Friday bullets - July 16, 2021

Life continues to head towards a more calm trajectory, though we aren't quite at our usual equilibrium yet. I'm not complaining, though, since it's so much better than Wednesday.
  • I took Y., G., and L. to the eye doctor yesterday. L.'s prescription for her reading glasses hadn't changed, so she didn't need new anything. G. and Y. both needed reading glasses as well. I wasn't surprised as they were both complaining of slight headaches after they had read for a while. Interestingly, G.'s prescription is exactly the same as L.'s. Those twin genetics run strong.
  • P. and D. left early this morning on a road trip across the country to visit our friends the H-S Family out in Washington. Tonight they are staying with a family friend in Sioux Falls, SD. 
  • I was walking next to the vegetable garden that never got planted this year making it a pretty impressive collection of giant weeds.

And then in one of the beds, I happened to notice that maybe not everything was a weed. Upon closer inspection, I realized there are quite a few volunteer tomatillos growing in there.


  • K., who has been earning money taking care of the outside birds every day, decided that he wanted to spend some of his money on a new Star Wars Lego set. So J. took him to our local big box store and that is what he did. Now that it is his own money purchasing these incredibly over-priced bits of plastic, he is suddenly more aware of just how expensive they are. It took him ~ 15- 20 minutes tops to get it all put together. He is happy with it and has been shooting family members with the ship's weapons.
  • I have the creative writing class I'm teaching in the fall all planned out, and am now moving onto planning the memory palaces class. Our co-op has lots of space for middle school and high school homeschooled students if any area people are looking for an enrichment based co-op.
  • We have bees again! We didn't mean to have bees again because ordering bees this past spring just didn't happen. I was resigned to another year without honey. Then on Monday, our neighbor calls us to ask if we had bees in the have because there were bees everywhere, so we go out to investigate. Sure enough, the hive was buzzing in bees. (Pardon the pun.) B. came out on Tuesday to take a look. There are nice Italian honey bees all moved into the hive busy getting it comfortable. He only lifted up the top to peek in a little because he didn't want to do anything to make them move out. Next week he'll come out again and take a closer look at the frames. It's kind of exciting to have bees just suddenly appear.
  • I had just about read through my back log of library books, but then a whole bunch more arrived via inter-library loan, so I now have a ridiculously large stack again. I suppose if I stopped putting books on hold, I would have a chance to catch-up, huh?
  • I recently read some statistics that women read books by both male and female authors in about equal amounts, but men tend to read male authors nearly exclusively. This stuck out to me because it fit in with a little rant I had with Jud when we wandered through Barnes and Noble on our last date. The shelves were labeled 'fiction' and 'women's fiction'. Most of the books in the fiction section were written by men, all of the books in the 'women's fiction' section were written by women. My head exploded a bit because it was an unnecessary distinction, and had I had a post-it note on hand I would have written 'men's' on it and stuck it above the fiction label. The way men choose books couldn't have anything to do with the way they are marketed could it? (Insert snide tone of voice here.) I don't know about you, but when I read those two labels, one sounds important while the other sounds frivolous. And now I'm annoyed all over again.
  • I still haven't caught up with the laundry from our vacation. I made a good attempt on Monday and Tuesday, but I haven't looked at the washing machine since then.
  • There are only eight of us at home at the moment which is very odd. And I am making too much food.
And with that, I'm going to sign-off. I have books to read.

Comments

Jennifer said…
I used to work in a bookstore and I had so many issues with the way they would choose wishy/washy titles for sections. Don't call a section "religion" or "spirituality" if all the books you have are Christian. Don't call a section "Culture and Community" if it's all LGBTQ+ (are you ashamed of naming different sexual orientations?). Get rid of self help all together - most of them are rah rah this is how I changed my life but it doesn't apply to anyone but me or here's a formula and if your life doesn't change, you must be doing it wrong. It was a corporate store so I didn't have a lot of leeway but on the other hand, no one came way out to my small town to check up on us. So I did have a lot of fun renaming things.

Another weird thing is that parents and grandparents always wanted the recommended age for something even though the child had picked out a book already. I'm so grateful that my parents let me read what I wanted to (and gave the librarian a hernia when she saw I was checking out "Catcher & The Rye at 10. I didn't tell her that my fourth grade teacher read us "Lord of The Flies" in grade 4 and I got bonus points for figuring out how they were going to get fire. So back in the bookstore, with a child's pleading eyes on me, I exaggerated somewhat either up or down.
7/17/2021 2:02 PM
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