Did you know...

Did you know that the winner of the 1904 Olympics marathon was dosed twice with strychnine during the marathon? He collapsed immediately after the race, of course, but he didn't die. I read an article from 1904 about it, and I just thought it was interesting.



--edit--

I love the new site design, mother. It's pretty... and red. :)

Contentment

So, today I was on my way to work with the sun coming over the horizon warming my face. I had my warm cup of coffee and watched the yellow lines move down the middle of the road. I began to think, "My bride and I have been together over of a quarter century and we still love each other, I have 7 marvelous children who love me and I love each and everyone of them".

Hmm, What more could a man ask for?
Nothing.

Speaking of the Terrible Trivium

Here's an interview with the Phantom Tollbooth author, Norton Juster, and here's an excerpt:

When the book first came out in the early '60s, the revealed wisdom was that you could not give kids anything to read beyond what they knew already. There were vocabulary lists. Lord help you if you put words in a book for ages 6 to 8, or 8 to 10 that they felt a child of that age couldn't understand. They also thought that fantasy was very bad for children because it disoriented them. It's changed somewhat for the better. The publishers told me that they had great misgivings because they thought that the book was too far beyond children.

But I've found in my travels, talking with kids, that they like the story and if a story is compelling for them, they'll get by any difficulty. They'll get involved with something that interests them. I think that's the great secret; it's being interesting rather than sticking to those artificial standards that they set up.

Which of course reminded me of Phyllis McGinley's story about reading Wind in the Willows to her daughter and Nancy Bond's strange statement that if she wrote for younger children she would have to be careful of the number of words she used, so she prefers to write for an older audience.

In looking over my archives, I see that I have neglected to share a good many delicious and pertinent quotes from McGinley's Sixpence in Her Shoe, and this one in particular is apt. It's from chapter 18, Realms of Gilt, which is the source of the above Wind in the Willows tale.

She begins by talking about the proliferation of childrens books, 'books which flow out ceaselessly, year ofter year' and what an 'Eden' this would seem to be

'for a bookish child. But it is a flawed paradise. In all this treasury of the printed word, all this lavishness of binding and type and illustration, one lack diminishes the bounty. Much here is less than literature.'

Sixpence was published in 1960, and she notes that

'the mass of writing is limp, listless, unoriginal, mediocre, and humndrum. Plots are insipid or mechanical. Too many pictures smother the story. And even when the writing lifts itself above accepted "juvenile" standards, its vigor is drained away by that leech among publishing structures- the Law of the Right Vocabulary.'

I would say it was worse than limp and listless, it was dark and dreary. But that's a post for tomorrow. Let's return to that Right Vocabulary. Norton Juster says of The Phantom Tollbooth, that everybody told him "This book will never go. It's too difficult. The ideas are too complex and too abstract. The vocabulary is beyond children," and yet of course it's a delightful read, full of fun and whimsy and it repays reading and rereading. Phyllis McGinley says the publishing industry ignores the likes and joys of real children and believes in 'the new Commandment: "Thou shalt not mystify."

She says a novelist friend of hers who had written a couple of excellent childrens' stories, saw a copy editor 'busily referring to a manuscript and a syllabus, scratching out and rewriting like a schoolmistress with a term paper.' Her friend asked lightly if there was a problem with censorship in childrens' literature, and the copy editor replied:

"Oh, certainly... we have to be very careful. Here is a book intended for children from six to nine. And this paper contains all the words that six-to-nine-year-olds are supposed to be able to understand. I have to take out all the big words not on the list and put in little ones."

The Language Wars have been going on a very long time.

Yes, indeed, a very, very long time. I have in my hands that 1909 Number Primer with the math exercise about soldiers that I posted the other day. Charming as it seems- largely for the old fashioned illustrations- the preface boasts that 'the problem exercises have been carefully planned as to vocabulary and scope. The vocabulary consists of 376 words distributed as follows- whereby there is a dreary little list showing that for the first school year children will do their math while confining their vocabulary to 67 words, they may have 203 new words the second, and 106 new words the third.

Most of these words, we are assured, are such as may be found in the usual primers and first readers, so as long as the children get the necessary drill preliminary to a new reading exercise, and preparatory work of a nature similar to the printed problems, pupils can read and interpret the exercises of the text.' They will feel a sense of power and independence, we learn, from their 67 word reading vocabulary, which includes such scintillating gems as 'book, bring, cat, come, cow, cup, did, many, May, leaves, play, and quart. What power!

Mrs. McGinley says:

"Whose invention was this vocabulary restriction I cannot say [I can!]. Librarians deplore the trend, publishers disclaim responsibility, authors declare themselves stifled by it, children detest it. But the fact remains that somebody has set up as gospel the rule that odd words, long words, interesting words, grown-up words must be as precisely sifted out from a book... as chaff from wheat or profanity from a television program.... "Read-it-yourself" books now come cleverly planned around a vocabulary of three hundred fifty words or thereabouts, and the fact that they are often clever and occasionally brilliantly ingenious does not alter their crippling formula.
Are children never to climb? Must they be saved from all the healthy bumps and bruises of exploration? I suppose the theory drifted down from textbooks, those teacher's-college-tested readers which are the common and insipid fare of elementary schools. Like many bad things, they were inspired by good intentions. Children, said the educationalists, must be gently led along the path to learning, seduced not prodded. So a vocabulary must be acquired in standard stages and according to procedures formed in a laboratory."

Children once, Mrs. McGinley points out, read Fox's Book of Martyrs and theological treatises for little Pilgrims, as well as Pilgrim's Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. Now we give them graded vocabulary and grey books.

I learn something new everday!

"If someone discovers why lemmings stampede headlong into the sea and drown, it may provide a clue as to why human beings are so anxious to be "with it." "
Is Reality Optional?, by Thomas Sowell

This intrigued me. "What is a Lemming? And has it been discovered why they drown themselves?," I said to myself.
So, I went to the computer and this is found I found out about them:

They're really cute and...

"While many people believe that lemmings commit mass suicide when they migrate, this is not the case. Driven by strong biological urges, they will migrate in large groups when population density becomes too great. Lemmings can and do swim and may choose to cross a body of water in search of a new habitat. On occasion, and particularly in the case of the Norway lemmings in Scandinavia, large migrating groups will reach a cliff overlooking the ocean. They will stop until the urge to press on causes them to jump off the cliff and start swimming, sometimes to exhaustion and death. Lemmings are also often pushed into the sea as more and more lemmings arrive at the shore.

The myth of lemming mass suicide is long-standing and has been popularized by a number of factors. It is usually stated that the main source of the belief in the suicide myth was propagated by The Walt Disney Company documentary White Wilderness which includes footage of lemmings migrating and running head-long over a ledge. An investigation in 1983 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Brian Vallee, showed that the Disney film makers faked the entire sequence using imported lemmings (bought from Inuit children), a snow covered turntable on which a few dozen lemmings were forced to run, and literally throwing lemmings into the sea to show the alleged suicides.

Due to their association with this odd behaviour, lemming suicide is a frequently-used metaphor in reference to people who go along unquestioningly with popular opinion, with potentially dangerous or fatal consequences."

From Wikipedia.org

More decorating

Remember that yard sale I went to where fabric was on sale for 2.00 a bolt? I got a nice pink and paisley dress out of it, and there's plenty of the paisely fabric leftover still. The FYB got a nice Hawaiian shirt out of it, and that fabric also made The Cherub a lovely jumper and the HG a cut tiered skirt.

We've hardly touched the other bolts of fabric, which brings us to my next project.

In my living room I have long been bothered by a design change made to my house while I wasn't on site. My stairs, which were supposed to have a nice large landing, and turn down into the living room making a wall between the downstairs bedrooms and bathrooms and the living room, were instead straightened and made to run straight down one living room wall, hugging that outside wall. This change is asthetically displeasing for several reasons- it darkened my living room, altered the space and footprint of the floor making it less functional instead of more, removed the landing I wanted for a couple of bookcases, made a sound tunnel directing all the upstairs noise right down into the living room, and removed the wall hiding the bathroom entrance, instead opening up that entire wall (which was supposed to be blocked from view by the stairs) so that the entrance to the bathroom is now very publicly gaping right in the middle of one living room wall. In case you cannot tell, I really, really dislike this.

There isn't much I can do about anything else, but I do have an old screen of my great-grandmothers and I want to put it up behind the living room chairs and in front of that bathroom, so at least you don't feel completely exposed when you step out of the bathroom. As a point of interest, my great-grandmother herself used it to screen off a downstairs toilet put in her room when she broke her hip and could no longer go upstairs to use the bathroom. This makes it only about fifty or sixty years old, not a genuine antique.

However, the screen is very old, and whatever once covered the panels is long gone. What is left is a rickety wood frame and three very dingy cardboard panels. Left as is, this would hardly improve the aesthetics of my living room. I decided to cover the panels with fabric, and went through the craft room goodies to see if we had anything suitable. I found a lovely bolt of fabric with five repeating panels of symmetrical botanical designs which I had picked up at that two dollar a bolt yardsale because it reminded me of a William Morris design. All the colors in my living room are in this fabric (which is no easy feat, my living room is an accidental combination of furniture found over a long period of time at thrift shops, yard sales, and the Rattery):

Here are two sides of the fabric, images taken by putting the fabric on my scanner:

Click to enlarge. On the fabric itself that pink pattern in the blue stripes separating the different designs isn't visible unless you are looking very, very closely. It looks like a solid blue stripe.

I have enough of the stuff to cover my screen. I brought it downstairs a couple days ago and draped it over my screen in place to see if I thought I could live with it, and I could not only live with it, I could gain a great deal of satisfaction from it. I do not know what it is about symmetry, but I find it very relaxing, soothing, and cheering.

This is my favorite of the panels:


I could look at that for a long time. In fact, I've made it my current computer wallpaper, and if there's enough leftover I may make a notebook cover with it. Morris' goal was designs that 'fill the eye and satisfy the mind,' and he certainly succeeds with me.

Imagine my delight when, as I draped the fabric over my screen I noticed, for the first time, these words along the edge of the fabric:

The William Morris Collection by Rose & Hubble. Detail from "Foliage" Hyacinth" "Granville" wallpaper, designed by John Henry Dearle for Morris and Company. Wild Tulip and "Pimpernel" designed by William Morris by courtesy of a The Bridgeman Art Library, London.

The typos are transcribed directly. Tulip really has no quotation marks around it, and it really does say 'courtesy of a the'. And the fabric I picked out because it 'reminded' me of a Morris pattern, actually IS a Morris pattern.


Serendipity!

Sunroom Floor II

Yesterday I showed my lily pad green sunroom floor, which was actually only the second stage on the way to storybook land. Here are the other steps:



There was a stone path stencil and some granite paint. The paint was slightly textured, and we added two packages of granite glitter to it. Here's a test patch to see if we preferred sponging or rolling. Oddly, in this picture, I think the sponging looks slightly better, but in person there was absolutely no doubt that rolling looked much, much better. A picture really isn't the same as being there.




A picture, after all, does not make your back, hips, and knees ache anything like my young painters (bless you, girls) say was caused by the real thing. I understand there are eight rows of cobblestones, with ten columns in each row and ten stones in each square.

Last night we had company over (our weekly midweek Bible study), and as they were admiring the new floor, one of the young boys paused in awe when he heard the above information. "That's 800 stones," he said, looking at one of my painters in awe.

The finished product will be on view tomorrow.=)

Books and History Classes

In what was actually an interesting lecture in my history of women class, we talked about19th century inventions for the home and how they could be time savers but also created a whole new host of duties and expectations for women.
One prime example was the introduction of the cooking stove. Women did not have to do their cooking over a fire anymore, which did make life somewhat easier. On the other hand, the cooking stove with its many compartments and varying temperature capabilities, mostly did away with the one-dish-meal so prevalent beforehand. Now instead of a stew with some sort of side bread, a good meal was expected to have multiple dishes. The standard of housekeeping was raised.
Even harder was the work it took to keep the stove in good working order. As the professor launched into her discussion of everything involved in stove maintenance, my mind immediately went back to the first time I read The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. At 9, watching Polly struggle with their stove, I was learning about something that would merit a place in a junior-level college lecture. How cool is that?

In Which The Equuschick's Brain Dumps Itself Upside Down

She doesn't understand how it all works, sometimes, the way her thoughts are all jumbled together and the one she thought was at the forefront suddenly gets thrown out the metaphorical window while another screams for a chance to voice itself.

It is almost like playing a very violent game of mental leapfrog.

The point is, she sat down to e-mail a friend this evening about something completely and totally unrelated, but the e-mail that actually ended up being written was a rant that had been hiding quietly like a good little thought in the back of the closet for some time until it lost its temper and took matters into its own hands, thus taking over The Equuschick's.

At any rate, she does believe every word her fingers typed without her permission, so she will share you this e-mail, primarily without editing. She must warn you that The Equuschick, of strong enough opinions on the blog, shares her opinions with even more vigor and less tact in her conversations with friends, so please do not be offended if you disagree. She was sharing her opinions on certain principles, with no persons in mind whatsoever.

It ought to have a title, however. Ahem.

In Defense of Myth and Against Juvenile Picture Books

"We're studying in the book of John, which is interesting for me, because I grew up reading the Gospels less than I probably should have, because one of the things I dislike about the American culture is how saturated everyone is with the wrong kind of Jesus. You know, the brown-haired, blue-eyed, white guy who is always wearing a perfectly clean white robe (like anyone could stay that clean living in the desert) in all the picture books and Sunday school stories? Everyone in America knows about that guy, the one who forgave the woman in adultery, but they seem to forget about the dusty, sweaty, Arabic looking guy who overturned the tables in the temple and drove everyone out with a whip.

It was just hard for me as a child, as embarrassing as this is to admit, to really read about Jesus without getting...bored. Because I didn't understand the real Christ. I just knew that guy in the picture books, the one that people have Bumper Stickers about, and the one they mean when they say WWJD. There is a house in town that has a big, blue, sign stuck in their yard that just says "I Love Jesus."

HOW LAME IS THAT.



The point is I didn't know how exciting Christ was until I grew up and quit reading the stupid picture books. I hate the stupid picture books and Sunday School Stories. By the time a child is old enough to truly understand the nature of who and what Christ is and what He did, he or she is all ready indoctrinated to this idea of Jesus being a Good Buddy, our best friend who would never stop smiling in that annoying, sappy, way they have him smile in the picture books.


And I am now totally off track here, seriously, but that is why I love fantasy and myth. Every fairy tale, myth, or fantasy story will have a theme revolving around a Great Evil being overcome by a Great Sacrifice. And that is our story. C.S Lewis, my favourite author, was especially good at this. He would spin the most amazing fairy tale, of fear and love and judgement and redemption and demons and angels, and then at the end, he seems to say " That is your story. You're living this now."

Harry Potter? The whole story is about a Great Evil that was in the end overcome by a Blood Sacrifice. And people all over the world read it and cried. Would the human heart break so completely over a story of fiction if it didn't recognize that at some point in the past, this story had all ready happened?

And that is every Christian's story. Jesus is not just some loving, perfect, blue-eyed, brown-haired white guy that is our "good buddy."

He IS the Sanctified Son of the Most High God, who became man and dwelt among us to be sacrificed hideously on a pagan altar,that His blood may buy back a lost generation. And if we trample on His blood, there will be quite literally all Hell and its angels to pay.

And in the end, because (by no fault of my parents who were actually quite good at trying to make me understand) I read those dumb picture books once or twice as a kid, I never understood the true terrible beauty of Christ and was bored by the Gospels, until I started reading fairy tales. Because that's what the Bible is, it is the Original Fantasy Story. Every pagan myth, every fairy tale, every fantasy ever written, is just the human heart trying to come up with ways to tell the story a different way, because we all know the story, and we all know it to be true.

And now when I read the Gospels, I understand, and I tremble in fear and awe and am, at the same time, overcome with love.


So I'm not saying, obviously, that everyone should do it my way, maybe everyone else was smart enough to understand this story the first time, but I wasn't. And C.S Lewis gave me a much needed nudge in the right direction."

A quote.

"Will power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to posses. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them or shifting their burden on others. The making of the substance called Character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the pyramids..."

The DHM's last post reminded me of this passage from Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton, which I read earlier this year, so I thought I'd share it with you all.

I love this painting!

The colors are so beautiful and the image is so clear!

Do you see, in the far right corner, a rather greenish square?
Well, this is what it says:

"Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall, - one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar how far away,
The nights that shall become the days that were.

Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
O, Whose sounds mine inner sense in fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring) --
'Woe me for thee, unhappy Proserpine'. "

Do you know who painted this?

Habit Quotes for the Common Place Book

'Heroic spiritual lives are built by stacking days of obedience one on top of the other. Like a brick each obedient act is small in itself, but in time the acts will pile up, and a huge wall of strong character will be built - a great defense against temptation. we should strive for consistent obedience each day.'
From the Life Application Bible's intro to Samuel.

We sow our thoughts, and we reap our actions; we sow our actions, and we reap our habits; we sow our habits, and we reap our characters; we sow our characters, and we reap our destiny.
Desiderius Gerhard Erasmus

Sow an action, reap a habit.
Hannah More

Pursuits become habits.

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
Ovid

Bad habits are best rooted out by replacing them with good habits.

Query

In whatever career field it is that involves the design of packaging for electronic items in smaller sizes (earbuds for iPods, as a random example)- is the apparent latent or blatent sadism and antisocial tendencies combined with a basic grudge against the human race a requirement, a part of the job description or is it a case of natural selection?

The Sunroom Project

First the girls and our lovely houseguest from Texas cleared everything out of the room except a couple very big and heavy things the HM had to move, and then our lovely houseguest from Texas washed the floor. What's not to LOVE about houseguests like this?

Then she and Jenny painted the floor this bright shade of lily pad green (that's not what it was called, but that's what I thought it looked like once down on the floor).

But this was only the middle stage of the project. Come back tomorrow to see what happened next.=)

Boiled peanuts

As I mentioned here, I unwittingly purchased a huge bag (around two pounds or more) of raw, unsalted, peanuts still in the shell, and I had no idea what to do with them as none of us were interested in shelling them. I asked here for advice, and boiled peanuts, which I did recall eating once or twice, seemed to be the way to go.

I hunted around online for directions. First I rinsed them until the water ran clear. Then I soaked them for around an hour (I didn't mean to do it that long, but I forgot what I was doing). I had to put a huge platter on top of the peanuts to keep some submerged. Then I rinsed and rinsed again.

Then I put the peanuts in a huge pot of salted water. I didn't measure, but you do want salty water. I boiled them for about half an hour or longer. What I did not do soon enough was put a weighted object (like the lid to a cast iron skillet) on top to keep the top layer submerged. They float. So the top ones were not getting done while the bottom ones were quite boiled.

Then I drained them and heated them a few minutes in the oven, not enough to make them crunchy, but enough to make them not soggy, and still hot. This is also makes them a bit saltier as the water evaporates by the salt doesn't. They texture should be something like firmly cooked kidney beans- not quite mush, but not at all crunchy either. The fact that peanuts are a legume really comes out in this dish.

I loved them. Our houseguest from Texas loved them. But I think we were the only ones. I put the rest in a crockpot and took them to the singing, and two or three other people really enjoyed them.

I put the rest back on a pan in the oven and left them in until the nuts were crunchy, at which point the rest of my family liked them, but I didn't enjoy them nearly as much as hot and freshly boiled. And it turns out, that's the healthier way to have them:

Boiled peanuts have more health benefits that raw, dry or oil-roasted nuts, according to researchers.

Lloyd Walker, chair of Alabama A&M University's Department of Food and Animal Sciences who co-authored the study, said these phytochemicals have antioxidant qualities that protect cells against the risk of degenerative diseases, including cancers, diabetes and heart disease.

"Boiling is a better method of preparing peanuts in order to preserve these phytochemicals," Walker said.

The study will appear in Wednesday's edition of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. The other co-authors in the study are A&M researchers Yvonne Chukwumah and Martha Verghese, as well as University of Alabama in Huntsville researcher Bernhard Vogler.

Walker said peanuts and other plants use phytochemicals for things such as helping avoid disease and insect attacks.
chemicals to a certain point. Overcooking the nuts destroys the useful elements.

Boiled peanuts have up to four times more healthy phytochemicals than raw, or roasted peanuts, which is kind of an eye opener to the more radical raw food proponents.

And on the Note of Medical Insurance-

Or lack thereof, The Equuschick had her own minor epiphanies as she was calling her own set of Middle Men to get her medical bills straightened out.

She isn't paying just the doctors, she's paying the Middle Men who are supposed to make everything more affordable.


Dude, that is so twisted it isn't even funny. How convoluted.

She is also, she strongly suspects, paying the computer companies that make the obnoxious automated messages that nobody wants to listen to anyway.

So there's Bozo #1, thinking to himself, "How can we make medical care more affordable," and Bozo #2 says "I know! Let's create Special Programs to Help People Pay for It!", and they all go "Woohoo, how generous and clever of us!" and it seems to The Equuschick that they it never seems to occur to them that Special Programs will need employees and buildings and equipment all their own, and when all is said and done society barely breaks even.

So that is probably an embarrassing and gross oversimplification, but there it is.

The Equuschick's grasp of economics has always been limited, and left her longing for the days when one bartered over beaver fur and traded livestock.

Having said that, she must say in conclusion, that she has no right complain, as God has all ready blessed her richly beyond her just return.

It is just that, as usual, The Equuschick finds herself despising a system she does not understand.

Saving money on your photo prints.

If you have a lot of digital photos you've been wanting to print to send to friends, or use in scrapbooks, holiday season is a pretty good time to print them. A lot of stores are offering sales on their photo printing. Walgreens is one that I know of.

Black & White Camera Settings are Fun :-)

This is the Equuschick and a dear friend. Don't they look sweet?

Appearances can be deceiving, though, because that was the day they played Dress Up in Goth. I'll let the Equuschick tell you more about that. I was just the photographer.

Is this how you feel about books?

"Now, some folks dislike my use of my books in this way. They love their books so much that they think it nothing short of sacrilege to mark up a book. But to me that's like having a child so prettily dressed that you can't romp and play with it. What is the good of a book, I say, if it is too pretty for use? I like to have my books speak to me, and then I like to talk back to them."
Phillip Brooks in "The Americanization of Edward Bok."

Picture from here.

Libraries and small towns

I mentioned recently that Granny Tea went to the library looking for a retelling of The Gingerbread Man or The House that Jack Built to read to the preschoolers in her work center. The library had no such tales. As an afternote, let me share also that when she shared her frustration with the director of the preschool, that personage looked blank and asked, "What's The House that Jack Built? I've never heard of that."

Sigh.

A kindly intentioned reader suggested we look over in the folk tale section- which is in the nonfiction stacks, which was what Granny Tea's helpful grand-daughter who works at the library did. They found one Gingerbread Man that was actually the story of the Gingerbread Man. At least, one hopes other, larger libraries have a better selection than we do. What Granny Tea wanted was a picture book retelling of the story- something like Jan Brett's sweet Gingerbread baby retelling. Paul Galdone retold many, many old folk and fairy tales in amusing but true to the original fashion. Our library has about 12, of which four are sound recordings rather than books, and none of them are The Gingerbread Man or The House that Jack Built.


And of course, every well appointed library ought to have the Gold Standard in pictures books, some illustrated by Caldecott himself, and here is a Caldecott version of The House that Jack Built still in print. the Randolph Caldecott House that Jack Built. But, no. We have folk tales from Botswana, and a Gingerbread Man story set in the Caribbean. And we have the Caldecott Sing a Song of Sixpence.

Under 'folk tales' we also have these specific titles:

American tall tales (CD/Unabridged) [sound recording] / by Mary Pope Osborne. Title (2002) Sound (non-music)

Best-loved stories told at the National Storytelling Festival / selected by the National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling. Title (1991) Book

Cut from the same cloth : American womwn of myth, legend, and tall tale / by Robert D. San Souci ; illustrated by Brian Pinkney. Title (1993) Book

Further tales of Uncle Remus : the misadventures of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, the Doodang, and other creatures / as told by Julius Lester ; illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Title (1990) Book

More scary stories to tell in the dark / collected from folklore and retold by Alvin Schwartz ; with drawings by Stephen Gammell. Title (1984) Book

More tales of Uncle Remus : further adventures of Brer Rabbit, his friends, enemies, and others / as told by Julius Lester ; illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Title (1988) Book

Myths, legends, and folktales of America / by David Leeming and Jake Page. Title (1998) Book

The people could fly : American Black folktales / told by Virginia Hamilton ; illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. Title (1985) Book
The People could fly [sound recording] : American Black folktales / by Virginia Hamilton. Title (1987) Sound (non-music)

The white deer and other stories told by the Lenape / edited by John Bierhorst. Title (1995) Book


And that's about it.

Our county seat holds just around five thousand people- and this is our county library. Our telephone book, which covers two or three counties and a couple dozen communities, is less than 1/2 an inch thick. There is one prefix for our entire town- the county seat, and the biggest two news items in town for the last year are probably the story about the homecoming queen who got drunk and arrested for underage drinking, and the news that the most expensive grocery store in town extended its hours so instead of closing at 9 p.m. it now closes at midnight. That is terribly exciting, by the way, but they've tried it before and it didn't work.

Friends of ours wanted to mail us something but did not have our address. I gave it to them, and jokingly said that if they just listed all nine of us on the package with the zip code, they probably did not need an address. I do not think we had lived here a year, but that is what they did, and the post office delivered it.

When my parents are out of town, sometimes the mail lady just brings us their mail, because she knows we usually pick it up for them.

We can't always find the books we want at the library, but we can usually find a friendly face.=)

Medical Insurance and Government Health Care

If at the end of this post you are as confused as I am, I'll feel better about it.

We have what we thought was a fantastic health insurance plan because the HM served in the military for 20 years. Obviously, the HG and Equuschick aren't on it because they are too old, but The Cherub, as a child with profound disabilities (including severe retardation) is supposed to be on it forever. That's not the only reason my husband served the full twenty years, but it was certainly something we always took into consideration.

Not too long ago we got a message saying she was eligible for Medicare, and that nearly 100 dollars a month would be deducted from her monthly Social Security check (her birth father died) to cover that. We declined, since she has full coverage with my husband's retirement.

Except our insurance, Tri-care, will no longer cover her medical bills, because she is eligible for Medi-care.
Medicare, they insist, must pay its portion first, before they will even consider chipping in. Naturally, we didn't find that out until after she had all kinds of medical tests and a new doctor that for the first time in years look somebody who will actually be of use to The Cherub, but we cannot go back until the insurance mess is cleaned up.

We have been around and around the loop talking to everybody and their answering machine, and the bottom line is 'eligible' for Medicare means, to our insurance, that Medicare and that hundred dollars a month out of pocket is mandatory. So, just out of curiosity, my husband looked into SSI, which the Cherub is also 'eligible' for since she's over 21 and totally disabled- the point of needing hands on, direct care 24 and 7. With SSI you have to charge for room and board, and supposedly you get to set the figure, which is an impossible thing to figure out, but it was largely an academic exercise for several reasons, one of which is because she's only eligible, they tell us, for 60-70 dollars a month in SSI anyway.

Of course, this is the same government agency that told us that The Cherub, who at 20 does not talk, still has toileting accidents, cannot bathe herself, fix her own food, brush her own teeth, read, write, or sign more than fifty words is actually not disabled and that being homeschooled is not still in school.

Talking to these people is enough to drive a person to drink. Which, I understand, might then make us eligible for more benefits than the Cherub currently gets.

As California Goes, So Goes the Nation

At least when it comes to Textbooks. Since CA and TX are the largest textbook purchasers, publishers generally cater to them, and that's what the rest of the country ends up buying.
And California is making some interesting changes in its requirements:

SB 777 prohibits any instruction or school-sponsored activity that would promote discrimination against gender. That means terms like "mom and dad" and "husband and wife" cannot be used in California textbooks because they suggest that heterosexuality is the norm. And under the new law, teachers and students who oppose same-sex "marriage" or who express disapproval of cross-dressing or sex-change operations could face disciplinary measures.

Schools can no longer enforce his and her bathrooms if students claim they 'identify' with the opposite gender:

"Mom and Dad" as well as "husband and wife" effectively have been banned from California schools under a bill signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who with his signature also ordered public schools to allow boys to use girls restrooms and locker rooms, and vice versa, if they choose.

"We are shocked and appalled that the governor has blatantly attacked traditional family values in California," said Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute.
[ ]
England told WND that the law is not a list of banned words, including "mom" and "dad." But she said the requirement is that the law bans discriminatory bias.

"Having 'mom' and 'dad' promotes a dicsriminatory bias. You have to either get rid of 'mom' and 'dad' or include everything when talking about [parental issues]," she said. "They [promoters of sexual alternative lifestyles] do consider that discriminatory."

Also signed was AB394, which targets parents and teachers for such indoctrination through "anti-harassment" training, CCF said.
[...]

Thomasson said SB777 prohibits any "instruction" or school-sponsored "activity" that "promotes a discriminatory bias" against "gender" – the bill's definition includes cross-dressing and sex changes – as well as "sexual orientation."

"Because no textbook or instruction in California public schools currently disparages transsexuality, bisexuality, or homosexuality, the practical effect of SB777 will be to require positive portrayals of these sexual lifestyles at every government-operated school," CCF noted.

Offenders will face the wrath of the state Department of Education, up to and including lawsuits.

CCF noted that now on a banned list will be any text, reference or teaching aid that portrays marriage as only between a man and woman, materials that say people are born male or female (and not in between), sources that fail to include a variety of transsexual, bisexual and homosexual historical figures, and sex education materials that fail to offer the option of sex changes.

Further, homecoming kings now can be either male or female – as can homecoming queens, and students, whether male or female, must be allowed to use the restroom and locker room corresponding to the sex with which they choose to identify.

AB394 promotes the same issues through state-funded publications, postings, curricula and handouts to students, parents and teachers.

It also creates the circumstances where a parent who says marriage is only for a man and a woman in the presence of a lesbian teacher could be convicted of "harassment," and a student who believes people are born either male or female could be reported as a "harasser" by a male teacher who wears women's clothes, CCF said.

California public schools have serious problems just teaching kids to read, but by golly they will all 'know' the sexual preferences of those historical personages the homosexual community wants to claim for its own. They are not likely to know anything else about said historical personages. Trivial information such as who they were and what they did and why we care won't matter nearly as much as their private demons, real or imagined.

Good Listens?

We talk about good reads quite often, here. I want to ask about good listens.

First, let me tell a cool story. The Progeny wanted to get the Parents an iPod Nano for our 25th anniversary, but they did not want to spend an arm and a leg because they are our Progeny, after all, so they are frugal.

The HG went on Facebook and found exactly what they wanted for exactly the right price. But then she thought, "I don't want to buy something like this from some stranger on Facebook." Still, she clicked on the link- and lo and indeed behold, the 'stranger' on facebook was a Christian we know who lived 45 minutes from here (in the town where the HG goes to University) and has given a couple of the Progeny a ride down to singings further south of both of us. So, coolness, the HG picked up our new iPod nano from the young man we know well enough to trust over iPod purchases and Progeny transportation.

And Pip formatted it and copied a bunch of my beloved Psalms in chant form, and now we're ready for more. But what?

A few of the fine old folk songs and hymns from Cumberland Books.

Librivox.com, of course.

The AudioBible Online

Other suggestion? We're interested in music, literature, poetry, podcasts, all kinds of things. The only criteria is it must be free.

Vintage Math

From the textbook Number Primer by Middlesex A. Bailey, AM (Head of the department of mathematics, New York, Training School for Teachers) and George B. Germann, PH.D. (Principal of Public School No. 130, Brooklyn), published by the American Book Company
copyright 1909

In form and substance these exercises are simple, progressive, and within the reading experience of pupils. The exercises are the outgrowth of three years' classroom experimentation in the selection and arrangement of number material adapted to the needs and understanding of first and second year pupils.

I am not sure this is the sort of math problem we would find in contemporary math texts for the public school. What do you think?

Sunday Hymn Post

Spirit of God, in love descend,

And make our hearts Thy place of rest;

In all our need a steadfast Friend,

To fill our store with gifts the best;


To cleanse our souls with holy fire

From sordid stains that guilt imparts,

And with Thy heavenly power inspire

Our languid zeal, and fainting hearts;


To lift our minds to nobler things

Than earth from all its best can show--

The wealth that flies on speedy wings,

The fleeting joys, like sparks that glow.


Come in the hour of sore distress,

When deep the heart for comfort sighs;

And with Thy soothing kindliness

The tear-drops wipe from weeping eyes.


"Lo, I am with you to the end,"

Thus speaks the promise of our Lord;

O Spirit of the Christ, descend,

Fulfil to us the gracious word.
__________________________________________________________________

John Brownlie

8,8,8,8


Lord, may Thy Holy Spirit calm

Our troubled souls, and give them rest;

And with His touch, like healing balm,

Allay the pain of the distressed.


We hear the promise Thou didst make

To lone disciples long ago;

And peace and hope our souls o'ertake,

And joy dispels our brooding woe.


Now let us feel the Spirit's power,

And let us hear His gracious word;

Fulfil to us this holy hour,

The promise of our dying Lord.


Come, Holy Ghost, with warmth of love,

With light of hope, and calm of peace,

And raise our sense-bound souls above

The mocking joys of earth that cease.
________________________________________

From Hymns of the Early Church by Brownlee, translated and published in 1913

Happy Things

* Fall Walks with a friend

* Listening to this friend play Simon & Garfunkel songs on the piano

* Watching British comedies with this friend

* Taking pictures of this friend and a sister being goofy (because I rarely am goofy)

... It's just been a good week-end, folks.

The Mona LIsa

This is an interesting article about some more study that was done on the Mona Lisa. From the scans, it looks like da Vinci had originally made her smile more expressive than he ended up painting it.

This 'n That

The singing last night was at my parents' house, just next door. There were three generations represented, although the oldest generation was scant- just my folks this time. We had approximately 27 people. The youngest in attendance is four years old, the oldest is 70- the college age having the largest representation. Everybody participates, and I, for one, get goosebumps when my 9 year old is loudly singing 'God is love' along with everybody else.

We sang for about two hours. We go around the room and everybody, young and old, has a turn to pick one song from the hymnal, and we always sing ALL the verses. Sometimes we go around the room again, but usually we are hoarse by the time we make the round once, because we do sing out.

Then we break for snacks- everybody brings something, whether it's a homemade cookies, pigs in a blanket, boiled peanuts, a bottle of soda, a bag of chips, or something fancier. After snacks we clear the tables for games.

At Granny Tea's house the youngest children mostly romp in the basement where there is a ping pong table and space for little boys to stretch their legs and their imaginations.

Upstairs some people visited while others played Apples to Apples and others still played boardless scrabble. Four young people (one dude, three dudettes) took a flashlight and walked down to the creek in the rain.

The Headmaster, The FYB, The Cherub, and I left at about 11:00 as the FYB was coughing and feverish. We dosed the boy with garlic, vitamin C, and a bit of Tylenol for his headache, tucked the two children into bed, and climbed under the covers ourselves. I read until the rest of the crowd came in shortly after midnight. That 'crowd' includes a young woman we've known for some dozen years who is visiting us from Texas and three members of a family who are visiting us from a couple hours down south.

The FYG spent the night with Granny Tea.

Granny Tea called us this morning to tell us one of the goats was out on her side of the fence, and the HM got up and got dressed to go see, but it turned out all the goats were on our side. We plan to butcher them soon and put the meat in the freezer, but we have no freezer except the tiny chest freezer that is already full, and they need some fattening up, having subsisted all summer on brush and weeds on the three acres or so of woods immediately surrounding the house.

Later we're going over to Granny Tea's homestead farm to dig up some lilacs for our friends down south to take back home, and we'll probably get quite wet doing that.

The day is cloudy and overcast- a sort of gloomy looking twilight over everything. In my newly painted sunroom, the whimsical storybook floor makes the whole room seem brighter and cheerful. It wasn't intended to be whimsical and storybook, but that's how it's turned out, and I think it's kind of fun. We'll share pictures later. We'll be looking for some toadstool statuary to go in there- something red with white polka dots, I think.

Tomorrow we'll have our weekly Resurrection Sunday meeting here at our house. We're a small group, we have hopes for more. Then we take our friend back to the airport- our other houseguests are also leaving sometime tomorrow or later tonight.

We'll probably eat some chocolate to comfort ourselves, but it won't be the same. And then... we start another week of school, work, worship, and play.

Bless A Blogger

Is there a post you read this week that made you think, helped you adjust your thinking, reminded you of your blessings, made you want to share it with friends, gave you a good idea, contained information so useful you just had to bookmark it, or in any other way blessed you?
Bless the rest of us (and the blogger) by sharing the link to it right here. The usual Mr. Linky widgets are fun and very useful, but you link to your own posts. We want links to other people's blogs for this one.

A bit of advice:

Always paint with someone; the job is so much more enjoyable!

Parents and Children

In our last installment of this article from Volume II of the Parents' Review (1890), Charlote Mason was saying "Perhaps, indeed, this [idea] of the Kindergarten is the one vital conception of education that we have." She continues:

"But in these days of revolutionary thought, when, all along the line- in geology and anthropology, chemistry, philology, and biology- science is changing front, it is necessary that we should reconsider our conception of education. We are taught, for example, that "heredity" is by no means the simple and direct transmission, from parent, or remoter ancestor, to child of power and proclivity, virtue and defect; and we breathe freer, because we had begun to suspect that if tis were so, it would mean to most of us an inheritance of exaggerated defects; imbecility, insanity, congenital disease- are they utterly removed from any one of us? So of education, we begin to ask, Is its work so purely formative as we thought? Is it directly formative at all? How much is there in this pleasing and easy doctrine that the drawing forth and strengthening and directing of the several "faculties" is education? Parents are very jealous over the individuality of their children; they mistrust the tendency to develop all on the same plan; and this instinctive jealousy is right; for, supposing that education really did consist in systematised efforts to draw out every power that is in us, why, we should all develop on the same lines, be as like as "two peas," and (should we not?) die of weariness of one another! Some of us have an uneasy sense that things are tending towards this deadly sameness. But, indeed, the fear is groundless. We may believe that the personality, the individuality of each of us is too dear to God, and too necessary to a complete humanity, to be left at the mercy of empires. We are absolutely safe, and the tenderest child is fortified against a battering-ram of educational forces.

The problem of education is more complex than it seems at first sight, and well for us and the world that it is so. "Education is a life;" you may stunt and starve and kill, or you may cherish and sustain; but the beating of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and the development of the faculties (are there any "faculties"?) are only indirectly our care. The poverty of our thought on the subject of education is shown by the fact that we have no word which at all implies the sustaining of a life: education (e, out, and ducere, to lead, to draw) is very inadequate; it covers no more than those occasional gymnastics of the mind which correspond with those by which the limbs are trained; training (trahere) is almost synonymous, and upon these two words rests the misconception that the development and the exercise of the "faculties" is the object of education (we must needs use the word for want of a better. Our homely Saxon "bringing up" is nearer the truth, perhaps because of its very vaguenss; anyway, "up" implies an aim, and "bringing up" an effort."

I will write more about this later (perhaps Monday). Company's here!=)

Woodstoves

The sunroom floor is being painted by a kind, tenderhearted, artistic, generous, and very precious friend who flew all the way out here from Texas. I'm very excited about the project, but it's not ready for prime time yet, so it's still a secret.

When it's done, we want to put a small woodburning stove in it so we can use the room all year around. But we have no idea what kind of stove to look for, or even where to look. We did look at the two home improvement stores in the nearest larger town, and they did not have what I wanted.

What I want, I think, is something like this. But that's in Scotland. Or this, but still I did want something closer to home.


Oooooh, or THIS. Mmmm, hmmmm. It's the Scan 5-2, but it deserves a more charming name.
The Scan 5-2 looks awfully cute. I can't find a price, which is always ominous, and the dealers I am finding are either in Canada or the Pacific Northwest (any of our friends out there want to pick one up for us and bring it over?). Isn't it darling?!

We're wanting to spend less than 300 dollars, as it is a small room.







We'll probably go with something like this, although even this one (the Lowe's Vogelzang Small Cast Iron Box Wood Stove, Item #: 200300, Model: BX26E,) is, according to the website, unavailable in our area.



And that Scan 5-2 item is really unusual, which means, since I like it best, it's probably at least five times our price range.

Potatoes, oatmeal and grits.

My weekly post on 'what's in your hand' is up at Frugal hacks.

Last week I had an interesting discussion about frugality that ties in with that post over at Frugal Hacks. I wrote there about the necessity sometimes for cheerful self-sacrifice and self-denial.

Some of you may remember my story about the six months where all we had to eat for lunch was baked potatoes- with a bit of cottage cheese when we were feeling flush. I now have two stories to top that one. I have a friend who comes from a family with 13 children. Her father was a blue collar worker; her mother a housewife. And there was about a year, she says, when her family had oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the parents told the children to be thankful there was oatmeal.
Her father had been cheated by his business partner, who also left the business in shambles with outstanding debts the partner had incurred with no intention of repaying. So the father went to work to pay back his partner's debts. And that was the oatmeal year.

As she told that story, a young father who lives up the road from us nodded his head in recognition. "For us," he said, "it was grits. Somebody gave us a huge bag of grits, probably at least fifty pounds. And so we ate them three times a day. Cooked them outside over a fire, too. The electricity'd been turned off. During the school year I ate the school lunch [he's considerably younger than my friend of the oatmeal eating days], and I sure was happy to have it. Summer that year was miserable."

Makes you feel kind of humble, doesn't it?

A very funny quote!

"And Mr. Mick not only became a vegetarian, but at length declared vegetarianism doomed ("shedding,"as he called it finely, "the green blood of the silent animals"), and predicted that men in a better age would live on nothing but salt. And then came the pamphlet from Oregon (where the thing was tried), the pamphlet called "Why should Salt suffer?" and there was more trouble."
The Napoleon of Notting Hill, by G.K. Chesterton.

Excerpt From A School Reading.

HEIGHT

When I was young I felt so small
And frightened, for the world was tall.

And even grasses seemed to me
A forest of immensity,

Until I learned that I could grow
A glance would leave them far below.

Spanning a tree's height with my eye,
Suddenly I soared as high;

And fixing on a star I grew,
I pushed my head against the blue!

Still, like a singing lark, I find
Rapture to leave the grass behind.

And sometimes standing in a crowd
My lips are cool against a cloud.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, October 11, 1925

I'm reading a book of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diary and letters, and I came across this poem that she sent to her mother (special delivery) right after she had written it. I especially liked the last two lines.

Green Fruit

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote this about 14 years after his marriage:

"Love is temporary and ends with marriage. Marriage is the perfection which love aimed at- ignorant of what it sought. Marriage is a good known only to the parties, - a relation of perfect understanding, aid, contentment, possession of themselves and of the world, -which dwarfs love to green fruit."

Josephine Moffett Benton, in The Pace of a Hen, shares that:

"Mark Twain once observed that no couple could begin to know the bliss of being married, short of twenty-five years together. In the presence of a companionable middle-aged pair, young romance seems a feeble reed in comparison to the strong plant of their devotion. How have they weathered the storms and reached such a mature affection, that the shining joy in being together is a blessing to all who touch their lives?"

And one of my favorite American poets, Phyllis McGinley writes in:

The Landscape of Love


I.

Do not believe them. Do not believe what strangers
Or casual tourists, moored a night and day
In some snug, sunny, April-sheltering bay
(Along the coast and guarded from great dangers)
Tattle to friends when ignorant they return.
Love is no lotus-island endlessly
Washed by a summer ocean, no Capri;
But a huge landscape, perilous and stern--

More poplared than the nations to the north,
More bird-beguiled, stream-haunted. But the ground
Shakes underfoot. Incessant thunders sound,
Winds shake the trees, and tides run back and forth
And tempests winter there, and flood and frost
In which too many a voyager is lost.

II

None knows this country save the colonist,
His homestead planted. He alone has seen
The hidden groves unconquerably green,
The secret mountains steepling through the mist.
Each is his own discovery. No chart
Has pointed him past chasm, bog, quicksand,
Earthquake, mirage, into his chosen land--
Only the steadfast compass of the heart.

Turn a deaf ear, then, on the traveler who,
Speaking a foreign tongue, has never stood
Upon love's hills or in a holy wood
Sung incantations; yet, having bought a few
Postcards and trinkets at some cheap bazaar,
Cries, "This and thus the God's dominions are!"

~Phyllis McGinley

I think it's impossible to truly convey the excitement, the glamour, the richness of married life to a child, for many of the same reasons it's nearly impossible to explain the excitement, glamour, and deep fullfillment that comes from parenthood to the deliberately childless. How can you describe the color of your baby's eyes to a blind man? How do you describe the sound of a lullabye to the deaf?

Even to those in love and preparing to marry it is impossible to explain. They think it is all the giddy butterflies in the stomach, the throb of your hearts when you first touch, when you first kiss, when you snuggle up one another and feel the jolt of touching fingertips.

It was in about about the fifth year of our marriage, my husband and I found the ''marriage is the perfection love aimed at, and dwarfs love to green fruit' quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and we knew we had found a keeper.

I met the Headmaster at Sunday School when I was seventeen years old. He was new to the area, and when I locked eyes with him across the room, my stomach did flip flops. However, later that day I told my mother he was weird and I was just sitting next to him at church to make the new guy feel welcome and not so friendless. It wasn't dignified- nor did it fit with my carefully acted facade of coolness- to let on just how very much I liked the new guy.

I was so cool that it was several boyfriends and one fiance later before the Headmaster and I were married- to each other- at 20, but let us draw a respectful veil of silence over those embarrassing shenanigans.

When we were married, we thought all those stuffy old couples (like, you know, in their 30's) who didn't sit next to each other and touch each other all the time and suck face in public were pathetic. That, we thought smugly, isn't the kind of marriage we're going to have. We're going to be romantic forever.

We were green fruit.

We didn't know that there's something far more intimate, special, and romantic about catching your spouse's eye across a crowded room and knowing exactly what he's thinking, and knowing that he knows what you are thinking then about all the public slobbering a young couple can produce.
Any hormonal pair of kids can slobber. Nobody can read the Headmaster's mind, body language, and facial expressions like I can- and that's far more romantic and intimate than all the face-sucking in the world.

Although that's kinda fun, too.

Happy Anniversary, Honey!!

This Is Beautiful

Don't allow anyone to say that our fine state is not beautiful!
They just don't know what they're talking about because they have never "Lived here"

The morns may be meeker than they were -

- but I still feel a distinct animosity towards them, no matter how meek they are.

Still, even with this sleepy wrath at having my night's sleep cut short, there are things I appreciate about the early morning. God made a beautiful world and on my drive to school I usually see an amazing sunrise, probably see a hawk or a heron, and occasionally see deer. Those are all nice things. It would just be nicer to see them in a well-rested state.

"The death-bed of a day, how beautiful!"

You can't tell from this picture, but that patch of cloudless sky on the horizon was still bright blue, while the clouds all looked like they were on fire.

An interesting fact about White-tailed Deer

"Whitetails also eat falling leaves, especially dogwood and maple, and have learned to select the newly fallen because of the moisture they still retain. Though color-blind, the deer can pick out by smell the red leaves, which have a higher sugar content. They gobble up fallen leaves at the rate of nearly forty a minute; a two-hundred-pound deer can consume nearly ten thousand leaves in a day." Critters, by A.B.C. Whipple

A reeeeally yummy Chocolate Frosting!

Here's where the recipe is.
(When I made it I did add the Cool Whip that it mentions in the first part of the recipe.)

Nature red of beak and claw

Golden Eagle attacks Roe Deer in Czech Republic.

Home-made stain remover

When it comes to most clothes, my philosophy is that if you wear it once it's used, so I buy them "pretested" at thrift shops, consignment stores and garage sales. Clothes with stains (especially, when my kids were smaller, baby clothes with food stains) will be so cheap sometimes they are being given away- which is GREAT, because you can get out almost any stain with this recipe:

1 cup Cascade Dishwashing detergent
1 cup Chlorox 2 (color safe bleach) OR Borax (Twenty Mule Team is one brand)
5 gallons of water.

Mix this solution and soak garment overnight. Wash it in the washing machine normally. I use the same bucket of solution over and over. Occasionally it will lighten a brightly colored item, and once I left a pair of hot pink slacks belonging to my then four year old in the bucket for a week (I forgot about it) and they turned cream colored.
Since I use it on tough stains, it's the last ditch effort for an item that was a lost cause anyway (the hot pink slacks had some sort of tar on them, and it did remove the stain along with the hot pink dye)- so it doesn't matter if the solution spoils it.

Works for me.

The Terrible Trivium

When we brought Equuschick home from the hospital, houseguests followed, and arrived that same night. They stayed a few days (lovely people) and then went home. Today we are picking up a dear, dear friend from the airport, and she will stay a few days and then go home, but before she leaves, other houseguests will arrive again. And so on. We expect to have had fifty of them, or more, before 2007 is out.. We had company for dinner last night, and more company over for Tuesday night Bible study, and that company includes 7 children under ten, and one three year old who makes the quads (the 'Four Winds of Destruction') look like a still life picture.

What with one thing and another, we have been preparing for houseguests and company by washing their sheets and moving all the clutter we cannot get to just now into my bedroom, dusting and sweeping the living room while leaving pretty much every other room untouched, and buying groceries since my tiny chest freezer is full, but utterly unorganized, dysfunctional, and is long past overdue for an inventory. My bedroom floor includes, but is not limited to, three bags of mismatched Tupperware to be gone through and tossed or put away, a picnic basket and a bag of teas and accoutrements to be sorted and organized, four bags or boxes of books to be read, stored, added to the catalog, listed for sale, or thrown away, some dirty clothes, a bag of Mary Kay lotions and potions that a former Mary Kay salesperson gave me, the dog hair that eddies up and pools around doorways and beneath furniture, various pairs of shoes, the two parts of a box to a puzzle (I do not know what happened to the puzzle)- and that's all I am going to tell you about.


I am feeling completely overwhelmed just now by the sheer mountain of messes everywhere in my house, the minefield I have to pick through just to find my way to bed, the undone projects I must complete, the agonizing stress of stuff unbloggable (which, on the scale of stresses, pretty much makes everything else combined look like featherweight stresses), the undone laundry, etc, etc, etc, and company's coming tomorrow.

I mean, really overwhelmed. To the point that the dog hair on my bedroom floor makes me cry, the unbloggable stuff gives me nightmares, flashbacks, and worse, and I am pretty much a real downer to be around.

So, naturally, last night while some of our houseguests and the rest of my family looked at hilarious you-tube video clips upstairs, I rearranged my living room downstairs.

Next I may sharpen pencils.

As the Terrible Trivium, 'demon of petty tasks and worthless jobs, ogre of wasted effort, and monster of habit' says, "what could be more important than doing unimportant things? If you stop to do enough of them, you'll never get to where you're going."

Spring Semester, here we come!

I've registered for these classes:

* Spanish Frontiers in North America
* History of World War II
* Colonial American History
* Recent American Constitutional History

One of them is with a Prof I've taken before... twice before, actually. His classes are excellent.
I am slightly nervous because with four history classes (two of them 400-levels) I know I'll be reading even more than I am now (which hardly seems possible). But it will be good reading and I'll be learning so much. And each semester brings me close to graduation! Hurrah!

The sunset

We had an absolutely gorgeous sunset this evening. Everything was glowing red or orange, and so I walked out in the middle of the soybean field to get a picture of it. This is HG's favorite picture that I took, I think.

It's That Time Of Year Again

We make this and hot cocoa mix every year. We make the hot cocoa mix in December, usually, but the Russian Tea we make in the fall when the days start turning cool and crisp and the leaves just begin to change color. Our 11 year old quite proudly made a large batch of this yesterday, and Equuschick shared jars of this and pumpkin bread with the neighbors who took care of the animals while she was in hospital.

Russian Tea, Original Convenience Version

* 3 cups sugar (Splenda works and tastes just fine. There's so much sugar in the other ingredients that the 'splenda' taste disguised)

* 2 cups orange flavored breakfast drink (powdered concentrate; we use Tang)

* 1 cup unsweetened instant tea mix

* 1 tsp ground cloves

* 1 tsp ground cinnamon

* 1 envelope unsweetened lemonade mix

- Combine all the ingredients and mix well. Store in an airtight container

- to serve, put 1 1/2 -2 rounded spoonfuls of mix into a cup filled with boiling- or at least very hot- water. Stir well.

I shared this here a while back and friends posted there:

coffeemamma said...
This sounds similar to the way we were served coffee in Mexico! In a *huge* kettle hung from a tripod over an open fire, they boiled water, coarse ground coffee, orange quarters (rind and all) and sugar cane. When it was finished (not sure how you tell that...) it was strained and served in strange mugs that looked a little like pilsner glasses with handles- best coffee I ever tasted!


Kim C. posted the Hillbilly Housewife's version that is much more inexpensive. That's what we're making these days, and here's how we have it:

4 to 5 cups of sugar
4 packets generic orange kool-aid mix
4 packets generic lemon kool-aid mix (depending on your sour tooth)
1 cup instant tea (with lemon flavor is very good)
2-4 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Whisk all these ingredients together in a large bowl. Put tablespoon in cup of very hot water and stir. Add lemon juice splash to taste, if desired. I want to try it with stevia next, and see how that works.

And Terri said...

This is actually a modern adaptation of an old recipe. I don't know how it compares frugality-wise, but in my opinion, the old version tastes better and is more healthy. (I cannot have artificial colors either, coffeemamma.)

Try this: In your stock pot, bring to a boil two quarts of water with two cinnamon sticks and a heaping teaspoon of whole cloves. Remove from heat and add 10 tea bags. Cheap black tea is the best. Cover and allow to steep for 5 minutes or more. Add the juice of one lemon, a large can of pineapple juice (I believe it is 46 oz.) and an equal amount of orange juice. We used to be able to get orange juice very cheaply in cans, but now we just use the pineapple juice can to measure. Return to low heat and add sweetener to taste. We use honey, but the original called for white sugar. Keep warm but do not allow to boil. When it seems spicy enough, it is ready to serve. If you increase the cloves, it will effectively numb a sore throat.

We usually have this on hand in a crock pot whenever we have a winter storm or someone in the family has a cold. This is less convenient than your mix, but it has the advantage of making your house smell wonderful and so welcoming to anyone coming in from the cold.

This one is delicious, but I am afraid our jaded taste buds gravitate toward the artificial colors and flavors of ten cent kool aid packets, and our desire for instant gratification makes us lean that direction as well.

Every version is wonderful for the sore throats and head colds of fall.

Anybody else have a favorite fall beverage or treat?

Parents and Children, a Parents' Review article

Parents and Children,
A sequel to "Home Education"
By the Editor

IV.- Parents as Inspirers. Second Part.

Sow an act,reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny- Thackeray.

Our last paper (November number) closed with an imperfect summary of what we may call the educational functions of parents. We found that it rests with the parents of the child to settle for the future man his ways of thinking, behaving, feeling, acting; his disposition, his particular talent; the manner of things upon which his thoughts shall run. Who shall fix limitations to the power of parents? The destiny of the child is ruled by his parents, because they have the virgin soil all to themselves. The first sowing must be at their hands, or at the hands of such as they choose to depute.

What do they sow? Ideas. We cannot too soon recognise what is the sole educational instrument we have to work with, and how this one instrument is to be handled. But how radically wrong is all our thought upon education! We cannot use the fit words because we do not think the right thing. For example, an idea is not an "instrument," but an agent; is not to be "handled," but, shall we say, set in motion? We have perhaps got over the educational misconception of the tabula rosa. No one now looks on the child's white soul as a tablet prepared for the exercise of the educator's supreme art. But the conception which ahs succeeded this time-honoured heresy rests on the same false bases of the august office and the infallible wisdom of the educator. Here it is in its cruder form: "Pestalozzi aimed more at harmoniously developing the faculties than at making use of them for the acquirement of knowledge; he sought to prepare the vase rather than to fill it." In the hands of Froebel the figure gains in boldness and beauty: It is no longer a mere vase to be shaped under the potter's fingers; but a flower, say a perfect rose, to be delicately and consciously and methodically moulded, petal by petal, curve and curl; for the perfume and living glory of the flower, why these will come; do you your part and mould the several petals; wait, too, upon sunshine and shower, give space and place for your blossom to expand. And so we go to work with a touch to "Imagination" here, and to "Judgment" there; now to the "Perceptive faculties," now to the "conceptive;" in this, aiming at the moral, and in this, at the intellectual nature of the child; touching into being, petal by petal, the flower of a perfect life under the genial influence of sunny looks and happy moods. This reading of the meaning of education and of the work of the educator is very fascinating, and it calls forth singular zeal and self-devotion on the part of those gardeners whose plants are the children. Perhaps, indeed, , this of the Kindergarten is the one vital conception of education that we have."

Although as we shall see when we continue, Miss Mason doesn't really think so. And this is one of the tricksie things about reading Miss Mason's gentle and genteel writings. She is so gentle in her approach that quite often when she is disagreeing with a particular position, less careful readers think she is speaking in approval.

Taken from Volume II of The Parents' Review, a periodical edited by Charlotte Mason from 1890 until her death in 1923. Volume II was published in 1891/2, and is, I understand, very difficult to find right now. If I do not own the only copy in North America, I am at least the only admitting it.=)

I am typing through the volume, transcribing them to go online so everybody can read them. I put the articles, in intallments, up here on our blog, and when complete I pass them on to this site to go online for everyone.

Much of this particular article, I believe, can be found in volume 2 and possibly 3 of Miss Mason's six volume series.

Grace & Desire

These being, in The Equuschick's admittedly brief life experience, the only two things necessary for a change of the heart, the soul, an attitude, or a mindset.

She says "only" because the theory is relatively simple, but as many other simple things are, it is not necessarily easy. (Okay, so in The Equuschick's experience, it is absolutely never easy.)

But the theory is sound.

Grace, of course, is what we all, whether knowingly or not, beg for when we beg for an answer to prayer. We beg to escape a temptation, we hope to change our attitude, and we ask for Grace, for without the Grace of God, we can work nothing in our own lives.

But if we have not the Desire, why should God spare His grace?

Alas, for The Equuschick has been there, praying in what she hopes to pass for some form of sincerity, that her attitude may improve, when all the while there is a twisted little demon inside her soul enjoying every moment of the pity party.

She can almost imagine, if you do not find the analogy irreverent, God raising a sardonic, metaphorical, eyebrow. "Indeed, " He says, "Why should I interfere? Far be it from me to interfere with your personal pleasure, my child. It is your party, cry if you want to."

Why should He remove a temptation that The Equuschick chooses to play with like a toy? There it goes again, that metaphorical eyebrow.

Mind you, The Equuschick does not mean to paint a totally hopeless picture, because sometimes, if the Desire is not there, there is at least a Desire to have the Desire, but The Equuschick cannot even get that far on her own, so she begs for Grace to want what she ought to want but doesn't really want yet.

And there, though it is messier and more complicated than it need be, will God help. He will sigh, but He will not scorn.

But is it not better to simply choose to Desire the good that one cannot attain but God's grace can give? There are fewer steps, you know. And humanity has that option.

And at what are sadly her better moments, there will you find The Equuschick, curled up in tears on the bathroom floor, engrossed in some pretty serious introspection.

"Are you, " says one of The Equuschick's selves to another self, "enjoying any moment of this? This drama, this self-pity, this self-inflicted misery?"

It ought to be a rhetorical question, but it isn't. At times the demon is there, frolicking about in the muck in a most disgusting fashion. To ask for Grace at a time like that is a ghastly affront to the very blood that was shed to purchase the Grace.

Beware, says The Equuschick to herself. The very best that a hypocritical plea for help will get you is nothing, and it might just get you worse than that.

But sometimes there is no demon, only pitiful weakness, and all the selves of The Equuschick cry on the bathroom floor and say "No, no, I am not enjoying this."

And the more bracing self of The Equuschick's selves will say "Then choose to cut it out, stupid."

The Desire is there, oh yes, it is there, pleasepleaseplease, oh God, help, I am drowning in a cistern of my own creation.

The plea is made with a certain apologetic air, of course, because Lord knows, she's been in that cistern often enough and she ought to know better by now than to think she'll have any fun in there.

But if it is The Equuschick's Desire, than God will pull her out with Grace, time and time again.

And life will get on, and help will come from unexpected places, and messages of love will come in little ways, until The Equuschick finds she is no longer miserable, because she has chosen not to be, and God has made her unmiserable, because she wanted it that way.


And, of course, once Grace has been granted, one really ought not to say no to a heavy pain-killer and a bowl of ice cream. Common Grace, you know.

Puts Hair on Your Chest

The boy is reading pretty well. He reads aloud from the King James Version in Bible class with some big mistakes, but not too many of them, and he manages pretty well after all.

But tonight I handed him a teabag and he looked at it, and then looked at me in disbelief.



He yelped at me, "HAIRBALL TEA?"

May I offer you some grace seasoning, please?

"There's no way I owe the library that much money," she said in an impatient tone. I began listing the titles that had been overdue and how much they'd accrued when she interrupted me. "Well, we'll just pay it, but there's no way we owe that much." Because we really do want to be a patron friendly library and because library fines are one of the most annoying things in existence, I asked if she wanted me to take some time to look into the fines and see if there could be a mistake anywhere.

"No," said in a very brusque and rude manner. "It's going to support the library, which is good. We just don't owe you those fines."

*pause* So is this where I'm supposed to grovel and thank you for your generous and charitable support? Because I'm not feeling your supportive spirit right now.

"You guys never tell me about these fines," she continued. I felt slightly sympathetic on this point: library policy is to tell a patron when they have fines on their card, no matter how small, but there have been some problems with having staff do this consistently. I offered her my apologies and encouraged her to ask anyway even if a staff member doesn't mention any fines. "I do; I ask every time I come in, and they still say no."

Right. Because our staff is not only forgetful but also inclined to lie.

She wasn't done yet.

"I keep putting things on hold, too, and you never call me about them and so they get sent back before I can get them."

I've been one of the primary call-makers for holds items and her number is one I've called before only to be greeted by a busy signal or answering machine... a machine I duly leave messages on.

The whole time this conversation was going on, she was taking pauses to talk to her kids about a meeting she had at church this evening, about an article she'd read in a fairly prominent Christian magazine recently, and about how she'd have to preview a certain book before her daughter could read it.

These things combined with her treatment of the library and its staff gave me a very bad taste in the mouth. If I had been a non-believer, I would have been disgusted.

Please, if you plan to be rude to people, go as an incognito Christian for the day. And if the idea of being an incognito Christian strikes you as impossible (and I'm thinking it will), please plan on not being rude to people.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains of the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

A really good quote!

"Within the mind of man is resident his great capability, which is to give
assent to the truth of God and to depose and send into exile the false gods that
persistently work to confuse the mind."


Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, by Dave Breese.

Agrarian Picture Book

I picked this up recently at the library just because it had such lovely pictures and the title, Going to Sleep on the Farm, was irresistible

Alas and alack, I don't really have any children young enough to fit the target age of the book, but my older children and I enjoyed looking through it anyway.

The text is quite simple- a little boy is putting away his toy farm animals as he gets ready for bed, Daddy lies nearby waiting patiently, and as the child puts away each animal, he asks his daddy, for example 'how does a pig go to sleep- tell me how? How does a pig go to sleep?'

This is followed by a two page spread of the animal in question bedding down on a (mostly) very authentic looking family farm, in luminous watercolors. What makes this book extra special is the progression of expressions on the Daddy's face in between the two page spreads about the animals. His affection for his small son shines through, but he's a very human daddy. He surreptitiously yawns and checks his watch, with an expression on his face that made me laugh out loud.

Even the endpapers reward examination.

Amazon lists this as for 4-8 year olds, but I should have put it at 2-4 year olds myself.

Charming.
.

Pondering

Is it better to read a few pages (and then write a narration) from each of thirty books every day, or to read many more pages (and then write a narration) from a different set of ten to fifteen books on any given day, rotating through so that you may not pick up any given book more often than every third to fifth day?

When you are old you apparently lose your tastebuds so you cannot tell if things are stale or rancid. I knew that. But apparently you also cannot tell when crackers are soggy instead of crisp (is this because of dentures?). When an elderly woman brings such things to potlucks, how do you avoid eating them while not hurting her feelings?

Why are all our dogs morning people?

And if a dog has taught himself how to open the back door and let himself into the house, how can we teach him to shut the door behind him?

Why does gelatin sound good, but if you describe something as gelatinous it sounds putrid?

Why is contentment so hard at times? Lack of contentment is such an insidious, creeping thing. I don't even notice it until all of a sudden my list of 'if only' things and situations looms larger in my head than blessings.
Like the woodpecker in the song from Louis Sachar's Holes, what we long for might be the very thing that leads to our destruction.

"If only, if only," the woodpecker sighs,
"The bark on the tree was as soft as the sky."
While the wolf waits below, hungry and lonely,
He cries to the moo-oo-oon,
"If only, if only."


Although it is hard to imagine how a chest freezer would lead to destruction.

On the other hand, it's not at all hard to see how this constant fretting after what you don't have can do that very thing.

Sunday Hymn Post

He Leadeth Me (click for link to an acapella version)

He leadeth me, O blessèd thought!
O words with heav’nly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, where’er I be
Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.

Refrain

He leadeth me, He leadeth me,
By His own hand He leadeth me;
His faithful follower I would be,
For by His hand He leadeth me.

Sometimes mid scenes of deepest gloom,
Sometimes where Eden’s bowers bloom,
By waters still, over troubled sea,
Still ’tis His hand that leadeth me.

Refrain

Lord, I would place my hand in Thine,
Nor ever murmur nor repine;
Content, whatever lot I see,
Since ’tis my God that leadeth me.

Refrain

And when my task on earth is done,
When by Thy grace the vict’ry’s won,
E’en death’s cold wave I will not flee,
Since God through Jordan leadeth me.

Refrain

Cyberhymnal information and midi file

Other School Experiences.

This was a T/F question on a management exam at the community college I used to attend. I'm so happy not to be there anymore. :-)
"Excessive Emphasis on long term revenes over shorter-term considerations is a challenge to maintain consistent ethical behavior that organizations face."

Autumn is here!

Autumn is definitely my favorite time of the year. The weather is so nice, and the trees are so beautiful... what more could one ask for? I believe the bright red tree in the picture is a sassafras tree.

Bless a Blogger

Share some link love today by sending us to another blogger's post that has blessed you, taught you, uplifted you, given you a good idea, made you think, made you laugh, made you weep- if for any reason at all you would like to give a blogger an extra special thank-you, post the link to that post here so the rest of us can see it, too:

Belated Acknowledgements

*The HG very kindly tidied The Equuschick's room for her, thus providing her with greater peace of mind.

*The Pipsqueak generously scooped stalls for The Equuschick last night and has accompanied her for supervisory emergency purposes when she feeds the horses, thus providing the DHM with greater peace of mind.

*The FYG purchased for The Equuschick a small stuffed dog, which provided much cuddling in the hospital.

*The FYB purchased for The Equuschick a small, green, squishy and bubbly stress ball sort of thing. This was of inestimable value to The Equuschick in the hospital, most conspicuously at 5 am, when the vampires who like to call themselves nurses come in and wake you up with their sweetest smiles and say "Hello dear, did you sleep well? We're here to draw your blood." The Equuschick was able to wring the ball, rather than their necks.

*JennyAnyDots and the DHM did wash and brush The Equuschick's hair in the hospital, an unenviable task by the time they were able to do it, but one that did greatly increase The Equuschick's self-respect.

*The poor HM and DHM did spend many unrestful nights in hard visiting armchairs, keeping The Equuschick company.

Autumn!

Emily Dickinson:
The morns are meeker than they were—
The nuts are getting brown—
The berry's cheek is plumper—
The Rose is out of town.

The Maple wears a gayer scarf—
The field a scarlet gown—
Lest I should be old fashioned
I'll put a trinket on.



The very best seasonal poetry is about fall. Which makes sense, since it is the very best season of all. It seems to me that the trees behind our house changed color overnight. I heard the wild geese overhead a few nights ago. The frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the stock.

Rachel Field wrote:

"Something told the wild geese
It was time to go;
Though the fields lay golden
Something whispered, -- "snow".

Leaves were green and stirring,
Berries, luster-glossed,
But beneath warm feathers
Something cautioned, -- "frost".

All the sagging orchards
Steamed with amber spice,
But each wild breast stiffened
At remembered ice.

Something told the wild geese
It was time to fly --
Summer sun was on their wings,
Winter in their cry.

James Whitcomb Riley's "When the Frost is on the Punkin"

WHEN the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
And the clackin' of the guineys, and the cluckin' of the hens,
And the rooster's hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it's then the time a feller is a-feelin' at his best,
With the risin' sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

They's something kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here—
Of course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin'-birds and buzzin' of the bees;
But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock— 15
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin' of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn;
The stubble in the furries—kindo' lonesome-like, but still
A-preachin' sermuns to us of the barns they growed to fill;
The strawstack in the medder, and the reaper in the shed;
The hosses in theyr stalls below—the clover overhead!—
O, it sets my hart a-clickin' like the tickin' of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the cellar-floor in red and yaller heaps;
And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With theyr mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage too!...
I don't know how to tell it—but ef such a thing could be
As the angels wantin' boardin', and they'd call around on me—
I'd want to 'commodate 'em—all the whole-indurin' flock—
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.

I don't know who wrote:
The summer is over,
The trees are all bare,
There is mist in the garden and frost in the air.
The meadows are empty
And gathered the sheaves-
But isn't it lovely kicking up leaves!

John from the garden
Has taken the chairs;
It's dark in the evening
And cold on the stairs.
Winter is coming and everyone grieves-
But isn't it lovely kicking up leaves!

And, of course, there's 'Come Little Leaves,' and about a hundred and one other seasonal poems about fall, and snatches from every one of them are whirling around in my head right now, just like autumn leaves.

Frugalities

This week's 'What do I have in my hand' column is up at Frugal Hacks. Check it out and let me know what you think!

One of today's midterms

I. Identify and give the significance of five of the following (20 points):
arbistristas
Colbert
noblesse de robe
Olivares
pays d'election
second serfdom
Verneuerte Landesordnung

II. Analyze the course and outcome over the struggle of sovereignty in one country from each category:
1. Austria, France, or Spain
2. Great Britain or the Netherlands
3. Prussia or Russia

III. Each of the aforementioned countries evolved differently from one another partly because of the crucial role played by key individuals, but also because of preexisting structural circumstances (geographical, topographical, demographic, economic, soil, weather conditions, etc.) that lay largely beyond their control. Please explain to what degree which structural factors explains the distinctive development of three of the following countries:
Austria
France
Great Britain
Spain

I wrote ten pages in seventy-five minutes. My hand hurts. :)

House to House

I like to write. I NEED to write, and days where I do not write something more interesting (to me) than a shopping list are really bad days for me. Some people sew, others scrapbook, some like cross-stitching, some like bungee jumping. I write.

Some people feel threatened by the internet, but I love the internet as a forum for that writing that I have to do. The internet is merely a vehicle for the writing- it's not inherently bad or scary by itself. Yes, it's pretty public. Yes, it has the potential for abuse. So does the grocery store, the bank, or even going to church (for every 'they met on the internet and broke their marriage vows' story I've heard, I can think of two or three, "they met at church" tragedies, because it's not the forum that is at fault, it's the sinners using it. And we are all sinners and we all need to be on guard against ourselves).


Some people are more comfortable with pen and paper via snail mail, and that's lovely for them, but I don't like it as much as the internet. Writing things by hand hurts my hands, I can never find the postage stamps, my envelopes are always stuck shut, and I just like the internet better. Some people are more comfortable with individual emails, and that's okay, too, but it's just not the same for me as a blog. I would never have met the family the Progeny stayed with while Equuschick was in the hospital without a blog, and I do not know what we would have done without her family this last week while my daughter was in the hospital just twenty minutes from my new friend's house- and have I mentioned that it was only about a month ago when we met the folks who gave us houseroom during that crisis? And I could list such blessings from internet contacts found via blogs and email lists a hundred fold, but, as usual, I am already creating a post far too long (did I mention I love to write?).


In older times, women were part of a larger society. They met daily, worked together, spoke together, saw one another on a daily basis as part of a larger community. The church in the New Testament met together daily.

For many years many of us couldn't do that anymore. The internet makes that possible.

I consider the internet an excellent way to regain that lost sense of community in an otherwise very time driven, fragmented society. It should never replace contact with people who can see you face to face, but it's a good extension. It has potential for evil, too, as does our contact in person. We decide what to make of it.

We can be this sort of 'house to house':

In First Timothy, chapter 5 Paul warns Timothy about the destruction that idle women can cause a church community: "And withal they learn [to be] idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not."

Or this sort:

In Acts, chapter 2 (great chapter, btw), we learn that the first Christians "continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart."

If this looks familiar, you've seen it before. It's a rewrite of two older posts.=)

Our Disappearing Heritage

Granny Tea works as a receptionist at a center that provides services to disabled adults as well as a preschool. She recently agreed to read a story of her choosing to the children at the Preschool. She reviewed the ancient children's literature book owned by her papa from which he studied in college (no pictures in it; it was a textbook) and selected a couple that might "work": She chose those old classics The Gingerbread Man and the House That Jack Built because she remembered she'd enjoyed those as a child. Her favorite is actually one she's never heard since, but was her VERY favorite when her papa read it--sorta like Rumplestiltskin but has a wicked little creature called "that." She decided "that" wouldn't be a good story for these kids.

So she went to the library to find a retelling of either of those two classic folktales with pictures that might interest the preschoolers. And she could not find a single copy of the classic Gingerbread Man OR The House That Jack Built!!! There is a multicultural book based on The House That Jack Built reflecting a Bali atmosphere or Hawaii or some such tropical island, and so naturally it wouldn't have the cow with the crumpled horn or the maiden all forlorn or the parson, and its just not the same. There were.two gingerbread boy stories that didn't tell the story "correctly," but had interesting pictures. And that was it.

Grannny Tea is bitterly disappointed, and writes to encourage those who care about such things to keep our eyes open and find those classic copies of classic children's books stories and folktales and KEEP them.

The next time you see one at the thrift shop, pick it up- for Granny Tea if not for your own family's sake.

Save the folktales!

Studying for midterms

... Two of them:
History of Women in America and then History of Europe 1618-1789. For good measure, I've got another class and then a Spanish essay to write in between the exams.

The iPod is for moral support. ;-)

Peanut request

I recently bought a big batch of peanuts in the shell for a very good price. When we got home I realized that they were raw, unsalted peanuts in the shell.

How do you make them roasted and salted?

Bringing a Casserole

I was going to write a post just like this one, but Kim beat me to it. Some of the things I'd started writing she already mentioned, others are different. I'm going to go ahead with what I have.

What can you do for others when they are in the midst of a crisis? How can you reach out and serve? These are some ideas, most of them based on what others have done for us in the midst of our crises. We have some absolutely amazing, incredibly thoughtful friends:
When we came home from the hospital with Equuschick, here's what greeted us. This is from the family with four boys we've mentioned before. Lovely people. Our living and dining room were full of balloons, and the kids had made a home-made sign for the door. One of the boys blew up all the balloons, another hung them up. They left a freezer meal in our freezer and a cake in our fridge, and apologized for not having time to clean out my fridge for me.

Not everybody in every situation will need or even want every thing on this list- much depends on the particular crisis. My purpose is not to write a list of absolute s, but to make a list of possible ideas that will jumpstart your own thinking.

Help with communication: Phone cards, loan your cell phone (especially if you have free minutes), offer to make phone calls or to be a point of contact for updates, help make a list of people and phone numbers (in a crisis I couldn't always remember my kids birthdays, let alone think of everybody I wanted to call), make a list of people and addresses that merit thank-you cards...

In a hospital you cannot always use a cell phone, and at the hospital where Equuschick was, we couldn't even use our calling cards. We had a cell phone and would go out in the family waiting room to use it, but not everybody has one. Sometimes a family is overwhelmed with the attempt to keep friends and loved ones updated, and it's a great help for somebody to say, "Give me a list of people to call and I will update them. You can give everybody my number to call for further updates." And it's also comforting to be assured that you're not imposing on somebody, hence the kindness of letting people know if you have free minutes or free long distance. Loaning the cell phone needn't be an open-ended gift, either- you can easily say, "I need to keep my phone with me, but I can come down to the hospital/hotel/your house to help out for an hour today, and while I'm there you can use my free minutes to call anybody you want to call yourself."

Help with record keeping: One of the most useful gifts I got in the midst of a crisis once was a small memo pad and pen to keep notes of all the stuff I had to keep track of. This probably cost the giver less than a dollar and it was invaluable. Not everybody goes to the ER prepared for everything.


Help with food: Gift certificate for fast food places nearby or pizza delivery, a casserole or just a plate of muffins or cookies, a plate of raw vegetables, a bag of trail mix for somebody sitting by a hospital bed, an invitation to a meal at your house, delivering a full home-cooked meal, delivering a freezer meal that they can cook later, as they need to, a few cans of microwavable soup and a box of crackers for somebody spending lots of time at the hospital.
A couple bottles of drinking water and some snacks delivered at the hospital can go a long way. I have often found myself unable to eat until 9 p.m., or waiting hours longer than I expected in the surgery waiting room, with nothing to eat or drink except soda and candy. Yuck.
To be REALLY helpful, either label your dishes very clearly, or use containers you don't want back.

Chores and household tasks: My parents remembered to put out the trash cans for us for delivery, and we were so very grateful. I never would have thought of that, but now I'll try to remember to offer the next time somebody I know is away from home unexpectedly. Other possiblities: Are there checks you could deposit, appointments you could cancel or substitute for (teaching a class, reading at the library), dishes you could wash, a refrigerator that needs cleaning, groceries you could buy, cleaning at the dry cleaners you could pick up, a car to repark? We once moved Thanksgiving Dinner to our house at the last minute because our hostess had her baby, but it could be something much smaller, just picking up the mail, or picking up a hold service notice at the post office and taking it back, or returning books to the library before they are overdue, or perhaps doing a load of laundry or making sure nothing has been left in the washing machine. Water the plants, make the beds, clean up the supper dishes- what is needed will depend on the family and the particular crisis.

Taking care of children- this could be as large as childcare or as small as giving little things for the children to do (bubbles, balloons, coloring books, small
matchbox cars, stickers, beanie babies). It can be new things, or it can be some things you gather from your house. You could entertain the children for a few minutes or keep them overnight. You could offer to pick up changes of clothes or do their laundry, or take them outside to race for a bit.

Help with decision making- this seems large, but people in crisis often have trouble thinking things through rationally. Sometimes just sitting with somebody and helping them narrow down their options is a tremendous help.

Encouraging notes, cards, and E-mails!! If somebody is in the hospital, find out if they have an email program. They will have a place where you can e-mail patients, and
volunteers will print out the e-mails and deliver them once or twice a day. This is lovely. Send notes or cards to the home- and do not stop when the crisis seems to be over. Keep in contact with people long after the crisis has passed, especially if it involved loss of life. Grieving survivors need to be reminded that they are not forgotten, that they are still normal, still have friends who love them, and who do not shun them. It is NOT enough to contact them once a year, or less, to tell them you 'think about them all the time' as though that effortless thought on your part should be just as creditable and commendable as though you actually made the effort to ACT on that thought and do something useful with it. We are not made for telepathy, and if you want your thoughts to be useful, you need to tell the subjects of those warm thoughts that you are thinking about them. It's fine to say, "I don't know what to say, but I am thinking about you and praying for you." It is not fine to tell yourself, "I do not know what to say, but I'm thinking about them, and that should be enough, so I do not need to actually speak TO them." Of course, we don't usually think it through this way, but that's what it amounts to. And if I sound harsh, that's because I am so guilty of this myself.

Hospitals usually have a social worker on staff who will be familiar with
the major crisis cases. You can call and explain to the social worker that you want to be of service to your friend, and suggest the different things you can do (from a distance, it's basically pray, send phone cards, and send those e-mail messages, or perhaps be a point of contact)- she may be able to help you think of something else of service you can do.

Personal items: Sometimes families end up away from home in a crisis lacking many personal items they would have remembered had they been given more time.
These items might include anything from shoes or slippers, socks, a bra, a pair of glasses, a hair brush, combs, deodarant, clean underwear, lotion, shampoon, toothbrushes, women's, um, toiletries- all kinds of things. ASK, and be specific (but private)- perhaps something like, "Is there anything I can pick up for you at Walgreens? Toothbrushes, something for monthly hygeine, do you hve all the clean underwear you want, shampoo... Please, name it."

The purpose of asking specifically is two fold- one, people in crisis can't think off the cuff. If you ask, that helps them focus. And if you include one or two potentially embarrassing things on that list, that gives them permission to ask for very personal items. If you are a man, you could also ask them to make a list in writing for your wife.

Transportation: Can you take somebody somewhere? A child to music lessons, a parent to the grocery store, a trip to the pharmacy, the bank, or to church? Ask, and make a couple of specific, concrete suggestions. I cannot stress enough that in the midst of a crisis, few people are able to think clearly, logically, and rationally, to remember what has been done or what needs to be done.

During our recent crisis with the Equuschick, friends in the city where her hospital was kept our children while we stayed at the hospital. After the worst was over, my husband would drive me there at night, and he would shower and then go back to the hospital. I stayed the night at their house with my children, and in the morning she took me to the hospital. Somebody else from her church gave her money for food, which was a wonderful blessing for us as well.

These are a few ideas- feel free to share more in the comments.
I've shared other ideas along these lines here and here. Oh, and here.

Apple Fritters

2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup grated apples
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of oil

Beat the eggs until lemon colored
Stir in milk
Mix the dry ingredients, add to milk and eggs.

Mix in the oil, add apples and stir.

Drop by spoonful onto hot, well-oiled skillet. Fry as for pancakes. This recipe makes about 12 small fritters.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar, cinnamon, or cloves as desired.

There *are* advantages to being a night owl

A dear friend is currently living and working in Europe. On nights that I stay up waaaay too late, I get to chat with her as she does her early morning e-mail check. It's fun. :)

Fall Wardrobe

Just 'cos they're pretty.

A Post Not Really Related to Much of Anything

* It really bothers me when teenagers at the library are stickily polite to the library staff while at the same time responding with rudeness, a short-temper, and ugly voices to their parents. Do they really think that thin patina of respectability convinces me? True courtesy is caring about everyone with whom you converse.

* This is the week of three midterms, one book discussion, and one term paper topic to turn in. After that, I think it will the week-end of much wandering around in my pajamas and eating chocolate.

* I love the weather in October.

The Dog People

Last Tuesday week at about midnight, the doggies were thrust unceremoniously out the back door into the fenced in back yard, given water and food (they have an Igloo dog house), and, so far as they could tell, abandoned by all their Dear Relations.

Friends stopped by a couple of times of day to rub their ears, tell them they were good dogs, and replenish their food and water. The elderly Sadie Lady was permitted back into the house most nights (thanks, Granny Tea!) because she is of a sedate disposition when she's the only dog in the house, and does not Chew things and Wreak Havoc in resentment at the absence of the human personages.

The HG even spent two nights at home, letting the dogs in, and going so far in throwing herself on the altar that she slept in Equuschick's room, letting Zeus sleep with her.

But today, Monday morning, the entire family (minus the HG, who was left at school on teh way up) arrived home and let the beasties in for good. They were terribly happy to be here, wanting nothing but to prostrate themselves in the presence of their Humans.

Instead, they were given Baths. The DonoMan dog was so disheartened by his forced absence from the hearth and home that he did not even fight his bath. He held back, tail between his legs, ears down, his posture speaking eloquently of dejection, but the forces of clean living prevailed, and he was moved to the bathroom, wehre for the first time in his life he simply gave up and walked meekly into the shower to be shorn of all those lovely smells he'd accumulated this week.
After his bath he collapsed, exhausted and relieved to be inside, on his bed on the Equuschick's floor, where he did not move for over two hours:



Which is kind of how we all feel about being back in our beds.

All except the youngest two children, who would like to feel this way about being in OUR bed.

The Equuschick Has Been Emancipated!

At first she almost said "Emaciated", but that is different. That is what the hospital tried to do to her first, before they emancipated her.

In other words, The Equuschick has been relased from the hospital. She would do cartwheels, but um, she's not quite that pain-free yet. Heh.


But yes, she spent all morning in bed by herself and when the HM came to see her she made it quite clear that was required of him, as an able-bodied man, was to march right up to the desk and demand of them what they intended to do with The Equuschick.

They had all ready unhooked her IV, so if she didn't receive an answer in what she pereceived to be a reasonable amount of time she was just going to get up and walk out the door in a huff.

Ten minutes after the HM had enquired, most politely, at the desk what they thought The Equuschick's status was, in came a lovely sort of person with her discharge order.

She'll still need to be on the pain meds, and she can't lift anything over 10 lbs. for a week (this requires that she clean out her purse), and she has some follow-up appts, but the worst of everything is over and she is going home HER BED, which is her FAVOURITE PLACE TO BE.

Thank-you all most sincerely for your prayers and kind thoughts, they have been a great deal of comfort to The Equuschick.

Sunday Hymn Post (and a wee little update)

The rambunctious guy in the last room- he was actually yelling so much she was in tears. He was screaming AND cussing, and one of the things he was screaming and cussing was, get this:
"The only @&#$^$* authority I $*%(^) acknowledge is God's and my _*(&%^$ commanding officer's, and if it's not in the &#$%^* Bible or the (%$##& constitution I don't )&^%$$* recognize it!"

She refers to him as Mr. Grumpy Gills.

Meanwhile She continues to do GREAT. So great that.... WE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL - SHE'S ON HER WAY HERE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!

Draw from the springs of salvation
Give thanks to His great and holy name
Make known His deeds among the people
Make known His exalted way.

Chorus: Praise the Lord
And shout for joy
For the HOly One is in our Midst
Praise the Lord
And shout for joy
For He is in our Midst.

(bass: Shout and cry for joy)

Call on his name with thanksgiving
Yes, joyously praise His name in song.
Through love He offered our salvation
Thru love He did give His son.

Chorus

Glynda B. Schales, copyright 1982
Arranged by Dane K. Shepard, in Hymns for Worship, 1988

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

The surgery went VERY well. They were very surprised at how small the leak in the pancreatic tube was, and in fact, could not initially find it!! They had to look at the pictures in delayed action (I guess slow motion repeat?) to see where the leak was. The doctor was expecting to see a cloud of dye spilling out of the duct, and only found one tiny opening with a small, small spot of dye. He put in a temporary stint which should loosen and pass out of the intestines on its own in ten days.

She had a rough night because of her roommates- she's been in Progressive Care with three other patients and a nurses station actually in the center of the room so they can keep a close eye on them. Well, none of the other patients have been very cooperative or quiet, and she's had almost no sleep for a couple days. I am sure she is the nurses' favorite patient, because those poor women have had their hands more than full with the other three. Last night she says the guy in the bed next to hers got mad in the middle of the night and spent half an hour or more yelling and swearing at his nurses, threatening to sue them for violating his constitutional rights. Her stress levels went way up and set off all her many alarms, bells, and whistles, and this morning they moved her to another room where currently she is the only patient, and she's much, much happier. That guy was a bit over the top, but I have to say this is the noisiest hospital we have ever seen, and we have an unfortunately large acquaintance with hospitals.

The next issue is the pancreas itself, not from the horse injury, but from the surgery. One doctor described the pancreas as the female organ of the body. You just touch it, he says, and it gets angry and it stays angry for a long time. The surgery itself can cause pancreitis, and since her pancreas is already pretty miffed over that whole 'kicked by a horse' thing, they are watching her closely for that. She gets clear liquids and broths today, and they want to know how much it hurts to eat. She's had lots of juice and some beef broth, and is still hungry and says it doesn't hurt, which is all good. They want to watch her closely for the next couple days, and then we'll see if she can come home.

So... our prayers here are that her pancreas is of the 1 Peter variety, of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price, also mild, tranquil, peaceable, and most forgiving in spirit.=)

I think I also asked earlier for prayers for the nice Amish family who are also spending their days and nights at the hospital. Mrs. Yoder had surgery for pancreatic cancer, and it turned out not to be pancreatic cancer. Her tumor is not on the pancreas, but behind it. The doctor is slightly more hopeful about her treatment than he was before. There is another woman there whose husband was in a car accident two weeks after they got married and has been there since- for the last ten days. I haven't gotten her name, but I know she'd appreciate prayers on his behalf, too.

Thank-you all so much for prayers, warm wishes, and sweet notes of comfort.

Update

EC just got out of surgery a little bit ago, although she's still in recovery. The doctor said that the injury was much, much smaller than they thought it would be from the previous pictures. They put a temporary stint to fix it up, and basically it all depends on how her pancreas reacts to the intrusion.
She'll be able to eat ice chips as soon as she gets out of recovery, and then they'll have to monitor her to see how the pancreas is getting along. Apparently, the pancreas is a *very* touchy organ, so please pray that it will take the surgery well and not get "upset" about it.

Brief Update

-- Surgery is scheduled for late tomorrow afternoon. Because they don't know exactly what solution will be needed, they're not able to tell us surgery length or length of recovery time yet.

Prayer Request

Updated 10/11, 1:47: I think most of our regulars have read this by now, so I'm going to post any additional updates to the top of this post.
Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow, the 12th. We do not have a time yet. She is doing MUCH better. She's still in a lot of pain and requires pain meds regularly, but her color is better, her blood work is good, and her pain is no worse than it was before. She sleeps a lot, due to the pain meds.

Her blood work shows further indications that there was some injury to the pancreas, but not nearly as large as they thought it was, or the levels of something or other in her blood would be much greater than they are. She'd also shown a small tear to the liver on the first MRI, but that hasn't shown up again, so either it wasn't there, or it's healed.

Because all her other numbers are so much better than expected, they want to wait on surgery to give her bruised and inflamed pancreas time to recover a bit before they do the surgery.

Her concern now is that they told her they may not put her entirely under, as they will want her cooperation in swallowing the tube for the GI procedure. Her biggest concern is that the dogs and horses are lonely, as everybody in the family has moved base up here until after the surgery.

Please keep praying, and while you're before the throne, you might make mention of the nice Amish family here while the Mama has surgery for a tumor on her pancreas. We haven't exchanged names, but Papa and the HM prayed together for the wife, and I know that we have each been praying for the other family as well, and there can never be too much of that.


---------------------
Some of you have heard, and I would appreciate it if as many praying saints as possible continue to hear, that we are in the hospital, yet again, with another emergency.

Equuschick was kicked in the stomach by her horse on Tuesday night. We drove to the hospital 45 miles from us, then after looking at her MRI and bloodwork we had a 90 mile an hour ride to the bigger and better hospital another 45 miles south, and then we had hours of waiting and more waiting. They are still trying to determine how much damage has been done to her pancreas and pancreatic duct. There is no doubt that some damage has been done.

She's had three MRIs, more needle pokes than a pin cushion (she was most indignant when they decided to try a child sized needle), and is herself.

This means she is alert, disgusted that she let her horse kick her, and is making jokes between lips pale with pain. She would joke about her own funeral if she could because that's the sense of humour she has.

Her mother, however, is less sanguine and less prone to being funny when her children are involved. I try to hold up my end of joining in on the jokes. But when they wheeled her off for her third MRI I made rather a huge mess crying all over my husband's shirt and engaging in grim and speculative dramatic 'what ifs.'

I'm feeling better, slightly, about it now. They say that they need a clear picture, which they are not getting, of how the duct looks. Then they will know if they need to do a minor repair or a major surgery replacing a blown tube with an artificial one. If I didn't mention it already (and I'm not rereading this to see if I did), they are concerned about the tube connecting the pancreas to the intestine, it may well be damaged and be leaking enzymes where they have no business being. They just don't know if they need to do a bit of stitching or a full replacement. She's also had nothing to eat or drink in all this time, and that makes her a very disgruntled Equuschick.

And while it is an irrelevant concern at a time like this, she keeps bringing it up because it frets her- she has no health insurance.

Update:the tube is definitely disrupted. She's going to have a GI sort of procedure involving sedation, tubes down the throat, squirting dye so they can see just where the links are, and they will then put in a small artificial tube that the tissue will grow over as it heals.
Concerns: causing further inflamation of an already inflamed pancreas
aspiration
infection
the usual risks associated with any sedation/surgery

I'm not a poet

-- but I was suddenly inspired this morning while trying to clean up after the dogs, and decided to share my poetic bounty with you all. Prepare to wince.

~~~~
Cats make me sneeze.
My eyes water and lungs react
When there's a cat about -
a rather irritating fact.

What about dogs?
Well, for starters, they shed.
They whine and bark 24/7
and want to drool on me in my bed.

I yearn for a hair-free place
Maybe with a bowl of goldfish
Or maybe no animalia at all.
*That* is a nice wish.

After all - it is the Equuschick who loves beasts.
When I'm lonesome for dog drool and hair
I can visit her abode,
Because - unlike me - she has the patience for their care.

Injun Summer

From the land of a dozen seasons, this is one of my favorites.

Literature Trivia

IN yesterday's post on nature study questions, Occassus shared the cool news that the book I took them from is online. Even better, it's on line in a format I can copy and paste:

: The Standard Question Book and Home Study Outlines By Lillian E. Ostrander: "Give the names of three works by Charles Kingsley State the character of each What was Kingsley's profession 453 297
Mention one work by Anthony Trollope State something of his life 297 495
Sketch briefly the life of Charlotte Brontd Mention three of her books What was the success of Jane Eyre How does it rank 411 297
For what profession did Thomas Hughes prepare Name some of hie principal works 447 297
Mention some writings by George Meredith Where was he educated 465
Tell something of Richard Blackmore and his works 407 297
What positions were occupied by Sir Edwin Arnold Name his most important work 400 297
In what year was James Bryce born Mention some of the important offices held by him Name three of his books 297 412
Give the names of two poems by Swinburne Mention an essay and a play by Swinburne 492
What was the purpose of Charles Reade's novels Name three "Name two books by John Watson Under what pseudonym did he write What was his profession in early Me 498
Give the names of three works by Hall Caine When and where was he born What was his early profession 414 State the nationality of James M Barrie Mention four of his works for the stage Give the titles of his first four books 403
Tell something of the life of Robert Louis Stevenson Name four of his books Where did he spend his last years 490
Sketch briefly the life of Henry Rider Haggard Name two of his best known works 441
Where was Rudyard Kipling born Mention five of his works Quote the first line of the Recessional 453 390 What English poet is called the poet's poet The father of English poetry The bard of Avon The bard of Rydal Mount 299 298 346
What is the real name of each of the following English writers Currer Bell Marie Corelli Boz Ian MacLaren Gavin Ogilvy Lewis Carroll 321 323
Name the author of each of the following Lorna Doone, Vanity Fair, The Woman in White ,Jane Eyre ,Scottish Chiefs ,The Compleat Angler ,Last Days of Pompeii, Pride and Prejudice 296 297 ""

Unfortunately, the formatting is a bit off. The numbers are references to the page numbers of where this information can be found in the Standard Dictionary of Facts, which is also online, but not in a format I find easy to use.

How to keep a sense of humor in college

One of my professors sent us several e-mails with documents for us to read in preparation for this week's class. Then he sent out a fourth e-mail saying:
If you didn't receive all three, I would suggest that you check you JUNK MAIL folder (which is hardly an accurate characterization of the contents! :-) )

Hello everyone!

Yes, I know, I've been gone for AGES. I'm sorry I've ignored you all for soooo long, hopefully it won't happen again.
Let me tell you some of the stuff that's been going on in my life.

*Pipsqueak and I have started a new year of school; the first week of new books is always the hardest week for me to get through.

* I've been doing quite a bit of household mending. (The skirt that has been in the closet for ages that needed new buttons is now hanging up in someone elses closet. The pants the Father needed to have taken up a few inches are now finally being worn by him. The dresses of the FYG that had tears in them are now patched and passed on to someone other little girl because she outgrew them.)

* Reading, of course.
Here is a list of some of my favorite books that I read this past year:
A Severe Mercy, by Sheldon Vanauken
Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the Dog), by Jerome K. Jerome
Adventures with my Pets, by Alexander Dumas
Amistad, by Alex Pate
The Deadliest Monster, by J. Baldwin
A Damsel in Distress, by P.J. Wodehouse
Uncle Tom's Cabin, by H.B. Stowe
The Arts, by Hendrick Van Loon
Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy
Stepping Heavenward, by E. Prentiss

* Visiting with all the various company we've had over the last...umm, I don't know how long, we've had LOTS!!

* And, well, you know, the stuff that you aren't exactly able to describe why it took up so much of your time but it just did. :)

And just because I felt like it here is a quote that I really like:

"Like all Americans, I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads- and herds of cattle too- big factories ad steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.
It is more important that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful, and intelligent than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.
We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received and each of us must do his part if we wish to show that this nation is worthy of its good fortune." Theodore Roosevelt

Oh look! It's Nemo!

Another picture taken at the aquarium. This one could have been a bit sharper, but I was taking through glass with no flash, so on the whole I was pretty pleased with how it turned out. No doubt it could be fixed up with a little bit of photo editing.

Management, Supervisors & Leaders

Must a supervisor be competent on the subject in which he or or she is supervising?
Should the manager have competencies on most of the areas that are being managed?

I Headmaster, Chapter 2 Verse 1 Says yes . . .
If the Supervisor / Manager wants to be Leaders.

A leader will lead the people through knowledge, this knowledge must come through an understanding of the task at hand and how it should be done, and the big pix of why it must be done.
To quote John C Maxwell, "they won't care how much you know, until they know how much you care".
A Supervisor / Manager must care enough to know what the followers are doing and how hard it can be.

Books for the children's library, circa 1922

Click to Enlarge

Narration questions for nature study

Name four animals classified as reptiles. Describe one of them.

Tell me about a turtle's eggs.

What is an amphibian? Name three.

Where do frogs lay their eggs. Describe the life-cycle of a frog.

Where might you find a stork? Describe its habitats. Tell me about its nest.

Describe the turkey vulture and its habits.

Describe the nests of the crow, meadow lark, swallow, and oriole.

Describe the coloring of an oriole, a flicker, a starling...

Give an account of the platypus and its mode of life.

Is a dolphin a fish or a mammal? Describe it.

Tell me about three creatures that live in a coral reef.

If I wanted to find a hermit crab, where should I look?

If I wanted to attract cardinals to my yard, what could I do?

What are the differences between a seal and a walrus? A wolf and a fox? A dog and a coyote?

Taken largely from the 1914 edition of The STandard Question Book and Home Study Outlines, published by Frontier Press, and including a preface which begins by assuring its readers that, "The days of the cave man have passed."

Sunday Hymn Post

In the land of fadeless day,
Lies “the city foursquare,”
It shall never pass away,
And there is “no night there.”

Refrain

God shall “wipe away all tears”
There’s no death, no pain, nor fears;
And they count not time by years,
For there is “no night there.”

All the gates of pearl are made,
In “the city foursquare,”
All the streets with gold are laid,
And there is “no night there.”

Refrain

All the gates shall never close,
To “the city foursquare,”
There life’s crystal river flows,
And there is “no night there.”

Refrain

There they need no sunshine bright,
In “that city foursquare,”
For the Lamb is all the light,
And there is “no night there.”

Refrain

Cyberhymnal

books read in September

Academically speaking, the last two weeks have found me in survival mode. I read like crazy, studied for an exam, did a presentation, napped at a desk in a school library (not comfortable), tripped over my own backpack in class, read some more, and hoped desperately that fall break would come *soon.* I think some of my friends thought I must have dropped off the face of the planet. Even in private forums with close friends, I went over a week without talking to any of them.
But fall break is here and after spending all day yesterday and this evening vegging (I worked at the library today -- lounging about is not recommended staff behavior) I'm going to try and get all my ducks lined up in a row again for the last half of the semester: get a head start on the reading we're doing, juggle a couple things and try to actually stay connected with people instead of living so much in my history books that the people in the 21st century don't hear from me at all.

Here are the books finished in September:
* Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution by Karen Racine - Read for Latin American biographies class. This is a well-written, well-documented, and entertaining biography of a charismatic figure from 18th and 19th centuries.
One thing my Prof wanted us to understand after reading this book was how very well-connected the world was two hundred years ago. We pride ourselves on "globalization" and think it's a recent phenomenon. The speed of it might be, the fact that the world and its people are tightly connected is not.

* Anne Orthwood's [Illegitimate Child]: Sex and Law in Early Virginiaby John Ruston Pagan (title changed to protect the innocent ;-)
- Despite its provocative title, this is a dry little book about legal practice in colonial Virginia. It's educational but not brilliant and definitely not an engrossing read. Read for History of Women and then had class discussion on it. Bleah. I wish people would stop imposing 21st century sensibilities on 17th century characters.

* Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835by Theda Purdue - I wasn't very kind to this book in my journal notes: "Trite, repetitive, sometimes illogical, with a great deal of supposition and only some enlightening historical documentation."
That wasn't perhaps quite fair: there *is* a lot of historical documentation in the book. There's also some interesting information.
But some of the double standards and suppositions just began to grate on me by the end - aggravated by class discussion. Can you tell I don't like class discussion in this class? ;-)
Example: Cherokee women were expected to (and did) separate themselves from the rest of the village during certain gender-specific times. They were viewed as having power then and would have hurt the community if they hadn't removed themselves.
Female classmate: Oh, that's so cool! To be viewed as having that power and to have the control to separate yourself like that.
Me (thinking in a bitter and sarcastic tone): If it had been early medieval Catholic women who did this, you would have been ranting at the non-inclusive way society treated women. This view is totally un-scientific!

SIGH.

Other things read:
* several chapters of Doyle's Old Regime France
* part of Hobbes' Leviathan, various excerpts from Locke, and various documents from the English Civil War and Restoration period
* more chapters from Ingrao's book on the Habsburgs

What I did *not* read:
* all of the article on caudillos
* the entire selection from Leviathan that we were supposed to have read
* the sections from the books I'm perusing while choosing a research paper topic

gack.

Fish.

I took this picture at a large aquarium a few days ago. I'm afraid I've already forgotten what kind of fish these are, but I really liked how the picture turned out.

Some days are just unexpected.

The Equuschick really doesn't know why or how it happened.

All of a sudden it seemed that she had volunteered herself to pick up three stray cats for an elderly, asthmatic, allergic woman whose husband was recovering from a stroke, and bring them to the shelter.

Said woman called this morning in some chatter-boxy, rambling form of desperation, and The Boss is on sick leave and it is the Deputy ACO's week-end off and the shelter is closed for Columbus Day, so nothing would be done about the cats until Tuesday at the earliest, and in the meantime, The Equuschick was made to understand, they were ripping up her screens and tearing up her patio and she was deathly allergic and what was she going to DO?!

And the middle part of this conversation is the one The Equuschick doesn't remember, the part that led to this:

Suddenly The Equuschick was telling her she'd be out after the shelter closed and she'd clocked out, because if she was going to do it at all it would have to be on her own time or she'd be in SO MUCH TROUBLE. And then the elderly woman was giving The Equuschick directions.

You know, the sort of directions little old ladies give when they've lived in the area all their life? The kind of directions that involve white picket fences and red-top barns and gravel roads?

Actually, as it turned out, once she remembered to give The Equuschick her street name, The Equuschick had a general idea of where she was anyway, and it wasn't too far from the home of The Common Room.

But to be safe she stopped by home and grabbed the cell phone first, and DHM and The Equuschick spent a few minutes map-questing, and then she was on her way.

(To help a strange old lady catch stray cats. Yeah. Some people do the oddest things.)

Strange as it may sound, once The Equuschick got over her initial I've Never Talked to You Before In My Life Don't Call Me Honey awkwardness, she settled down to enjoy herself catching cats.

There was a tabby, a grey, and a black, not at all sure of what to think. The Equuschick likes meeting new animals. She wants to watch them, to see what they're like, and how they think. To watch their manners, and mind their manners, and be polite, and speak their language. Domestic cats only run away from people who have forgotten to mind their cat manners.


*cough*

End Animal Geeky Moment.

Then, of course, Mr. Old Farmer showed up, being a friend of the couple with the allergic wife and the husband recovering from a stroke, and Mr. Old Farmer wanted to know if he could take the cats to his place to be his barn cats.

Which was all well and good, except for the part where The Equuschick had to follow his truck to his farm to help unload the kitty trio.

She had lost all sense of her bearings by the time they hit the fifth county road in two minutes.

Once the cats were unloaded and The Equuschick had met and fell in love with the farm Collie, Mr. Farmer struck up a conversation about his old farming partner, and in order to illustrate where his old farming partner lived he gave directions like "past the black top" and "by old Culp's place" and "where all so and so's Black Angus cattle are."

It was when he got to the Black Angus cattle that The Equuschick realized there was no point at all in asking him for directions back into town.

So she got into the car and squinted, concentrated, and made faces, and wrestled with her brain, until at length it revealed to her that she was currently on 123 N. and wanted to be heading West.

She blessed God for the compass in the Buick and headed West, and only West, because she didn't know what else to do, until at length she ran into 456 S. and did give a great, glad, cry of glee,because she knew all about 456 South, and it would bring her to the road that would take her home, if she just stuck to it like glue.

Then, of course, once in town, she had to get gas, and the cashier greeted her with "Do you like iced coffee? Here, try something!"

The Equuschick was given a good quarter cup of coffee and ice and creamer, and told the story of how the cashier's daughter had introduced her mother to it and the cashier hadn't expected to like it, because she doesn't like the stuff in the bottles, but she liked this, and it is good, isn't it? Finish it!

And that's life in a small town for you, one supposes.

Rummage Sale Bargains- or not

At that recent two dollar a bag rummage sale, I let each of my youngest two children rummage to their heart's content and fill their own bags (which they paid for). The boy scored a great pair of tennis shoes with rollers on the bottom, and a lot of junky toys, and a few pairs of blue jeans in great shape. Some of them even fit him.

The girl did a great job finding herself some very needed shirts, some pajamas, and a skirt or two.

About those pajamas.... she says she had a really cute pair of Winnie the Pooh P.J. bottoms, flaneel, long, warm, cozy. Somebody else had the top and offered it to her, but my girl chose to give up the pants instead, which was very sweet of her.

She rummaged some more and found another pair of warm flannel pajama pants in very pretty shades of blue and green, with cute little rabbits all over them.

Because it is just two dollars a bag for the rummage sale, all proceeds to to the crisis pregnancy center in town, and I was tired, hot, and overwhelmed I did not go through their bags to approve purchases before we left. And so it is that when she got them home and we all shared our purchases those of us who are older and more experienced with the ways of the world recognized that they aren't cute little rabbits. They're bunnies. What my sweet little girl has is a pair of pajama pants in a pretty blue checkered pattern of the Playboy bunny logo.

Or rather, that's what she HAD.

Linky Love, or that Gratitude Attitude

Bless the rest of us and pass on a little thank-you gift when you share a link to a post that blessed you this week!

Whhhhhhhheeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww!

We are tired, brain-dead, and a little punchy, but it's been a grandly fun last three weeks or so.

It was a great strain on some of us than others. Last week, no joke, we measured the FYG against the diminutive Equuschick, and the FYG (who is only 11) was just a hair or two shorter than EC. Just a few minutes ago the FYG walked up to hug the Equuschick and suddenly started screeching and jumping. She was screaming, "I'm taller than you; I'm taller than you!!" And we all stopped and stared and were agog to realize that she is. She is A GOOD INCH taller than the Equuschick. She grew an INCH in less than 7 days. She has the longest legs of any of the girls and looks something like a stork right now. No wonder she's had dark circles under her eyes all week and is something of a grouch. She's been working harder in her sleep than most of us in our waking hours.

Last night we stayed up late watching Facing the Giants. We liked it better than we expected to, although we have issues with the country record played backwards theology (you know what happens when you play country music backwards- you get your dog back, your truck back, and your wife loves you again). Still, it was cute and had some very funny moments, and we can stress the things we did agree with (love God anyway, give Him the glory no matter what happens, be content with what you have- even if the folks in the movie really weren't quite so content as all that).

After sending our last round of company off at 8:00 most of us headed off to the annual two dollar a bag rummage sale, where I got a little carried away myself, and allowed my 9 year old boy to fill a bag of his own resulting in a bag of toys such as mutant ninja turtles, transformers, and power ranger figures, and numerous other toys I would not ordinarily have in my home, six pairs of blue jeans (only two of which fit), and a very, very cool pair of tennis shoes/roller skates, whatever those are called, as well as a fun plastic shield, sword, and dagger:



And a few other things, including the two dollar futon.


We just spent a couple hours reviewing our purchases. We did and they are doing some slight tidying, I am making plans for how we are going to eat our leftovers for the rest of the weekend, and on Monday we have GOT to get started with some more regular schoolin'. Sometime between now and then we have to really CLEAN the house and sort the toys and get rid of broken ones and find all the places the quads were devious, and wash MORE laundry, and fold even more than that (My husband is out of town and I slept with a load of clean laundry on his side of the bed last night).

But before that, we want to watch a move. But what movie?

Movies we've enjoyed (in no particular order):

Amazing Grace
That Thing You Do
Casablanca
Mary Poppins
So Dear to my Heart
The ARistocats
Ever After
The Pirates of Penzance
The Inspector General
Pride and Prejudice
The Princess Bride
Fiddler on the Roof
Arsenic and Old Lace, Charade, My Family and Other Animals, and Stardust
Sense and Sensibility
Fellowship of the Ring
The Winslow Boy
Sound of Music
Peter Pan
Three Amigos
The Incredibles,
Dragon Hear
The Emperor's New Groove,
The Court Jester
The SEcret Life of Walter Mitty (both Danny Kaye movies).
The King and I.
It Happened One Night

And a whole lot more I am not thinking of. But we want to watch something different. Suggestions?

Note to Self

Make sure you check the quib!

;-)

Breakfast Muffins

Our houseguests of twelve left this morning at 8:00, after the Mama and I stayed up until about 1 a.m.

They didn't want to dilly-dally as they have a long day of driving, so I sent them off with the following breakfast (adapted from the Sausage Pancake Puff recipe posted at Pancake Recipes). They are not really very pan-cake like, but they are really tasty, work well for eating on the go without making a mess, and they are filling. Here's how I made them:

I fried some hamburger meat in a skillet, seasoning it liberally with Spike. How much? Oh, just enough.=) I would guess between one and two pounds.

While that was browning I combined:

8 eggs
2 cups of dairy liquid (Using what I had on hand means I used a combination of about the last 1/4 cup of cream along with enough 'butter milk,' which was really spoiled milk, to make two cups)
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
Liberal dashes of Italian herb seasoning and salt and pepper to taste.
Garlic

Mix this stuff together with a whisk until all the lumps are out.

Grease muffin tins lgihtly (I used olive oil)

Spoon in about 1/8 cup of the meat in the bottom of each muffin tin- just enough to make a single layer in the bottom.

I poured just over under 1/4 of a cup of the batter in each muffin tin- the batter should fill up the tin about 3/4 of the way.

Bake these at 425 degrees for 10-15 minutes, or until they are puffy and golden brown.

Then top with just a bit of sharp cheddar cheese- I didn't really measure. I used my cheese slicer to slice rectangles off the end and cut those into fourths, putting on square on each muffin. YOu can put them back in the oven to melt the cheese, or you can just let the cheese melt on the top.

These are light and fluffy when fresh out of the oven. When they completely cool off they sort of fall a bit and feel heavier, but they are still delicious.

Bill at Pancake Recipes suggested serving them with sour cream, diced tomatoes or salsa, and this would be delicious, but since I made these for our friends to eat in their van while driving we did not offer any extras except napkins.

This recipe made 30 regular sized muffins and a dozen miniature sized muffins. I gave our friends 18 of the larger ones, we kept one dozen regular sized and one dozen miniature- mainly because those pans were not finished yet when they were ready to go.

I haven't tried it yet, but I think you might even be able to make these in muffin papers (especially if you don't drain the meat) for even more portable munching.

Almond Joy Cake

1 box chocolate cake mix (pudding type, or just add a box of dry instant vanilla pudding) Mix according to directions. Pour into two 9x13" pans. Bake about 20 minutes at 350. While cake is baking, mix in large sauce pan 1 cup evaporated milk and 1 cup sugar. Bring to full a boil. Remove from heat, add 24 large marshmallows. Stir until melted. Add 12 ox pkg coconut. Pour over HOT cake.

Frosting:
1 1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup evaporated Milk
1 stick margarine.

Bring to a full boil. Remove from heat and add 1 1/2 cup chocolate chips. Stir til melted. Pour over cakes immediately. Top with toasted almonds or chopped pecans, if desired.

Dining Room Set for 21

This is our dining room, arranged for 12 guests plus the nine of us- I think it should go without saying that this was taken before six children under five had eaten in it:



We have two benches, each seats three comfortably, four little kids in a pinch. Folding chairs borrowed from Granny Tea made up the difference.
I stocked up on paper plates, and then went out and bought some more.
I really ought to take an 'after' picture, but frankly I am not ready for that level of transparency, and I don't really think y'all are, either. Just use your imaginations.=)
Breakfast this morning:
2 pounds of bacon, two packages of English muffins, toasted and buttered, a dozen fried eggs. That was AFTER the 11 children under the age of 12 had already gotten up and gotten their own (and their younger siblings') breakfasts of bagels, cream cheese, carrots, and apples. I figured they wouldn't be hungry, but when the smell of frying bacon wafted through the house the three 9 year old boys came into the kitchen professing to be famished, so they had second breakfasts, as did the quads, well, and pretty much everybody but those of us 17 and older. WE managed to make do on one breakfast, which is why I only had to make a dozen fried eggs instead of 2 dozen.
Lunch: sandwiches, qfried cheese tortillas, and fruit
Dinner: Tortellini soup, the HillBilly Housewife's garlic bread, and Almond Joy Cake. Recipes and links will have to follow later.

Quad-Sitting

My husband is working out of town.

My houseguests have (most of them) gone touristing, taking Jenny, Pip, and my youngest two with them. We have the quads. The HG is on primary quad duty until she leaves for work, then I am, with the Equuschick's help until the EC goes to a writer's workshop, and then it's just me, The Cherub and the quads until their family gets home tonight.

It's been a busy morning, and shortly we'll be using nap time to put the house back together.

For lunch we gave them half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, apple slices, popcorn, and milk. We filled their cups about 1/2 an inch deep with milk and then stood on duty with towels and the milk carton to wipe the inevitable spills (there were two) and give refills (lost count). Then the HG took them out in the yard to play while I fixed our lunch. While I was fixing lunch the EC got home from work so she did some tidying up of the pretty much trashed living room and dining room.

While getting them ready to go out to play after lunch I entertained them with a Newtons Cradle toy. I played with three at a time while the HG cycled through them changing diapers and getting them ready to go outside to play. We took turns making the balls bounce, practicing patience, consideration- (No, Caius, it is not your turn, it is Balthassar's turn. No, Caius, it is not your turn, you just went and you don't get to go again until your brothers go, Caius, you have to wait for all the other boys before you go again, now you can't go at the same time, it tangles up the balls...)- and honesty. At one point three impatient three year olds each grabbed a ball to let it fly at once, and the balls got all tangled. Instantly and independently, without a thought the adorable little culprits pointed at each other and said, "He did it."

Over all they actually did very well taking turns, and quickly most of them knew whose turn it really was (harder than it seems since the rotation was always changing due to the other changing going on). They really liked it and I gained all kinds of cool grown up points by showing them how to do it with two balls at once and then three.

We finally got them out and the dogs in (Donoman intimidates them because he is so bouncy. Zeus they love, even though he's big enough to look over the tops of their cute little noggins, because he's so calm).

I got our lunch in the oven and the HG got the boys into their beds and came back to my room to talk to me. Then the EC joined us.

Equuschick to HG and I: I am coming in to tell you that the quads are jumping on the beds instead of napping. I told them not to, but they just smiled at me and kept on jumping, and they are so cute I cannot be firm with them. So I told them I was coming to get you and now I have.

HG:And that absolves you of further responsibility?

EC: That's the idea.

HG: Oh, so you're the pliant nice Auntie and I have to be the firm one?

EC: Yes.

HG, heading to the sleeping porch: Abednego Matthew! Balthasar Mark! Caius Luke! Darius John!* Stop jumping on that bed right now!

EC to me: See, I don't even know their middle names. How impressive a disciplinarian can I be if I can't call them by their first and middle names?

*Names have been changed to protect the stinkers.

Laundry Soap, Redux

In response to an older post on how we make our own laundry soap, somebody asked me a few questions. I thought the answers might be of general interest, so here we go:
I made the recipe on the Simple Dollar last night and this morning it looks like it can't decide whether it wants to be a liquid or a gel. Kind of clumpy too. I might try your blender method but I'm starting to regret having made 5 gallons of this...


It does not matter whether it's a liquid or a gel or if it has small cottage cheese like clumps in it. It cleans just the same no matter what it LOOKS like. The blender just makes it look better.

Has it turned any of your whites grey like others have claimed?

It has not turned my whites gray.

We're still using it a year and a half later.

I am betting those who complain that it did were using laundry soaps with optical brighteners before and they don't like the look of clothes without them:
"The optical brighteners found in many common laundry detergents are actually tiny particles that stick to the surface of your clothes. These particles make colors appear to be brighter by absorbing invisible ultraviolet light and re-emitting it as blue light. This blue light offsets the yellow light that is produced when colors begin to fade and lose their intensity. Although these optical brighteners may make your clothes appear brighter, they are chemical residues that are intentionally left behind on your clothes and may cause skin irritation or other allergic reactions." Or maybe they do construction work or something like that.

If I was unhappy with the whites, I would just do a load with an extra 1/2 cup of baking soda, washing soda, or borax in it.

Do you have hard water?

We have soft water. If I had hard, I would use extra baking soda in the soap and/or in my wash.

Hope that helps!

UPdated to answer another question- does it work in front loading washers?

A. That's what we have!=)

Meals for a crowd

We are fortunate enough to have a day old bread store in the same town where the HG goes to university. We can get organic whole wheat bread, multi seeded garlic bagels, english muffins, and other bagels for .59 a package. So she stocked up for us recently.

Lunch yesterday was sandwiches, peanut butter and jelly, cream cheese, smoked salmon and cream cheese, and carrots and apples.

Supper was Chinese Savory Beef. Here's the general outlines of the basic recipe, which comes from The More With Less Cookbook:

Brown 2 pounds of beef, cut in bite-sized pieces.

Add and quickly fry:
a chopped onion
2 crushed cloves of garlic
2 slices of ginger (the recipe says this is optional, but I don't think this is at all the same without it)

Add:
1/2 cup soy sauce (we use Bragg's Liquid Amino Acids largely because they are wheat free)
2 T brown sugar
1/8 tespoon pepper
3 cups water.

Bring to a boil, turn heat down to simmer, cover and simmer for 3 hours more. Add more liquid as needed. SErve over rice or pasta.

1/2 an hour before serving add other vegetables if desired.

Here's how we had it:

A few days ago my husband brought home several packages of beef in various cuts because it had been marked to hafl price at his grocery store. He put them in the roaster with various seasonings and started them cooking in the morning before he went to work. I awoke to find them cooking with a note saying they'd be done at about 3, and I should figure out what to do with them then.

I added onions, brown sugar, Bragg's, garlic, ginger, Chinese five spice, and more garlic and ginger and let it simmer in its juices. But then I had to leave to take children to music lessons.

The Equuschick cut it up in the food processor when it finished cooking and put it in ziplock bags for the freezer.

Yesterday, one of the girls took a bag with about four to six ups of meat in it out to defrost. I left to run errands and left written instructions behind for the Progeny. Pip put the thawed meat in my soup stock pan, added water and more seasonings (garlic, ginger, etc). She and Equuschick peeled and diced carrots and turnips and added them to the stock. Jenny started rice in the rice cooker. About half an hour before serving Pip diced the rest of the leftover baked potatoes from two or three days ago and added them to the mixture on the stove.

When I got home everything was finished, so I dished up bowls of the cooked, steaming brown rice and ladled the stew over the top.

We ate probably six cups of rice and nearly all the stew. We could have stretched the stew, if necessary, by adding peppers, parsnips, peas, mushrooms, and/or extra water or beef broth.

This is one of my favorite fall/winter company dinners because it does stretch so well, and it doesn't matter how tough the meat is, the cooking process will make it tender.

Our Guest Room

This is how the guestroom looked after we rearranged it in between houseguests who left on Saturday and houseguests who came on Sunday. Wish we'd taken a before picture, but we didn't think of that.

The bed belonged to my grandmother's grandmother. Everything else came from a thrift shop, except possibly the yellow sheets. They probably came from the Rattery. I wish the bed frame weren't quite so dark in the picture- it has some really pretty carving on the headboard..


View from the doorway. You can't see it in the picture, but if you were standing where the picture taker is standing, there would be a tall and wide bookshelf/hutch to your left, and it is full of books. There is a smaller bookcase next to that. Likewise, full of books.
The closet is to the right, but there is no dresser because who has time to change clothes when there are all these books to be read?.
Doncha love my stylin' blue hat on the ledge to the left? I also have a large picture of Van Gogh's Irises on the wall to the left, just out of sight of the picture.

Our bed and breakfast will be available again by this weekend.=)

On a less pleasant topic, I hate to be a malcontent, but I have to tell you those ceiling tiles are a thorn in my side. I hate them. They are plain white and I think they are ugly and they clash with the walls. The builder imposed them on me in a weak moment. I wanted something with a bit more style and a lot less hospital white. I don't want to paint all of them. I thought about trying something like this on them, but I once counted all those ceiling tiles and had to go read a mystery to recover from the stress. Any other ideas?

Seven Sunroom Sleepers

Below is a picture of the room we call the sunroom. This picture is taken from the outside, obviously, last winter, also, I hope, obviously. Above it is the deck. This room juts out from our dining room.


It isn't really a sunroom yet, but that's what it wants to be when it grows up. The walls and floor are unfinished, incomplete- raw. It ofen ends up as a storage room, and last winter it was my walk in cooler for surplus cold goods.

This summer it's been a bedroom, where the two boys of the family that lived with us for several months slept. And this week, because our friends are from Texas, it's a sleeping porch:


There are actually nine boys in this picture- the oldest boy decided he and his little brother who hangs with him most didn't want to be all alone in the upstairs back corner of the house where it is quiet, peaceful, free from spiders and other wildlife, and temperate and comfortable in climate. Who would want peace, quiet, and a comfortable and REAL bed when he could bed down with eight other boys on an air-mattress over a concrete floor out with the spiders in an uninsulated room surrounded by open windows?

So all nine of the boys in our house right now (including our own) are bedding down on the sun porch each night.

I think the dads are jealous.

Meals for Many and Using Leftovers

Supper last night was simply chili and cornbread. I am not going to post the recipe here because I didn't use one, and it needed LOTS more spice. Chili is a nice meal for a crowd because you can always add more beans, more tomatoes, and/or more water if you need to. Cornbread is a must, and we had two large pans and only ate one of them.

I like leftover cornbread with honey and butter liberally mashed into a crumbled piece of cornbread and heated in the microwave. It's a nice snacking food for children.

My husband, who is a prince among men, is making waffles for breakfast this morning.

As a salad we had a mixture of grated carrots, grated turnips (about a four to one ratio, and some lemon juice and honey mustard dressing. Needed more honey mustard dressing, but I liked it.

For lunch yesterday I fried a couple onions, added nine diced brats, and about three cups of cold diced baked potatoes, 3/4 cup of sauerkraut, some balsamic vinegar, and spike (an herbal seasoning). I fried this some more
and then added 8 ounces of sliced swiss cheese.
Bratwurst is a local delicacy that we do not much care for, but we have these because the farmer who butchered his hogs last year and left one for us at the meat processing plant, included brats in the order. We can handle them if the thin skin is removed, they are diced very small, and fried with other things. In this case, the result was acceptable, but if I were to do it again I would add balsamic vinegar OR sauerkraut, not both. I think sauerkraut, sausage and potatoes is one of the best fall lunches their is, but in this case it all just worked out because I had 1/2 cup of sauerkraut or so in the fridge left from another meal, and baked potatoes leftover from the shipwreck the day before.

Here are the four three year olds with their chili- and a little something else. Look at the plate of the lad in the forefront of the pic (click to enlarge):

Their shirts say, "I tried to be good, but I got bored."

The two quarts of chili are gone. The bit of leftover fried brats and potatoes we have will, I think, make a great cornish pasty filling, especially when I add a couple diced turnips (friends of ours gave us a bag full of turnips from their neighbor's garden).

Monsters in the Deep

"Sun and stillness. Looking down through the jade-green water, you see the monsters of the deep playing on the reef. Is this a reason to be afraid? Do you feel safer when scudding waves hide what lies beneath the surface?"
-- from Dag Hammarskjold's fascinating Markings

---

Houseguests

The family of twelve is here and in fine form. Mama, Papa and 18 month old are in the guestroom (they brought a portable crib). Oldest daughter and my sixth girl are sharing a room (they are nearly the same age and have long been good friends). Their oldest boy and one of the quads are in the sewing room. The rest of the boys- three of the quads, the twins (9 years old), my son (also 9) and the f5 year old- wanted to sleep in sunroom on air mattresses because it looked cool. This means that we have 21 people in the house and two empty twin beds. Isn't that funny?!

I got up before they did and peeked in on them in the sunroom- it was a lovely picture but I didn't have the camera. They were scattered all over the beds, variously curled up, sideways, diagonally, and in round balls with their bums sticking up. The sheets their daddy tacked to the unfinished walls over the eastern windows to block the morning sun were billowing in the breeze. The wind was blowing the leaves of the trees I could see through the southern windows. After a heavy rain last night the air was fresh and crisp, clean-smelling. I got my breakfast and brought it back to my room to read a bit, post a bit, and enjoy the breeze blowing through my own open windows.

Minutes later my quiet and peaceful breakfast was interrupted by a shrill fire engine yell and the five year old burst through my bedroom door, followed by the Donoman dog, who thought everybody was playing. The five year old was not playing, poor little guy. He was terrified. He raced all the way around my bed and would have kept on going forever if not for the wall. He smiled weakly at me and strutted bravely out of the room when I grabbed the Donoman dog and assured the boy that the dog was only playing.

His strutting bravely was not the less impressive when he wobbled a bit because his knees were still shaking.


It's going to be a busy week, but a fun one.

Recipes for a Crowd

The family of 12 is here, and we are having fun. Y'all asked for our recipes, and I think the best way to share them is one day at a time- so we will know for sure what worked and what didn't.

Sunday night we had Shipwreck. Here's how we made it:

SHIPWRECK CASSEROLE

3 lb. hamburger (uncooked)
2 med. onions
bag frozen peppers
1 c. uncooked rice
2 c. chopped celery
2 c. sliced carrots
2 can tomato soup
2 can boiling water
Salt and pepper to taste

The HG made it in two large pans (9X13 or larger)

Slice onion, green pepper and carrot in bottom of baking dish. Scatter rice over top. Add layer of hamburger, then celery. Pour can of tomato soup over, then boiling water. Cover dish and bake at 300-350 degrees for 2 hours.

Ours was a bit liquidy, partly because the carrots were juicing carrots. WE could have added more rice. We were supposed to have potatoes, but we were out of them, and The Equuschick would not be back from the store by the time the casserole needed to go in the oven. So when she got home with the potatoes, we scrubbed them and put them in the electric roaster and cooked them up. Then we served the shipwreck by scooping some over a bit of baked potato.

The two large pans were more than enough for the 20 people who were here- 9 of them being 9 or younger, six of them under 5.

By cooking the potatoes separately in the electric roaster, we were able to cook way more than we needed, and I had planned on using those for potato soup this afternoon for lunch, but on further reflection soup with four three year olds and The Cherub seems not to be the wisest choice. I'll be frying up some brats, onions, peppers and those baked potatoes for lunch.