Ordinary Time

I'm just about done with my dyeing experiment of dyeing 100 grams of fleece with each of the twelve dye colors I have (eleven actually because I wasn't planning on black). You want to hear something that filled me with great satisfaction? When I got down to measuring out the fleece for the last two colors, I realized that I had exactly enough fleece for it all to come out perfectly even. Here is everything minus the two that are still drying. What is missing is brown and emerald. These last two colors were interesting because the dyes each broke quite a bit. (Broke meaning that they separated into their component parts when I started heating the dye pot.) This also means these colors are the least uniform of everything. I will be curious to see what they end up looking like when I spin them. Here's brown: As you can see the black used to make it separated quite a bit which is why you see black patches. And emerald: In this the blue broke leaving blue patches. Blue is also t...

Time. I just need some more time in my life. A recurring theme in conversations between M. and me is our moaning about not having enough time, either daily or in a lifetime, to try and master all that we wish we could. On my own personal list is the desire to be functionally fluent in multiple languages. In my imagination, multiple means upwards of six. There's good news and bad news about this little fantasy. The good news is that it is totally doable, even as an adult. Anyone can learn a new language, even if they have missed the optimal window of learning it naturally as a child. Our brains are pretty amazing things, and being multi-lingual is not out of the realm of reality for anyone, provided they are willing to put in the time. And there's the bad news. Learning a new language, even if one has a natural aptitude for languages just takes time and the effort to memorize the new grammar and vocabulary. I can carve out a bit of time throughout my day to work on language le...

We successfully navigated the library for the first time yesterday. This was no small feat and our travelling circus now seems to draw even more attention. Probably this is due in no small part to the fact that we have added one child who likes to shout, "I love you!" at random strangers and another who uses a walker. (An aside... the walker we are borrowing from a friend has been great. Y. obviously knew what it was and while she doesn't want to use it in the house, she used it without a complaint for a trip out. It gives just the right amount of stability so that she can be pretty independent. And even with our very short trip with it, I am hyper-aware of people's reactions. I'm sure this will turn into a blog post at some point.) Of course, there were also the nine children I had in tow which was probably a factor as well, though most of the staff at the library are used to us. To their credit, not one of them batted an eye that I had a couple extra this time. ...

A reader mentioned to me that I should do a post on Leitner boxes since I mentioned them in my previous post. She may not be the only who who doesn't know about them, so here's a brief explanation. We can't start with the boxes, though. We have to first go back to the idea of a spaced repetition memory system. This is the idea that there are optimal times between review sessions of material to firmly implant an idea into ones memory. Different scientists early in the last century worked on this problem and I had run across the idea in various forms in my somewhat compulsive reading about brain science. I think that's why I was so intrigued with Sebastian Leitner's system of using index cards when I read about it in the book, Fluent Forever. I knew the science behind it and it made sense. Plus, it used an organized system with schedules and index cards and little index card dividers... all things that I enjoy playing with. It is also hard to ignore the results of s...