Ordinary Time

Fine Line Creative Arts Center is hosting an open hunt this month where artisan made orbs are being hidden in the prairie next to the center and in a local forest preserve (Leroy Oakes).  We thought it would be fun to head over to our favorite forest preserve and see if we could find one. It was an absolutely gorgeous day. Do you see the bumblebee? I haven't the foggiest idea what plant this is, but it was cool. I can't tell you how excited I was to come across this bridge. We had taken a path that we hadn't been on before and suddenly there it was. I have driven up and down the major road right next to it and always wondered what the bridge I saw was connected to. Now I know. It was very satisfying. And once again, we had the entire place to ourselves.  Alas, no orbs... even with the promise of ice cream if we found one. Since there were only four left to be found this week and the forest preserve is huge, I figured it was unlikely we would find one. We'll try again n...

I can tell I have a lot in my head as I've been getting ready for school, getting my co-op classes ready, and as a co-op board member, getting the volunteer situation sorted out. And somewhere back in my head is my business that I have several things I need to do (and perhaps do some advertising and networking) which just hasn't reached appeared out of the depths of the inner to do list. And how can I tell my brain is overloaded? By what I'm able to read and not read. Non-fiction has been totally out recently. I just cannot seem to focus on it. The same goes for more "serious" novels. Instead, light and fluffy is about the only thing I can handle. I plowed through the Constable Twitten mysteries by Lynne Truss. (Highly recommended, by the way.) And then I started two more books. One I just couldn't read because I didn't find the main character's family situation believable, and the other was a book I realized I had read but didn't remember. I just ...

Every year after I spend dozens of hours doing the school planning, I sit back and look at the notebook I use and think, "Is that it?"  It certainly doesn't look like the cumulation of me spending the past two weeks doing little else. I made J. look at it this evening to ooh and ahh over it. (My instructions were very specific. "I need you to look at this and be impressed because this represents far too many hours of my life.")  Here's the first two pages on the inside. Yes, it's all written long hand in a spiral bound notebook. To get to this point took another full notebook of scribbled ideas along with multiple scraps of paper. It's truly the only way I can think and organize lots of information. Anything digital means very little to my brain.  As well as what we're covering each day, I have a list of what supplies we need when and which chapter books in what order we'll be reading at teatime. I have done all the thinking and essentially h...

No fiber news to share this week. I really have spent much of my time finishing getting ready for school next week. There are a couple of odds and ends left to do, but for the most part I'm done.  Because J. was gone all weekend driving D. to school, he took today off to get some things done around the house. The first and most important item was to get our new trees planted. I managed to keep them alive through the heat and they really needed to get in the ground.  L. really did do more to help than just sit there. The plum (you can see the absolutely loaded apple tree in the back.) The two sour cherries in the foreground and right, and the pear on the left. (It's difficult to see.) A better picture of the pear.  Our two peach trees are not long for this world. They are very, very old and every year we think they won't make it through the winter, but I'm afraid this will be the winter that they don't survive. The other item on the list was to move the baby adolesc...

Well, D. is at least. J. took the weekend to drive D. to school. D. starts his junior year as a bio-chem major this year.  J. was able to spend Saturday night catching up with college friends and drove home today. The rest of us did our usual things. We also did a big library trip followed by a treat to pick up some donuts for teatime. We finally finished Storm, which turned out to be a rather depressing slog. (As a small piece of trivia, Disney turned it into an episode called A Storm Called Maria, which you can't find anywhere now. It was also the book that was credited for the phenomenon of naming storms.) I was pretty much done with the author's exceedingly make focus. The very few women who appeared in it were pretty much window dressing. You can ask my children, as we progressed in the book my brief asides to comment on what we were reading grew more frequent and more tetchy. I thought we all needed something fun to read next as a sort of palate cleanser. We are now readi...

This morning, as I'm working on the photocopying I need to do for the school year, L. comes blowing through asking me if I had a shoelace. It seemed fairly urgent, but I couldn't think of any off hand. Y. then mentions there's a pair in the worn out sneakers she's throwing out, so the two of them head off to retrieve the shoelaces. All is quiet again for a while until L. blows through again. "I made a slingshot and have figured out when to release it to get the rock to fly and I might have hit the trailer well I actually hit the trailer but it's only a little dent. Bye!"  And so begins L.'s newest past time... having made a slingshot is now learning how to use it. This is the style where you swing it around and release one end which then launches the projectile. Life is never dull.

When we adopted TM,  we traveled to Vietnam in July. Vietnam is a tad warm in July. We managed okay, though we're thankful for an air conditioned hotel room. One day we went to visit the historic town of Hoi An. It was a beautiful town. I would have loved to wander around it more than we did, but the heat, sun, and humidity were overwhelming and we could only manage a very little bit. I would love to go back someday to actually get to appreciate it. This afternoon when I went to check in the horses it felt exactly how Hoi An did. And with a record high of 100° and a heat index of 118°, it explains why I felt as though I was back in Vietnam. Needless to say we only went outside to care for animals, the rest of the day we were all hunkered down inside the house. I did finish the actual planning portion of school, for both us and the classes I'm teaching. Now I just have to do some sorting and photocopying and that type of organizing stuff.  Like yesterday, the heat also meant th...

The heat has reached us. Since there wasn't anything on the calendar anyway, I'm using these two days to stay inside and finish my school planning. (And for those of you for whom the heat has been around a lot longer than two days, my sympathies. I'm not really complaining because we've had it pretty good this summer.)  Every year it's the same. I think I have a really good start on the planning, but then when I sit down to put all of my scribbled notes into a coherent plan, I discover gaping holes that I missed and need to fill. That is what I spent the bulk of the day sorting out. I now have a finalized and workable plan up until the last four weeks of the school year. That's tomorrow morning's activity. Then the rest of the day will be spent creating student checklists, doing a couple of schedules for individual learning projects, and generally getting things in order.  And remember when I was so proud of myself for spending so little money on school? Tha...

J. Is in the process of installing the new dishwasher which arrived this morning. Because evidently we don't even really shop for appliances anymore. We find a good deal online and have it delivered, always buying the warranty. With the warranty we might squeeze out another year out of the appliance which feel decidedly disposable these days. 

The past week was not taken up with a lot of fiber activity. Looking back, I'm not sure exactly what the week was taken up with, but it felt rather hectic. I don't really like hectic. This week is my do or die week for school planning, so I'm not sure how much free time I'll have this week, either. But I did manage to get a version of the t-shirt I showed you last week fitted so that I will wear it. There's no picture because it looks exactly like the one I showed you last week, just with more ease. It was annoying because it took three different tries to get it to fit correctly.  As I was working on it, I made two realizations. The first is that my sewing skills are rusty. The whole process took longer than it would normally because I felt as though I was having to remember how to do things at every single step. It wasn't actually an enjoyable process. The second thing I realized is that before I took my not-so-brief sewing hiatus, I was just at the point of ac...

The day started off with me realizing that my cherry cordial was just about to turn to vinegar. I really should have bottled it on Friday, I think. It's still pretty good and definitely worth making again. And since I have now discovered a total of five large wild black cherry trees in our yard, it's good to be able to make something with the fruit. The wine bottle was a bit of white wine leftover from a recipe where we  poured the last little bit of cordial that didn't fit in the jars. We tried it before dinner. Chilled it tasted a lot like kir.  Then, I learned about a tree sale a (somewhat) local nursery was having on fruit trees. We decided that it was worth heading out to because we have been wanting some more fruit trees. I thought if the prices were good that we might be able to get two.  Well, the prices were very good and we were able to get four. (It was a good thing we went when we did because the trees were selling very fast.) We have a pear, a plum, and two s...

With the homeschool planning, that is. And if you are talking broad outlines, I have that taken care of, too. The slow but is plugging exact titles and page numbers and activities into the calendar. I'm now stuck for a moment while I wait for some library books to arrive. But I also think it won't take me very long to finish once they come in.  So what are we doing this year? It's a little different because I have only high schoolers (other than H. and R.) So as well as planning the school year, I'm also beginning the process of shifting responsibilities for learning on to them. But in general, everyone is doing biology, the Renaissance, study skills, and rhetoric. Biology will be a little untraditional. (Imagine!) I'm using a sort of backwards curriculum this year. Each week everyone will be given study questions that they need to research. Then the next week we will spend one day a week going over their answers, discussing them, and doing the lab portion that goes...

This past weekend, J. took six children camping at a state park about two hours away. I stayed at home to do animal care and Y. stayed home because she really doesn't enjoy camping.  Some pictures from their trip.

Any one of these things would have been an annoying blip in the day, it was their cumulative nature that had me pretty done in by the end. I did the grocery shopping in the morning. I don't know what is going on with Aldi, but there was more food on the shelves during the worst of Covid than there has been the last several weeks. I've shopped at Aldi a long time and have a pretty good idea of what I can count on finding there, but not now. Today I would say I couldn't get a sixth of my list. These were not unusual items, they are things I buy every week... or try to. When I ask the checker I'm just told they are having warehouse problems or supply chain problems or something. It seems to me having food on your shelves if you are a grocery store would be a pretty important to do item to tick off. So, that was annoyance number 1. Annoyance number 1- B will be when I have to go to a more expensive store to buy the things I still need. Another grocery trip, more money... Bl...

I don't have a lot to show today, but one of the projects has been kicking around my studio since spring and I'm happy to have it finished.  Do you remember last year when I was making batts with the mill ends I bought?   I had spun all of these except the two on the very left side. They were my least favorite and they were somewhat dissimilar, so I knew the yarn each made would not really match. I finally decided to use them to learn a new spinning skill... making thick and thin yarn. I figured I'd be less than pleased with the outcome, so might as well use fiber I was not in love with. Late last week I finally finished spinning them. This picture is dreadful, but they are very difficult to photograph when they are still wet and hanging in the bathroom to finish drying. But even with the bad photography, you can tell the left skein is much grayer than the one on the right. I was actually overall pleased with the thick and thin bit. I'm not sure the changes in diameter ...

I haven't given an update as to how Major is doing integrating into the herd. I'm happy to report that everyone seems to be getting along happily.  Now... It wasn't quite so happy at first. While only Java appeared slightly aggressive towards him, for the most part the other horses just ignored him. And he ignored them, often just choosing to stand behind the barn just looking unhappy. And to top it off, Emmy and Java seemed bizarrely tied together, especially for two horses who had just tolerated each other previously. It didn't seem to be a good state of affairs for any of them. P. and I talked about it and we came up with a plan.  I closed the gate between the pastures which creates two separate ones. Into one pasture (the one without the barn) went Major and Emmy, while nto the other went Java and Vienna. Emmy had never been aggressive towards Major and Vienna and Java used to hang out together before Java decided she couldn't leave Emmy's side.  It took Maj...