let them eat cake

(May is a month of birthdays for us...)

Alice Walker's Daughter on Being a feminist's daughter

Rebekah Walker (daughter of Alice Walker, who wrote The Color Purple) writes, "I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son - her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology. Well, so be it. My mother may be revered by women around the world - goodness knows, many even have shrines to her. But I honestly believe it's time to puncture the myth and to reveal what life was really like to grow up as a child of the feminist revolution."

Read the complete article here.

A Visit to My House

I created my own meme!!

People who visit us get a taste of who we are, what we're into, and what we're like. I notice that my kids tend to show new visitors the same computer things they like, or play music for them that they love that our guests have probably never heard, and offer the same snacks.

Since there are lots of people I know via the internet who may never get the chance to visit us, I thought I'd offer a virtual glimpse of a visit to our house.

If you came to our house--

You would see:
Art posters on the walls (Mona Lisa; Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott, Miranda and the Tempest, The Shrine; Constable's Hay-wain; Bouguereau's The Bird Lesson; Edmund Blair Leighton's The Accolade; Sir Frank Dicksee's La Belle Dame Sans Merci; John Singer Sargent's Garden Study of the Vickers Children)

We'd probably feed you:
corn chips
Red Vines, if they aren't rock hard

And offer you this to drink:
diluted juice, or your choice of hot tea (we have lots of varieties!)

We'd undoubtedly ask if you'd read:
The Chronicles of Narnia
The Lord of the Rings
(If you said yes, then we'd ask if you'd read The Space Trilogy or The Silmarillion)

We'd want to play this music for you:
Whirlwind of Leaves by Tom Root (our best friend's CD!)
Celtic Skies (unknown but great Celtic praise music)
Vienna Teng
Sara Groves
If you were a true Narnia fan: Roar of Love (2nd Chapter of Acts' Narnia album)
If you were a piano fan: Julianne Markavitch's CD of Tarentellas

We'd want to tell you the latest about:
The Prince Caspian movie we recently saw

We'd probably suggest a game of:
Quiddler (inside) or Frisbee Golf (outside)

We might show off:
Tim's graduation announcements, which are still in progress (if you wait a couple of weeks, we might be able to show you his actual diploma!)

We might get on the computer and show you:
Lego Beowulf (parts 1, 2, 3)
Weird Al's Star Wars American Pie


If it was a long enough visit, we might watch:
The Climb (a movie about two mountain climbers)
Our Mutual Friend PBS miniseries (it would have to be a really long visit for this one!)
The Sandy Bottom Orchestra
(Have you seen the Julie Andrews version of Cinderella?)

___________________________________________

What would a visit to your house be like?

We're tagging:
The Squirrels at Dewey's Treehouse
The Common Room
The Beehive
Liberty and Lily
U Krakovianki
Miss Roxie
Athena in a Minivan
Shilohmom at The Country Cottage
Katie at CM, Children and Lots of Grace
Excelsior Warriors Dawn ;)
I'm tagging Thimble Cottage, too - even though I'm there every week.

We Saw Prince Caspian

And I liked it. But my real post must wait till I'm more cognizant, because we went to the midnight showing (oh yes...) and my brain isn't used to functioning at 4:30 in the morning.

*yawn*

Useful Online Converter Software

Media-Convert can save a file that you upload to another file type. In my case, I can convert an Open Office (.odt) file from Linux to a Word doc, or to a pdf file. I can also now convert files to pdb files so my PDA can read them.

Text Fixer has tools for removing line breaks from Project Gutenberg texts, adding

tags to convert a page of text to html, and other useful tools.

Pink Dress

Our Trip to Buffalo

Erie County Courthouse, downtown Buffalo

A couple weeks ago we had the chance to go to Buffalo, NY with some friends. They were going because Giselle (otherwise known as Miriam, otherwise known as sis) was in a ballet performance, and had to be there for rehearsals--so we got to spend a whole week in the city, splitting our time between rehearsals and seeing the sights. We visited Niagara, which was utterly amazing and cannot be described in words; we toured some decommissioned ships at the naval park (very cool); we drove and walked through downtown Buffalo with its wonderful churches and old skyscrapers; and we spent one long and interesting evening walking up and down the street with a tired toddler and a sick toddler, poking into bookstores and candy shops and cafes, trying to find a place to eat that wasn't a bar or a budget-breaking restaurant.

You don't realize until you're on the road, away from everyday comforts like refrigerators and microwaves, how important food really is. But when you have eight people who spend all day running back and forth from state park to ballet studio to hotel room, it's very important to have adequate meals. And when your only refrigerator is a small styrofoam cooler and you have no oven or microwave to speak of, dinner becomes a matter for careful strategy. You can't come home half an hour before dinnertime and throw together something from what you have in the fridge. So it turned out well that we had a Walgreen's next door and a grocery store down the block. We brought a crock-pot and an electric griddle to our hotel room from home, and Giselle's mother cooked some great meals in our improvised kitchen by the bathroom sink while the Four of Us sat on the bed and watched Dick Van Dyke episodes.

(By the way, if you ever happen to be out late walking on Elmwood Avenue, getting tired and looking for someplace to eat, you might try SPoT Coffee. I don't know of any other place that gives you a rubber chicken to identify your order and lets you sit on a blue velvet armchair while you eat quesadillas and bruschetta. Also, the best way to follow up said dinner is to go down the block to Starbucks and get a Java Chip Frappuccino with whipped cream and mocha drizzle. I'm just saying.)

Anyway...on with the pictures.

On the way up: at the New River Gorge in West Virginia.

Driving through Pennsylvania.

Our first sight of Buffalo.

Looking down Delaware Avenue from our hotel room, with the Walgreen's next door.


Walking to the Tri-Main building, where Buffalo City Ballet is located. The building was once a factory which at different times produced Model T Ford's, Bell aircraft parts, and engines for the Navy. Now it's been converted into space for offices and shops.


Buffalo Naval Park. Behind us are the USS Little Rock (larger, on the right), the USS The Sullivans, and the USS Croaker (the submarine).


We found this almost by accident, driving around the theater during a rehearsal, but it turned out to be one of the best stops of the trip. It's the old New York State Insane Asylum, built in the 1870's. The building, empty now, has halls sprawling over several acres, all connected to one another with copper-roofed passages. It's an amazing place and very creepy. Henry Hobson Richardson, the famous architect, designed it, and another famous designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, did the grounds. But it hasn't been used in years: they stopped using it for patients in the 1970's and it's lain empty since the administrative offices moved out in 1994. It was made a National Historical Landmark in the '80s, and Wikipedia says that New York has set aside some money to restore it. I hope so; it's such a beautiful building that they shouldn't let it go to waste.


We were looking for a grocery store the first night we arrived and saw the silhouette of this building not far from our hotel. (If you have ever been driving around a strange city at night and suddenly seen the outline of a castle looming black against the night sky, then you know what it's like.) It was too late to explore that night, but of course we went back when daylight came. This is the Connecticut Street Armory, built in the 1890's for the 74th Regiment of the New York State National Guard. These days it's a meeting place for several military and veterans' groups.

Niagara Falls!

At Niagara Falls State Park.

Shops on Elmwood Avenue.

The fair and ghostly Giselle, who was, after all, the reason for the whole trip.

(Pictures by Tim, Giselle, and The Moms)

Forth unto Buffalo!

I love it....

...when I hear my four-year-old sister giving her stuffed animals feigned British accents.

Charlotte Mason and Play

This is from the ChildlightUSA group blog, and is by a schoolteacher. This is just a snippet from The Art of Play:

"Recently I stood on the playground [a paved parking lot with no swingset or games] with a prospective parent and her comment was, 'How do the children play out here? What do they do?' As I began to tell her, she interrupted, not out of rudeness, but more out of incredulity. 'Yes, but there’s nothing out here for them to do!' As I told her of the elaborate make-believe games, complex tag games with different rules for different players, and just plain old digging in the dirt, she eyed me skeptically. 'You must work hard to plan all this for them.' It was inconceivable to her that a group of five and six year olds could conceive of their own games, organize themselves, and implement the plan without an adult directing, supervising, and managing the whole affair."

For Mother's Day

The Ambleside Online website has been temporarily changed to a lovely palette of pink shades.

And here's a sweet series of pictures of a little girl imitating her mother.

FLDS Reading

I've been keeping up with the FLDS case by reading the CommonRoom blog, which is focused on the state's lack of hard evidence to justify their actions is removing children from their home, and how this could set precedents that we have reason to be wary of.

I've also been reading accounts of former members' claims of abuse within the group that would warrant removal of children - claims about what amounts to water torture on infants to teach them not to cry, brainwashing of women to the extent that mothers don't protect their own daughters from forced marriages to older men and women accept a life of enslavement, and abandoning young men who have been raised to fear and distrust "the world" by thrusting them out into that world in order to decrease competition for brides.

This case is a real mess, no matter how you look at it. I've heard of a few women who have escaped the group and told tragic stories about life within the compound, but no accounts from any of the young men who were forced out and had to learn to make their way in the outside world. If that's true, and such men do exist, I wonder what their thoughts are about all of this? Where are they now, what have they done to survive? Have they kept their beliefs and tried to be absorbed into similar groups (or perhaps more mainstream LDS churches?), or do most of them reject God altogether? And, if the stories are true about how children are raised to expect men to dominate women, and women to submissively accept that lifestyle, how do these men fare in marriages out in the real world?