Friday bullets - Jan. 7, 2022

January has certainly made itself known here. I would be excited about tomorrow since the forecast is for 30 degrees, which is about twenty-five degrees warmer than it has been all week, but it also promises freezing drizzle, which doesn't sound fun at all. In some ways it would worse than the high of five to seven degrees that we have been having. If winter would stay at a nice 31 degrees all the time, it would be lovely. Then it could warm-up once, making just one mud season as opposed to the ten we've already had, and we could head into spring. Thus ends my moaning about the weather and we can move on to other things.

• The seed catalogs have all arrived. I don't think I need very many things since I kind of abandoned the garden last year.
• It must be cold because K. has been putting on long pants and an actual jacket to go outside this week. It's a lightweight jacket, but still. He still wears shorts and a tank top inside the house, though.
• We have finished our first week back at school and are now caught up with my schedule. We have also started back to both math and grammar with only a small bit of drama. Y., K., G., and L. all do grammar together, so I end up reading the lesson out loud and then we do some oral exercises before I give them some written work. After having read quite a few of the Incorrigables books over break, where the narrator discusses all sorts of things relating to language, history, and literature, I have discovered that I am reading our textbook in Penelope Lumly's voice. She is the governess in the stories. I am amused, though I'm not sure everyone else is. They just want to know why we can't just read out teatime book in the morning and call it grammar. Really, if you haven't read these books to your children, you should.
• Speaking of reading out loud, I come across people asking for good read aloud books for their early grade school aged children. Why, why, why do people suggest books which aren't worth the time to read aloud? The time we have to read aloud to our children is finite and therefore precious, why waste it with series books which are aimed at beginning readers? I can't fathom choosing to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Junie B. Jones out loud. Sure kids enjoy them. That's how they're written so that developing readers will continue to develop their skills. That is not the focus of reading out loud to our children, though. That time is spent helping them build their listening skills and vocabulary, to give them an ear for complex sentence structure, and to expose them to stories that won't be accessible to them for quite some time if they had to read them on their own. Plus, good books are far more interesting for the adult to read.
• Every so often I need to read a little bit of fluff and sometimes I would like that fluff to involve things I'm interested in. I decided to search up fiction which weaving as a part of the story. Inevitably, it is a cozy style mystery that turns up. Optimistically, I read it hoping that it won't be disappointing. I don't know where this optimism comes from because they are always disappointing. Thin plot, even thinner characters, and a world where everything works out far to easily. By that last one I mean the parts of the story not involved in the mystery are almost magically easy. The main character always has everything work out... they find the perfect place to live, the perfect job, the perfect friends. In the case of cozy mysteries which revolve around a specific craft (and this is a real thing), inevitably, the main character moves to a small town and is suddenly surrounded by multiple people who all do the same craft that she does. They all immediately become best friends and then go on to solve the mystery. I live in a fairly well populated area and I don't have a single friend out here who shares some of my fiber interests. I find it more than unbelievable that there is any chance things in real life could work out as in the book. 
• As I was doing some ironing yesterday, I was listening to the MIT neuroscience class that I've been watching. This class session was about brain development. The professor said two things that I found really interesting. The first was just an aside from a lecture she had heard about, I think artificial intelligence... maybe. In that lecture she heard, she reported that when a learning system is geared towards developing curiosity, the entire system ends up with a broader scope of knowledge than a system that is give a set of discrete learning tasks to do. I have never felt so vindicated as a relaxed homeschooler in my life. The second item of interest was the professor's comment that as they study babies and brain development, that they have learned that hands are second only in importance to faces; that babies will focus on a person's hands if they are doing something interesting. I found this interesting because getting R. to focus on what her hands (or someone else's hands) are doing has been one of those long-term goals I have for her. Once again I feel vindicated that this is indeed important. If I can in a sense take her back to an earlier part of her development then maybe we can eventually move forward. I will continue to ask her look at what her hands are doing.
• Today, January 7, is St. Distaff Day. I bet you didn't know this. I bet a lot of you are wondering who St. Distaff is. Well, there's not actually a St. Distaff, but a distaff is a tool used to hold the fiber that one is spinning. Usually it holds flax which is then spun into linen. There was a ban on spinning during the twelve days of Christmas and so the day after Epiphany marks the day to return to the never ending tasks of life, which for anyone pre-industrialization, would have been spinning. Some things I have read say that it is much older than Christmas. Instead, it seems that there was a spinning ban during Yule, the time between the soltice and the new year, which makes Jan. 2 another day where distaffs were celebrated as a return to work and to spinning. Interesting, huh?
• Finally, I'm finishing up reading How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. It is an interesting book, though not a fast or easy read. It will be one of those books that I will be glad to have read and will continue to think about. I will leave you with a (rather long) quote from it.

"What's especially tragic about a mind that imagines itself as something separate [as opposed to in community], defendable, and capable of 'efficiency' is not just that it results in a probably very boring (and bored) person; it's that it's based on a complete fallacy about the constitution of the self as something separate from others and from the world. Although I can understand the logical outcomes of a very human craving for stability and categories, I also see this desire as, ironically, the intersection of many forces inside and outside the imagined 'self': fear of change, capitalist ideas of time and value, and an inability to accept mortality. It's also about control, since if we recognize that what we experience as the self is completely bound to others, determined not by essential qualities but by relationships, then we must further relinquish the ideas of a controllable identity and of a neutral, apolitical existence (the mythology that attends gentrification). but whether we are the fluid product of our interactions with others is not our choice to make. The only choice is whether to recognize this reality or not."  (pp. 139-140)