Ordinary Time

K. turned 17 today in a rather anti-climactic celebration between siblings being sick or needing to work due to the storms passing through. And them the power went out. We may have to have a do-over in a little bit.  That's it for the evening as my phone is about to die. Hopefully we'll wake up to a fully electrified house.

You know, sometimes there are things that I desperately want to write about, but because they feel so scary and hit so close to home, that I have absolutely no words to share. This is currently how I feel about anything having to do with the state of the nation about the LGBTQ+ community and specifically the trans community.  What I will say is that this is hard, and frankly terrifying.  How would you feel to know that a great number of people think your child shouldn't be allowed to have basic rights? How would you feel to know that a great number of people believe that your child is a danger to others?  How would you feel to have an increasing amount of hate directed at you and your child?  No, really, stop and think what that would be like. Do you enjoy the feeling? I imagine you don't, because who would?  Yet, there are a great many people out there, most frighteningly law makers who are playing God, who think it is just fine to demonize a whole people group...

Every year I say I'm going to get the cold weather seeds in early and every year I'm trying to grow things like spinach and snap peas in weather that is a lot too warm. But not this year! We're having a quasi spring break this week, just doing lighter work, so I have a bit more time. This happened to correspond to a pretty decent day and I took advantage of it.  It helped that I had lettuce seedlings that really needed to be set out. (I had been hardening them off hoping the weather would cooperate.)  I'm happy to report that all the seeds are planted!  I'm trusting all the gardening books that "plant as early as soil can be worked" is really what they meant. I also wanted to give a brief update on how my new soil blocker is working. As of right now, the little soil blocks are working very well. A few days ago I transplanted all the pepper seedlings that I had started before I bought the soil blocker. When I transplanted them it was into the soil blocks. L...

There is a fantastic fiber store near my mom's house, so of course I had to visit it while I was there. I was paid for the piano judging I did and had a little bit to play with. Here's what I found. This is what I went in for. It is more of the silk and Polworth wool blend that I bought last year and loved. There were also blue braids, but I've been working with a lot of blue recently and decided to venture out to another color.  Then I bought some supplies for next year's spinning class. This Jacob wool was fantastic for beginning spinners. I'll dye the white and leave the natural brown as it is. I had also planned on getting these. Then comes the unplanned purchases. First there are these two skeins of fingering yarn. I don't often buy yarn these days, but these were so pretty and soft, there they were in my basket.  I'll probably also take a bit of them apart to figure out how they made it... number of plies, how they combined colors, etc. Because I could...

On Saturday we had salmon for dinner. This is a rare meal for us, for while we all live it, it is often too expensive to be able to buy enough to feed everyone. That is until you are doing your shopping and happen to see this. Yes, that package of salmon cost less than a dollar once the $5 was subtracted. Plus, there were more in this same price range. I bought five. For once everyone got as much salmon as they wanted. It will be a long time before I find a deal as good as this again.  When I was checking out, the checker and I had a pleasant conversations about my very cheap salmon, which brings me to the title of this post. Aldi, along with practically every grocery store I shop at, has torn out the bulk of manned cash registers and replaced them with self checkouts. Unless I am buying one or two items that don't need to be weighed and don't require an ID, I actually loathe self checkouts. There is something about the impersonal machine telling me that I did something wrong t...

I'm not doing a weekly update today. There would not be much to say except that I scrambled all week trying to get ahead of all that I needed to do. Normally I don't feel as though I'm scrambling through the week. In fact I work very hard to be sure I'm not because I am not happy when I feel rushed. But there is something about being gone all weekend and Monday to have all of that fall apart. I'm feeling a little less harried today and am looking forward to a weekend with very little on the calendar. Instead I though I would share something I wrote to a struggling parent today. It might be useful to others even if you aren't feeling at the point of crisis. This is an excerpt with other details deleted. <<I find it useful to have essentially a triage list in my head for dealing with upset between children. It helps me to remember the order of importance when dealing with multiple upset children at a time.  1. Comfort the wounded. In real time this means I d...

This would be a vague counterpart to yesterday's voice in terms of education in our country. Well, Florida at least, that forerunner of the state with the largest population of the lunatic fringe. So it seems a principal was forced to resign for showing sixth graders pornography. Sounds concerning, huh? Well, until you realize that the "pornography" in question was... Wait for it... Michaelangelo's statue of David.  I'll just let that sink in for a moment. What on earth?  Among some of the many things a large potion of Florida's populace needs is access to a dictionary. But maybe those have already been banned because they might contain... Gasp... Bad words.  But I digress. The definition of pornography is: Printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings. I guess the pearl clutching began right after the word "organs" (can ...

Last week I spent time listening to some of a Global Resilience Summit. I signed up because it has some of my favorite brain people on the list... Daniel Seigel, Bessel van der Kolk, Stephen Porges, etc. How could I pass it up, especially since it was free? There wasn't a whole lot new or surprising in it, but it was done in interview form so it was interesting to here the panelists having a conversation rather than just presenting material. Each of them wound up with the same conclusion. In order to become resilient, it takes a combination of physical safety and connection with others. Without these two main scaffolds in place, emotional health cannot be replaced. If you've read here for any length of time, these ideas are not new to you. There was something that caught my attention. I believe it was Stephen Porges (who wrote The Polyvagel Theory) whom I was listening to at the time. The interviewer was asking about how to support children in returning back to school after a c...

I'm back from my long weekend in Arizona. It was a good trip even if it wasn't quite as warm and sunny as I was hoping. (I went to the thrift store to buy a couple of sweaters.) It was still significantly warmer than my family was at home, so not surprisingly, no one was overly sympathetic to my lack of 80 degree weather.  I had a good visit with my mom and also got to catch up with some long term friends... some if whom I've known since first grade. They are all the type of friend who you just pick back up with as if you had seen each other yesterday.  Have you noticed how expensive and difficult flights are to get? To be even remotely affordable (the emphasis on remotely and not affordable) I had to fly at less than opportune times. This meant that I exited off the plane after midnight and didn't really get into bed until 1:30 am or so.  If I was able, I'd just make an easy morning of it, but long before the plane tickets, I had scheduled a neurologist appointment...

  These are orange blossoms. They smell absolutely heavenly and I wish I could post their scent on the blog as well as their photo. I've been back to Arizona in spring many, many times, but rarely does my trip coincide with the orange blossoms. I am thrilled and make sure to smell them every time I go outside.

One of the great joys of homeschooling (at least in my opinion) is to choose to spend the entire morning curled up on comfy couches while I read the final chapters of a book we are involved in. In this case, we were finishing The Domesday Book by Connie Willis. As I have mentioned before, this is a book where a historian travels to the middle ages and accidently ends up in the year 1348, the year the Black Death arrived in England. It is not as dire as you would suppose given the topic. Well, at least until the last chapters. I figured it was better to get them all read in one fell swoop rather than lingering over them. The book does a very good job of portraying the horribleness of the plague. Yet it also still tells a very good story, so it feels worth it. We'll move onto something lighter for our next book. What I really wanted to do was to continue my campaign to encourage parents to continue reading to their teenaged children. I think it is just as valuable as reading to your ...

I've done a lot of reading this week which means I didn't spend as much time on fiber related things. I did, however, finish the socks I have been knitting for J. To remind you, this are knit out of the yarn I spun from the first raw wool I ever processed. I also didn't measure well and ended up having to supplement with purchased yard. (The red is purchased.) Here is the second finished sock. I'm pretty pleased with this one. Life would be grand if they both looked like this. But...  As you can see the two socks don't match very well even if you don't pay attention to the colors of the heels and toes. The first sick I knit turned out to be a little too short in the foot and I just don't like the pattern I used. The second sock was the one where I combined two patterns together so I was happier with the gusset and toe. Here, I'll show you. The brown toe is the second sock and the one I'm happy with. The first sock's toe is... odd and pointy. I do...

Just a few things from the past week. We celebrated A.s and W.'s birthdays this past Friday. Everyone but D. was able to at least make an appearance. A. then left in the wee hours of the morning to go collect D. from school for his spring break. A. invited G. and L. to come along which they very much enjoyed.  The horses, Emmy in particular, are shedding. Emmy got groomed a bit yesterday. Those white splotches are not snow, it's horse hair. The actual snow appeared today.  We have collected about 12 gallons of sap which J. has been cooking down. We don't quite have syrup yet, so I can't tell you how it tastes. All my pepper seeds have sprouted. Earlier this week I went into the downstairs bedroom to use the treadmill and when I glanced out the window I saw a large, furry creature sitting on one of the large rocks we have in the front yard. I wasn't sure what it was and my initial thought was a beaver, but then realized it was a very large groundhog. He was pretty cu...

When a reader asks for the list of brain books I have read, how can I say no? This is not a complete list because I only started to keep a list of what I read in 2016. It was at that point I grew tired of forgetting titles or rereading a book because I had forgotten I had read it. I have added some pre-2016 books on at the end that I know I have read, but I started reading on this topic around 2012, so that's four years' worth of books that I don't have titles for. This is a long list. If I remember a book and found it particularly interesting, I'll put an '*' next to it. If a book needs some sort of comment, I'll add that. It was also difficult to look at my list and decide what kind of book it was. You'll notice that there are books that venture a bit outside of the strict 'brain' category, but I think still fit. 1. The Body Knows its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel - Sian Beilock * 2. ...

Earlier this week I finished reading Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. I was excited to read it because it received fantastic reviews, and frankly, who doesn't want to read a book with an octopus as one of the narrators? What follows is both a bit about the book, but as much or more about neuroscience. Do be forewarned, that while I don't plan on sharing spoilers, I am going to discuss some plot elements. If you plan on reading the book and are bothered by knowing too much ahead of time, you may want to stop here and come back after you have read it. Long about two-thirds of the way through the book, I actually set it aside for a bit. I just wasn't interested in the story or the characters and found myself reluctant to pick it up. I don't like not finishing a book that I am that far along in, but as I mentioned, I was unenthusiastic. So I did a quick search to see if I could find any negative reviews. None. Everyone loved it. Everyone thought it was sweet ...

Remember when I couldn't find my seed box, but eventually did? Well, not only did I misplace my seed box, but I also seem to have misplaced the trays of small starter cells that I start the seedlings in before I transplant them. The difference is that we can't find the cells anywhere. Trays, domes, larger cells and containers are all together, but not those smaller ones.  This is why when a friend texted me about her new way of starting seeds I paid attention. I was going to have to replace those lost cells with something. My friend was telling me about the soil blocker she bought and how much she loved it. I knew about soil blockers, those devices which create formed blocks of soil that don't require any type of container, but they seemed to be one of those advanced gardening tools and since I was still at the 'happy when things grow and I can keep them alive long enough to go outside' stage, I hadn't really paid them much attention. It turns out they weren...

In a world of accreditation with gatekeepers everywhere, autodidacts are stuck. I may have more than enough knowledge and experience in a certain area, but because it is self-taught, I am disallowed from taking exams which would allow me to demonstrate that knowledge and experience. I am just overly frustrated at consistently being passed over in favor of those who do have those accreditations yet I am disallowed from obtaining them because my knowledge came from non-traditional means.  Sorry, it's a bit cryptic, but it's been a frustrating two days. 

To give fair warning, this post could be exceedingly long and have more than the usual number of pictures.  Last Wednesday, an afternoon I try to keep free, the weather was beautiful. It was sunny and the temperature was in the 50's, which at this time of year feels gloriously warm. With a free afternoon and weather I could be outside in, I decided to take advantage of it and finally mix up dye stock solutions of the 14 new dye powders my adult children gave me for Christmas. Because acid dye powder is very fine, I like to do it outside where no one can accidentally breathe it in. So, I got all my supplies, donned my protective gear, and got to mixing. I'm much faster these days and it took less than two hours to get everything mixed up. One thing I find intriguing is that the actual dye color doesn't always look like the dye stock. For instance this dye: It's a mauve color which means it's going to be on the lighter, pinker end, but it looks like a very deep pink i...

Just a little PSA announcement tonight on a couple of word definitions.  Natural consequences - The direct result of making a poor decision. Leave your coat at home? You'll be cold. Procrastinate about writing a paper? You might not have time to finish it. Don't fill up the gas tank soon enough? You'll run out of gas. Imposed consequences - An unrelated punishment for not following rules. Most of the time have little to do with the offense. They don't actually work and definitely hinder you from being on your child's team. They often indicate that the rules are more important than the relationship with the child. This can be a difficult distinction to wrap ones head around. Especially since so many parenting resources would say the exact opposite... Enforcing rules = good parenting. It took me years to tease apart and undo this type of thinking which is probably why I might sound like a broken record.

I should probably add the word 'finally' to the title because we've been trying to do this for a while. Can you guess what's happening? After years of thinking about it and getting supplies ordered (where they sat in our utility room last year), we are finally tapping our maple trees. Can you see the little drop of sap hanging off the end of the tap? We opted to not have hanging buckets but instead use tubing that runs down onto covered buckets. We're only tapping three trees this year as we figure out how we're going to make this work. We'll probably end up with just a couple ounces of maple syrup by the end. The other reason we're starting small is that these are all silver maples, not sugar maples. We know the syrup will taste a little different and we want to be sure we like it before we enlarge the endeavor. But I'm excited to be finally trying this regardless.