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Tuesday, January 30, 2007
because you can't die of cuteness
...here's C reading "Jabberwocky" for Librivox's Weekly Poetry:
Monday, January 29, 2007
I am here. Sort of.
Thank you, Denise, for sending me a "I hope you're not dead" (roughly paraphrased) comment and obligating me to prove that I do indeed have a pulse and measurable brain waves by writing an actual post. (Seriously, there was a time, when I was really involved in this thing and posted every day, sometimes more than once a day, when I used to actually devote some time to wondering how my survivors would let my vast blogging public -- um, sarcasm -- know if I were to drop dead suddenly. And you thought only melodramatic fourteen-year-olds played out those kinds of scenarios!)
So. Here's what's been happening.
History class is going well. I am actually really liking it. I am using index cards and taking actual notes. I almost never did this in high school (and truly never, with the index cards). About the only classes where I really took any notes were math and science ones, and in those classes I would randomly find a piece of paper or open a notebook to a random page, write the date so I'd know what day the assignment was for (because I honestly usually believed that I would do my homework. Does that fit the oft-used definition of insanity, do you think?), and take down whatever the teacher taught that day. Then I would never look at those notes again.
I can feel all of you college-educated teachery types shuddering from here.
Anyway, the night class is a lot of fun. I probably don't have to work as hard as I do, because the teacher (do you call them professors if they have master's degrees and are teaching one night class for a community college but teach junior high history during the day? Someone honestly please fill me in. I've been just calling him a teacher) gives all indications of being not only the world's easiest grader, but also he outright says that he will tell us on review days exactly what will be on the test, sometimes including answers to specific questions. So I have a friend who mocks me for studying so hard, but you know what, I don't have to be doing this at all. My husband could continue to support me, I don't have to have a job or a career or any further education than I do right now. I'm doing this because I want to, and the main reason I want to is that I enjoy learning and I enjoy a challenge. Also, I can pretty much guarantee that at some point I will have a class that's not so easy, and if I don't establish some sort of organized study habits, that will be Analytic Geometry, sixth period, spring semester 1992 all over again. And we don't want that, do we.
Plus I fully intend to have the kids quiz me with my index cards and that will lead to discussions that will count as their US History lessons too. Two birds with one stone and all that.
OK. Enough about school. On to the real news.
MY IPOD IS BROKEN.
I am so, so sad. It charged and did its little sync routine thing Saturday morning, and I ejected it properly and all that, and then when I went to use it, it wouldn't turn on (and no, the Hold switch was not on). So I plugged it into the computer and the only thing it would do was give me this "Please Wait, Very Low Battery" message, even though the battery was fully charged. The computer won't even SEE it. (My theory is that it crashed because I got it too close to full. It had about 400M of its 4G capacity free, and it was the fullest I'd ever made it.) It's under warranty, so the Apple people are going to take care of it, but in the meanwhile, folding laundry is much, much less fun.
Um, what else. Jenn and Debi and I are embarking on a Beth Moore online study, "Believing God". I really truly need this right now. We should be blogging about it on Fridays or Saturdays.
Also, I am almost out of Librivox projects, and we can't have that, so I just signed up to read O Pioneers! for them. I won't bother posting about it here, but I'll post when it's done. Or if you're absolutely bored and you have nothing else to do at all you can follow its progress here. "Listen" links will show up as I finish and upload chapters.
I am knitting a cotton sweater for C. I am having a wonderful time with it. Cotton is SO SO NICE. I also bought some actual real wool, to make a scarf and hat for myself (and teach myself cabling), but i haven't started those yet.
And I think that's all. I have a ton of things I should be doing, so I'll go do them.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
this is not what I am supposed to be typing.
In history class on Tuesday (history class! me! for a grade!) we were assigned an essay. Actually, we were told that we'd be assigned an essay pretty much every week for the whole semester: 'reaction papers' to current events stories provided by the instructor or dug up on our own. He said they should be five-paragraph essays, and in my dorky haven't-been-in-a-classroom-since-the-early-days-of-the-Clinton-administration naivete, I thought that meant, oh, hey, whatever. Around five paragraphs, you know, a page. Whatever. I do vividly remember being taught to write five-paragraph essays in I think the fifth grade, with the rigid academic format, but I honestly don't remember (although I'm sure I did) writing any essays like that in high school. I thought the whole "do it this way or else" thing was kind of like how they taught you in second grade that THERE IS ONE WAY TO MAKE A CURSIVE T OR ELSE YOU DIE. I found my current event, sat down at the table, wrote out a rough draft, and went to bed smiling because for maybe the second time in my life I had done my homework on the day it was assigned instead of the far more familiar day that it's due.
I was so wrong. I went a-googling and found out that indeed I do need to travel back in time to fifth grade and react to current events in five tidy, well-planned paragraphs. My brother, a high-school teacher, seemed amused and somehow bewildered that I would find this surprising. Of COURSE that's how you do academic writing, you silly sister whose mind is all muddled after a dozen or so years of a steady diet of that very informal Internet you love so much.
People, I just wrote an OUTLINE. What have I got myself in for?
And did I mention that there's a research paper? I wonder if the one I wrote in the sixth grade on Ireland would fit the bill. Probably not.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
I've been -- I've been tagged!
[cue heavenly chord]
Have you any idea how long it's been since I've done a meme in here? Ages and ages! In blog years, anyway.
OK, Kat tagged me for the following (thank you, Kat, for validating my existence. This is like my name in a KS post. Remember the THRILL of it?):
The Page 123 Meme
1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, look down to the 5th sentence.
3. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog.
4. Include the title and the author's name.
5. Tag 3 People.
OK. The book closest to me is one of C's American Girl library books on the arm of the couch, and those don't have a page 123, which is a good thing, because the next-closest book, sitting on the coffee table, is The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury of course, which I checked out of the library even though I think I own it and it's here somewhere, because I found out that my husband had never read it. How a person reaches the age of 37 without having read The Martian Chronicles is a bit of a mystery to me. There's something wrong here somehow, for that poor man to have slipped through the cracks in such a fashion.
So, page 123, sentences 5-7:
"Having chosen you for this serious task, I find my reasons deplorably obscure, Father, but your pamphlet on planetary sin did not go unread. You are a flexible man. And Mars is like that unclean closet we have neglected for milleniums."
Ooh. Heavy.
You know, I don't know if there are three people who read this who actually still use their blogs (Debi, Kristen, and Jenn, I AM LOOKING AT YOU. Not that I have much room to talk.) Michael, Kiwiria, and Valerie, if you see this, you're IT. :)
Monday, January 15, 2007
finishing things is fun
When my mother had just finished high school, she got a job with the school district. Part of her job involved cleaning out lockers after everyone left for the summer. (I think I'm remembering this right). In one of the lockers, she found a pincushion made of four multicolored knitted sections sewn together. She has used that pincushion ever since. I don't know what made me think of trying to make one for myself, but a few weeks ago I went looking online and found these instructions. (basically, knit rectangles in specific sizes; sew them into tubes and then turn the tubes in on themselves; tuck the resulting half-height tubes into each other; sew the bottom together). I dug into my scrap yarn and emerged today with this:
pincushion
top
bottom
with pins
It's way bigger than my mom's; you truly could use this for knitting implements, small scissors, etc. I think I'll put it in the craft-fair tote (ha! she says. That's optimistic.) and make some more. The one I make for myself will be a bit smaller, and I'm also going to try using a ribbed stitch instead of garter stitches, casting on the circumference and knitting rows for the height, if that makes any sense at all. Well, it does to me anyway.
Thursday, January 11, 2007
the hard-working coed
It's a good thing I didn't make a resolution to blog more, isn't it.
Seriously, I have been really busy. I have been subscribing to podcasts and knitting and listening to my iPod. All these things take much time, as I'm sure you understand.
OK, OK, so I have been doing a little laundry too. See, T made me this shelf in my laundry room that folds down from the wall (in the fashion of a very large built-in ironing board, except I don't need one of those, seeing as how I pretty much never iron, unless I'm sewing, and having to travel back to the laundry room to press a seam would be a bit of a hindrance in most projects) and it is just perfect for folding my laundry. Now I pull a load out of the dryer, shift one over from the washer and start it drying, load the washer and start it, and then bring down my handy-dandy shelf table and stand right there and fold the freshly cleaned and dried clothes (while listening to a podcast or a Librivox book on my iPod, generally). And then I call the kids in to take theirs to their rooms, and put my clothes and T's on our bed. The baskets -- they do not sit around full of clean clothes. There is no... no coffee table involved. It's all rather new to me but it seems to be an interesting way of life and I'm seeing how I like it. So far so good.
Also, my dad had a project this past week that involved digging a trench on Saturday (with a trencher, and my main contribution here was to stand around with my camera around my neck looking like an idiot while Dad, T and my brother ran the thing), and then laying PVC pipe and electrical conduit and all kinds of lovely things in all these several hundred feet of trench on Monday, Tuesday, and today. And then covering up the trenches with dirt. I was slightly more instrumental in these tasks, since it was just my dad and myself and the kids who were doing the work. My muscles are very very disgruntled, but it felt good to do something with a little permanence -- something, unlike sweeping a floor or folding clothes, that wouldn't be undone within twenty-four hours. Except for that wee little thing about one of the joints bursting underground this evening after I left, and water gushing out and washing out many many many feet of freshly-filled trench much more deeply than it had originally been dug, moving all our carefully-placed dirt into the barn at the bottom of the hill, which barn now has a pond in the feed room . LT pointed out helpfully that this happened not long after I verbalized that bit about a job staying done. Maybe God was displeased at my lack of submission to the housewife's repetitive role, I dunno.
And ALSO, also also ALSO, I signed up for a night class on Tuesday! An actual, honest, graded, for-credit, first-small-step-on-the-long-road-to-the-RN-after-my-name class! It's a history class, and it's the first time since 1993 that I will have done anything for a grade. Or honestly much of anything associated with any kind of merit-based, objective assessment. This is exciting and scary at the same time. What if I'm still an undisciplined loser? What if I somehow turned stupid in the past thirteen years? What if I totally completely embarrass myself in class??
Well, honestly, that last one is sort of a given.
In keeping with my status as a matriculated individual, T has started calling me a coed (usually preceded by some endearing spouses-only adjective or another). I've told him that if he doesn't watch out I'll wear a plaid skirt and oxfords on the first day of class just to provoke him. He, um, doesn't seem to mind that idea. Men. I swear.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
books for December
Appallingly late with these again. I wasn't putting it off because it was such a daunting task to write this post; I was putting it off out of shame that once again I only finished two books in December. And one of them doesn't really count.
- Shopgirl -- Steve Martin -- 2.5
- You know, except for one very brief little chapterette, this entire book was pretty much a waste of time for me. Good thing it's really just a novella. Martin's writing style was surprisingly good -- not that this means it was amazing, just that it means it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be -- and his wry humor comes through in the text. This fact, and the aforementioned chapter, were all that kept me from making this a 1.5 (1 being reserved for books I can't make myself finish because of their utter bad suckiness). So if you open this to the chapter about the main couiple's second date -- I cannot even remember the characters' names -- Mireille? -- anyway, open it to that chapter and read the exchange between them which is, with its narration, possibly the most apt and humorous treatment ever written of the miscommunications that abound in male/female relationships, and you will have gleaned all the good that I did out of this little book. I kind of feel bad, not liking it, because the premise was interesting. It just didn't go anywhere. Or at least not anywhere I cared about. Stylish, but as substance-free as the local public schools.
- Anne of Green Gables -- L.M. Montgomery -- 5
- One of my top ten favorite books ever. I've read it literally at least two dozen times, probably three. This time I was reading it aloud and painstakingly editing the resulting audio files, which meant that I noticed pretty much every little detail all over again, and the story actually was better for this. Other than that, I have nothing new to say about this wonderful book except that I am going to force my family to listen to it in the car as soon as I have a car kit for my iPod. Bwa ha ha ha.
So there you have it: my shameful little list of two (2) books for an entire 31 days. To be fair to myself, I did have a lot of other projects going on. Not that I did all of those either.
