Almost There!!

Anna graduates on Saturday. Praise the Lord! And I don't mean that lightly! Graduating a child from high school is a huge undertaking, especially when a family homeschools.
I enlisted Philip's help in making a slide-show on the computer. Anna was in charge of removing pictures from albums, and returning them to the right albums. Hopefully. We got about 85 pictures - yay!! This is child's play to Philip. He'll have it running on his laptop and hers also, I hope, at graduation.

He decided we needed pictures of the graduate in her get-up. This is the gown, which I hemmed 9 inches (on the bottom) and 3 inches (on the sleeves). She's looking great! I told her to hop up on Fiona.

Philip in his photographer's stance. He's pretty picky about his pictures. Very few of them were deemed acceptable. I'm just happy if the eyes aren't closed.

Julia always tries to evade having her picture taken. She dashed away, but my shutter was too fast for her!

Anna is a very affectionate child. Philip is a bit stand-offish. He'll hug you, because he knows you need a hug, but otherwise, back off. The faces tell it all.

And speaking of kisses and hugs ... last night was also Peter's school choir concert. A little fatherly affection, post-concert, by way of congratulations. I live with nuts.

Afterward, we were all sitting around. In the living room. All six of us. At the same time. I can't tell you how unusual this is. Four? or Five? Yes, sometimes. But all six? I had to get a photo of all my kids, sitting so closely together, without squabbling. I suppose it helped that they were all watching screens. Julia is playing ... wait for it ... Lego Harry Potter! Hahaha! The boys were both watching her skills.

Food for Starving Blogger Folk!

Hi all! Blogger has been down for two days, so I couldn't post. But at last, I'm here to meet your online-reading hunger needs :)

In no particular order,

An article on the Navy Seals. I don't know that it's very enlightening, but it has pictures, and I really wanted to know what some of these guys looked like.


Fun baby-name website. You can type in the name, and it'll tell you how popular the name has been for the past, oh, 200 years. Pretty neat!

Some REAL community "organizers.  This World Mag article tells about some people who don't define community work as whining to the nearest media and demanding gov't funding. They actually work, and help people. Great article.

"Death to High School English" -- I loved this article, although there's a little bad language toward the end. This teacher addresses the dilemma we have of college students who can't write well At. All.  Got no grammar. Got no spelling. Couldn't spot a sentence fragment if it bit them on their noses. The solution? Read it and find out.

On a related topic: College Debt. Is it still worth it to go into debt for a degree? It's a complicated issue, and this writer has his doubts.


Will there be a College Debt Bubble, like the housing bubble, a cataclysmic deconstruction of our whole higher education system? This writer explores this question.

20% Unemployment among men -- David Brooks calls it "The Missing Fifth." He addresses all the possible reasons why 1 out of 5 U.S. men are unemployed, examining the job market from 1954 to the present, but he never addresses the elephant in the room:  women in the job market. Yeah, adding all those women in the 60s and 70s did make a difference. How could it not?

I'm Reading Ivanhoe

I read a little bit each night before going to sleep. Sometime last month, as I walked through the house toward my bedroom, I realized I'd finished whatever book I'd been reading, and I had nothing to help me doze off. As I walked by a little bookcase, I picked up the first book that came to hand. It was Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott.

Ivanhoe is no book I had ever planned to read.  As we all know, it's a "boy book," and thus to be avoided by girls. Plus, it's an old, 19th century boy book, which means it's full of endless, descriptive paragraphs leading nowhere. Even my husband looked at me with surprise and declared it "boring."

I disagree.  I'm enjoying Ivanhoe. I like the characters, and I particularly enjoy the time period: 12th century England. This is a familiar time to me: the Crusades are going on, Richard the Lion-hearted is secretly returning to England, and his brother has tried to usurp the throne. These are the sons of Henry II, who had Thomas a Becket murdered in his own cathedral. Great literature is set in this time. There are jousts and castles and kidnappings in the forest.  Goodness -- even Robinhood is there, with his merry men!

I read just a bit each night, never more than I want to. If I get tired after two paragraphs, I close the book. If I'm still enjoying it after two chapters, I keep reading. No obligation, no pressure. For too many years, while I got a BA in English, and then a Masters, I was under quite a bit of compulsion to read classics, lots of classics. I burned out on them, and have avoided them quite well for many years. But I find I enjoy them just fine, if I don't feel compelled. So I nibble away at them, while I nibble on a piece of Hershey's chocolate. Sometimes I don't want chocolate. Sometimes I want three pieces. It's the one time of the day when I let myself do exactly as I want to do.

I'd like to see a movie of Ivanhoe. Apparently Elizabeth Taylor did one, no surprise there. I bet she played the dark-eyed Jewish girl, Rebecca. Roger Moore also played in one version. I suppose he was Ivanhoe himself, who seems unusually absent during much of the story, even though it's named for him. I'm hoping the hero reappears toward the end of the book, because I'm beginning to despair of him altogether.

When was the last time someone recommended Ivanhoe to you? Sir Walter seems to be fading from the public eye and losing popularity. If you like stories of daring-do, consider a trip to the lists for a good joust among the Saxons and Normans. Consider Ivanhoe.

"Where has she been?"

I can just hear you asking that.

All three of you :)

Well, I've been here. Busy, or not. But with nothing much to say.

I've been watching bees, visiting with my brother and his wife, who stayed overnight on Sunday. I've been putting tomato plants in the soil, at last. I've been cutting spinach and pulling radishes. I've finished Julia's school year. (Yippee!! Much celebration is heard down the hallway!!) I took Anna shopping for her graduation dress, a simple, summer cotton affair. Then we went to Dollar Tree and bought all the tacky graduation decoration stuff we could stand.

Hmm. What else? I cooked a few meals, even though I haven't been in the mood.  Thus, the total lack of food pictures. I made a chocolate cake, but it was just a box mix. I finished Anna's literature lessons, and wrote her final exam.  I read some more in Ivanhoe. I do that each evening, just a few pages, before bed. I read through Abraham's, Isaac's, Jacob's and Joseph's lives, and wrote a blog post about it, but didn't post it. Yet.

And I told myself about 20 times each day, "Life is good." Because it is. And you know what? Telling myself that life is good, helps me to believe that it is. I don't think it's some silly positive-thinking mumbo-jumbo. I think it's a truth that I don't see easily, and I need help. It's helping.

Anna graduates on Saturday. I've taught her for nine years of her schooling. Nine out of thirteen. And she still loves me, and thinks she can learn something from me. I think that's amazing.

Signing off for now!

Sandy, in her Humiliation

Yesterday, Julia gave Sandy a much-needed, long-procrastinated BATH. Julia decided it would be easier just to get in there with her, in her bathing suit. I think it lasted about 40 minutes, no kidding. This is toward the end. Poor dear! I called her name, and she looked at me.

She really was in desperate need of cleaning. She had a mat of something scary on her shoulder. And Julia detected two, um, well, we call them "cling-ons," down under there somewhere. Plus, she's starting to shed for the summer, and she had to brushed well, IN the bath.

Julia can get Sandy to lie down on her back, in her lap. She'll even do it in the bath, which I find remarkable, because dogs really don't like that, especially in water.

So I called her name again, trying to get her to look at the camera. But she was so mortified, she just turned her nose to the wall, and wouldn't oblige. Hahaha!

Being Productive

We had some productive work around here this week. Adam treated his bee hives for hive beetles. He hasn't seen many, but he doesn't want to take any chances. Here's what he did: he cut up an old yard sign, the kind that have a core of long, narrow "tunnels" inside. He holds a stack of them here. He put borax powder into each tunnel, and sealed each one on both ends, with vegetable shortening. Hive beetles love shortening, but the borax will kill them. The bees are too large to fit into the tunnels, but the beetles will eat through the the shortening, to their deaths!

He placed two beetle traps in each hive.

We have a fig bush/tree in the yard. It was a full-sized tree that fell over. New shoots sprung up from the stump. It gets taller and fuller each year, but no fruit. I think that's because we have only one bush, and need two. The leaves are beautiful.

Philip and I burned a huge, huge pile of brush and clippings in our fire pit. Lots of rather green stuff, so it was often smokey. We trimmed the Lady Banks rose bush way back; she was intrusive into the thoroughfare.

Adam spent days this week working on the Jaguar, trying to get it to pass inspection. The deadline was Friday, or the temporary registration would expire - argh!! He just made it! One small repair after another kept popping up. On Friday, it was inspected and tagged :) Smokey picture from the fire pit.

If I don't post again before tomorrow, have a Happy Mother's Day, all you mommies out there!

A Bookish Family

I spent most of today cleaning Julia's room. Julia didn't help much at first. You see, she'd become afraid to go into her room. Last night, she wouldn't even sleep in her room. She'd seen a camel cricket in there; to Julia, these insects are the greatest horror on the planet. She slept, whimpering slightly, in the TV room.

So, this morning, The Great Cleaning commenced. I used a rake. Usually a broom will suffice, but the depths of the piles of books-clothing-writingimplements-trash-legos-toys-stuffedanimals was just too unfathomable for my broom. A spring rake was brought. I raked everything -- everything -- into the hall. There we sorted. And I knew Julia would have to get rid of a great many books. Here's the pile she decided to abandon:

I removed all furniture except the bed, dresser, and one bookcase. We swept the floor. She cleaned it with Lysol. I sprayed insect repellent to ward off any foolish camel crickets. I squashed the one she saw yesterday, which greatly relieved her. (Poor thing, the insect, I mean.)

She really didn't keep that many books; I was surprised. I went through the rejects and kept all the ones I've been longing to keep.  All the ones I want to have in the house for grandchildren someday.  I've been anticipating saving reading books for my grandchildren ever since I began having children myself. Silly, I know.

And now!! I have A Grandchildren's Bookcase! Here it is:

The top shelf is for reading to the little ones. The middle shelf is for early readers. The bottom shelf, for more advanced bookish ones.

While rooting about, I also discovered my little books.  I love little books. Here's my collection. I've placed a small, brown Gideon New Testament pocket Bible on the right end, for size comparison.

So adorable.

Now, I must patiently await the grandchildren. At least they'll know they've been anticipated :)