definitely needs sugar to mask the well water taste. I usually go sugarless, because otherwise how can you taste the tea?

I would just like to announce that I am a very spoiled person. The entire time the folks have been up here, they've been suffering with dial-up internet. About a week before I came up, the satellite finally came through, so I only have to deal with pages that take 30 seconds to load, instead of 3 minutes like it has been up till now. I don't quite appreciate how spoiled I am, though, since 30 seconds is still inexcusably long with any reasonable internet connection. And my dad works in telecom, so we always have stuff long before anybody else does. All the neighbors except two still use dial-up. Yeah, we're in the country. There is no DSL. There is no spoon.

I was planning to start leash-training the fat white cat today, because he's obese and has no muscle at all, and if I can manage to leash-train him he will at least be able to take walks up our driveway, which might be good for a couple of pounds. (In case anybody thinks this is a paltry sort of exercise regimen, you're quite right, but we do live at the back of a very narrow 10 acres, so the driveway is fairly substantial.) But it's rainy and cold today, and I feel like reading Narnia instead of going outside, so the Cat-Drag will have to be postponed till tomorrow. I hope Mr. Fatso appreciates how lucky he is.

Christmas, Christmas time is here

2007-12-22T22:26:00.000-06:00

Quotable moments from the sisterly edition of Christmas this year:

My nephew Joseph: That's funny looking.
My niece Elizabeth: Your face is funny looking.
Joseph: Your mom is funny looking.
My sister Robin: You have the same mom!

Joseph: Because I'm sooooooooooooooo glamorouth.
(the kid is destined to be a drama major.)

Joseph: Man, guys, that was a great party. I'm totally hammered.
Robin: Joseph! Do you know what that means???
Joseph: No, I heard it from Elizabeth ...
Elizabeth: YOU DID NOT!!!

Wow

2007-12-20T11:50:00.000-06:00

And just like, that, four and a half years of college are over. I'm free, but I feel so empty. How could I have spent the last semester not savoring every moment I had here?

The study referenced below

2007-12-14T17:04:00.000-06:00

Quoted from the Mayo Clinic Proceedings

"...patients should know that sustained oral contraceptive use prior to pregnancy increases a premenopausal woman's risk of developing breast cancer, saysDr. Kahlenborn. He says physicians should better inform their patients of the risks associated with oral contraceptives and calls it a "clear-cut informed consent issue."

The study noted that 21 out of 23 retrospective studies have shown an increased risk of breast cancer in women who took oral contraceptives prior to pregnancy. It also showed that those women experienced an increased risk of 44 percent.

What's more, in 2005, the World Health Organization officially classified oral contraceptives as a class one carcinogen, the study's authors say.

These are staggering results given that more that more than 45,000 women each year develop breast cancer prior to menopause, Dr. Kahlenborn says. "

Full article here: http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2006-rst/3722.html

And a year after it came out, WHY is there still no news coverage on this story??? Oh, right, because we women are so ignorant that we need big strong men to tell us which studies to believe and not to believe about our own reproductive health. Ideological censorship, much? If it were about Advil, the FDA would be all over this baby. See previous entry for an opinion on this from the Chicago Tribune.

Another reason not to trust people who shove pills at you

2007-12-14T16:34:00.000-06:00

Ladies, your ob-gyn isn't going to tell you this, and neither is your pharmacist.

"...this debate has been going on for years, if not decades, and judging by the last studies given wide exposure a few years ago by the media, the issue seems settled: Oral contraception does not significantly increase the risk of breast cancer.

There's just one problem. According to an analysis in one of the most credible peer-reviewed journals in the country, the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the risk is real. The study employed an often-used medical research technique called "meta-analysis" that allows researchers to combine data from other studies on the risk to get a larger picture. The result: Premenopausal women who used oral contraceptives prior to having their first child have a 44 percent higher chance of getting cancer than women who didn't use the pill. If they used the pill for more than four years prior to their first full-term pregnancy, the risk increased 52 percent. Chris Kahlenborn, an internist at the Altoona (Pa.) Hospital and the study's lead author, suggests one additional woman in 200 could get breast cancer. Extrapolated throughout the population, that could mean thousands more cases every year. I'd say that's an important story.

The reaction? Nearly total silence. Since it was published more than a year ago, I couldn't find a single reference to it in the archives of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or this paper. The Associated Press appears not to have covered it. I couldn't find a single mainstream media article about it in a Google search. But stories about other breast cancer risks were plentiful, including one about how sleeping with a night light on can increase your chances of getting breast cancer. The National Institute of Cancer doesn't mention the study on its Web site, but it did detail a 5-year-old study claiming to find no higher risk to pill use. The American Cancer Society also doesn't mention the study and concedes only that "it is still not clear what part" the pill plays in breast cancer. Such guidance, if not deceptive, is certainly incomplete.

"The last word seems to be that the pill is safe," Kahlenborn told me, as he called me with his frustration with being unable to get this important information out to women. "The word basically in the medical community before the study, and it continues to be, is that the pill is quite safe." But the results of his study are disquieting enough that if the pill were just coming out today, the findings would be enough for the Food and Drug Administration to keep it off the market, he said."

Here's the complete article (which does not have a link to the study - does anybody know where to look for it? Steph?)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped1203byrnedec03,0,3672465.story

Update: found the link. http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2006-rst/3722.html

why I'm not interested in any more birthdays

2007-12-07T13:52:00.000-06:00

Twenty two is too young to be this depressed about getting old, but somehow, I am. Maybe it's because I was supposed to graduate last May and am at this moment supposed to be in the real world, maybe it's because I have all these friends either married or soon to be, but somehow I can't shake the feeling that twenty two means really grown up, and now I have to worry about grown-up things like finance and nutrition and exercise and vitamins and all the things about which I've always thought "I'll think about that when I'm older." Wrinkle cream is tempting, because, you know, at this age the skin around your eyes is losing elasticity, so you have to stop the wrinkles before they start, or all is lost. And let's not even discuss bone growth and density. It's all downhill from here, baby.

And to think, I thought I had another eight years before I would be tempted to claim to be younger than I actually am. Man.

A few weeks ago I thought Elizabeth Bennet was silly for responding to Lady Catherine's question about her age with "With three grown younger sisters, your Ladyship can hardly expect me to admit it." Now at the mature age of twenty two, I think I'm just going to be twenty one for another couple of years.

Ohhh, man, the Onion

2007-12-04T13:47:00.000-06:00

Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement

WASHINGTON—"All the feminist movement needed to do was hire someone who had the balls to do something about this glass ceiling business," said Peter "Buck" McGowan.

It's Crunch Time

2007-12-04T12:55:00.000-06:00

...time to pay for all the times I said "I don't have anything to do this semester." Oh, how easy it is to convince yourself that because something isn't due for a couple of months, you never have to worry about it again. Oops. The curse of the procrastinator.

Of course, on the other hand, in six days I will be thesis-free, for better or for worse. Well, not quite thesis-free, since I'll still have to stand in front of a bunch of people and present it, but it will be all written. Maybe. At least, it will be all turned in. I wonder what the standards for passing are for thesis-level artistic translations. Like, what if all the lines don't scan? Do I pass if most of them scan, as long as they're all decently similar to what the Latin says? How about if they all scan perfectly but there's horrible cacaphony? Can I end a word with an m and begin the next word with an n? (My literary sensibilities revolt. Nevermind, cacaphony is not an option.) How about if I just disagree gigantically with Dr. Maurer's reading of the line about re-dyeing wool? How many commentators do I have to have on my side before I get to disagree with him? Am I brave enough to try?

And let's talk about all the social engagements this young lady has this weekend. My birthday Thursday, singing and then my birthday party Friday, another party Saturday at which I have to make an appearance, recording the Requiem Sunday ... in short, by the time tomorrow is over, it might as well be Monday for all the work I'm going to get done. Annnnnnnnnnd Monday's when the thesis is due. Man, it looks like tonight's an all-nighter for me.

*psychs self up for all-nighter.*

*wonders when during all this she's going to get to the liquor store, or if her party guests are going to have to drink tea*

2007-11-19T13:51:00.001-06:00

I know some other snarky ladies of my acquaintance will appreciate this. I found this article from the post on it that The Pious Sodality of Church Ladies just put up - I'm linking to their blog rather than directly to the article because they're cool enough to merit being looked at. So go check them out: http://church-ladies.blogspot.com/2007/11/oldie-but-goodie.html

Excerpt from the article:

Our eyes are squinty from reading too much and our tongues have dents from all the times we’ve had to bite them in futile attempts to suppress our true natures.
...
I’ve no idea where this demand that people who call themselves Christians are only allowed to discuss matters in hushed tones and frequent murmurings of “I understand where you’re coming from” has evolved from. Quite honestly, there’s a long and rather honorable tradition of smart aleck Defenders of the Faith behind us, if we only look.

2007-11-19T00:40:00.000-06:00

Countdown to Clear Creek: three days!

Here's what I'm going to do when I get there: greet whichever parent did not drive me there, cuddle my dog, sit in the living room and smell the air. The air in that house is wonderful, because the house is made of cedar wood. Whenever I come back from Clear Creek I can smell the Cedar House on my clothes for days. I'm sure I'm going to do a fair amount of cooking, and lots more cuddling of my dog; I'm going to meet the new cat, Esmerelda, so named because she has green eyes and therefore looks like a gypsy, because everyone, especially my mother, knows that green eyes and gypsyness are inherently linked; and I'm going to go to bed EARLY and sleep as long as I want to, and there's going to be DARKNESS in my room!!! (This is mostly a big deal because in my domicile here there's a light that shines into my bedroom window all night, and it affects my quality of sleep in a rather adverse way.) And there's going to be quiet. And lots and lots of food. And maybe if I'm very lucky it will be cold enough to see my breath in the morning, and I'll get to experience four days of it being almost winter before I get to go back to the preternaturally long summer we're having here.

Maybe I'll climb up on the roof and clean the chimney out, make sure there are no birds nests in there and such, so we can have a fire in the wood-burning stove for me to sit next to while I translate Latin and work on Mrs. Walker's Thank You For Teaching Me To Sing present. There's definitely enough wood piled up to have a fire going the whole time I'm there, though I won't insist on it.

2007-11-15T15:33:00.001-06:00

UD has outdone itself. There are always Christmas lights on Braniff; this year they are floating 3 feet above the roof. The effect is not the most aesthetically pleasing one they could possibly achieve.

Anne Taylor Loft is an excellent place to find pretty dresses, if you're willing to wait half your lifetime for them to get down to a reasonable price. I just got one for $15 and I plan to wear it for the family Christmas party, and let them all just THINK I paid full price for it. Haha.

In other news, it's November and I'm glad the weather round here has finally taken notice. I can't. wait. to live somewhere where the weather patterns behave in a rational manner.

The other day I thought about the sound of hummingbird wings when they come up right behind you to get to the feeders. The first time I heard it I thought it was a killer wasp about to attack me, but now I can tell a difference between the sounds of wasp wings and hummingbird wings. Six days until I'm in my favorite place in the world! Though I'm sure it's too late in the year for hummingbirds, so I won't be able to sit outside and listen to them.

sigh

2007-11-08T18:17:00.000-06:00

I am SO glad to know that Jesus was a socialist and stood up to the biggest empire in the world, that Saddam Hussein might have been a bad man but George Bush is a bad man too, and that it's acceptable for a Catholic to have her own Just War theory at odds with the Church's teaching on it. Thank you Cindy Sheehan for enlightening the poor benighted students of the University of Dallas.

Happiness is...

2007-10-29T02:06:00.001-05:00

...making chicken broth out of the bones from the chicken your parents sent you from their neighbors out in the Middle Of Nowhere, OK (I told my voice teacher I had something really funny and country to tell her, and she said, "did your parents send you a chicken?" and then she didn't believe me when I said that was exactly it. But the chicken was delicious and I'm very proud of my first attempt at broth.

Miniature pet pigs!

2007-10-16T13:30:00.000-05:00

This is really funny.
Piggy pictures here

2007-10-14T22:48:00.000-05:00

According to the folks, the leaves are changing color in Clear Creek. Here, everything is still green; the only difference between now and the usual Texas summer is about 15 degrees, while they only difference between now and this past summer is ... nothing.

The thunderstorm today gives me hope, though, that maybe when I wake up I'm going to need a heavy sweater to walk to Mass. Bringing in a cold front is the least it can do for me, since it got my music books all wet. Imagine: you're sitting outside the Capp Bar reading Herodotus (in English) and drinking your latte (with skim milk and honey, to make up for all the High Fructose Corn Syrup in the sundae you just had) and you hear a rolling crash of thunder. You think to yourself, "I should put my piano books back in my apartment now, so when the thunderstorm hits I don't have to walk back in the rain later and get them all wet." Reasonable, no? Apparently, I don't yet know Texas. Halfway through the three minute walk back, the rain hits with all its force, and a minute and a half later I'm about as dry as I would have been if I had jumped in the swimming pool outside my apartment. I get in the door, mop myself off a bit, and would you believe it, the rain stops. Just like that. I love you too, Texas.

And now for a list of things I'm not going to miss about Dallas after December:
airplane noise.
car noise.
the greenish light from the pool that shines in my bedroom window and keeps me awake at night.

Also a list of things I miss about Clear Creek right now:
monks with military haircuts
gigantical squashes for sale after Sunday Mass
ditto with the gigantical cheeses
the crunching sound car tires make on dirt roads
the way you can tell how long it's been since it's rained by how much dust is on the leaves on the sides of the roads
the sound of the rain on leaves and dirt (and no asphalt anywhere!)

In which our heroine is excited about fall

2007-10-11T18:27:00.000-05:00

Fall might finally be coming to Dallas, by which I mean today was 85 degrees instead of a hundred. The insufficiency of the season here aside, I still think some Keats is in order. (I'm not poetical enough to post my own po'try anymore, I know now, but that ain't going to stop me from posting other people's)

To Autumn

1
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a seet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

2
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou doest keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too--
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the riversallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The revival of the weblog

2007-10-11T17:07:00.000-05:00

It's a strange experience, finding a blog one apparently made once upon a time, and only ever used (once) to demonstrate the opinion one once had that meter is not necessary to poetry. Please don't scan that poem below, it's not worth it, unless you're a high school teacher trying to demonstrate what iambic pentameter isn't.

I now believe meter is necessary to poetry, but I no longer think it's appropriate to inflict my poetry on others.

So, why am I reviving the long-defunct blogger? Why not just let it die the natural death it so obviously wants to? Here's why: so I can friend Michaela (does blogger let you add friends? Is it cool enough?) and post comments all over her blog. Hi Michaela! I can't bug you in real life yet, but that's not going to stop me from cyber-bugging you!

God's Work

2005-06-20T18:06:00.000-05:00

"The harvest is great, and the laborers are few."

Golden wind caresses golden wheat,
bows to golden sunlight.
Brown hands, shining gold in the sunlight
caress the golden wheat.
The basket is woven of golden grasses.

A brown hand burns in the golden sunlight.
Delicate fingers, petite wrist
stretch, squeeze, scrape along the wheat;
all that hands can accomplish;
weak hands, they can work.

Slender white fingers, sparkling with rings
caress ivory keys, music-crafters.
Delicate wrists and soft fingers, weak
and beautiful, transparent, stretch
to the golden wheat, invisible under the golden sun.