My Almost-Dragon

Earlier today I found a little tiny piece of something on the comforter of my bed. It was bright, shiny green and about the size of a thick thread. My first thought was some synthetic material; my second was something organic, like a tree-bud or the fiber from inside a green pine cone. My third was a dragon (such small dragons have been found before, notedly in the great dragon plague in England some years ago--recorded by Edith Nesbit in The Deliverers of Their Country). Indeed, it was so very green, and shone so brightly in the sun, I thought a dragon was at least as likely as anything else. There was only one way to find out, so I got a microscope to take a closer look. Alas! it was not a dragon, unless dragons have stalks and leaves. I looked around more and found a few more pieces: one of them brown and dried, so it was decidedly something organic. I still do not know what it is, however, and am curious. If anyone happens to know what the flora of southeastern North America look like when magnified thirty times, I would be obliged.

The stalks (my dragon is on the top left)


Approximate actual size


A stalk magnified 30x

The Twenty-Third Post

Hooray! I was tagged to play by Firefly at Bioluminescence!

Here's the game:
1. Search your blog archive.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Find the fifth sentence (this is meant to say something about you).
4. Post that sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five people to do the same.

Well, okay. My 23rd post is one of our end-of-term exams from last school year. And depending on whether a section heading counts as a sentence or not, we end up with this:

"What invention do you think most changed the world? What can you tell about how it came about?"

Well, I do have an interest in the world being changed. And homeschool is pretty much my life right now. :)

I tag Miss Roxie at Sunny Day, my Homemaker friend at Thimble Cottage, Cheekymama at I Have to Say, Phyllis at Hunsucker Home and Keepermom at Lighthouse Christian Academy.

Crock Pot Recipe

I've been looking for healthy, dairy-free, mostly vegetarian recipes for our new crock pot so I can throw everything in the crock pot in the morning and leave it until dinner. I found a few recipes online and I plan to try a few over the next few weeks. Today I tried this one:

Spaghetti casserole

1 lb (approx. 2 handfuls) spaghetti, break into pieces
1 26-oz. jar spaghetti sauce
1 c water
(optional - add soy cheese)

Combine all ingredients in crockpot; mix well. Cook on Low for 4 hours until pasta is tender, stirring once during cooking. Serves 6.

I followed the instructions, the house started smelling really good! Mmmm! Like spaghetti! Miss M kept asking for "pah-ta" (pasta) because it was making her hungry. On one ocassion, she came out of the kitchen with a chunk of banana in her hand and proceeded to tell me, very animatedly, how she got a banana, took a bite, spit it out, and ate banana. I went into the kitchen, and here is what I found on the floor: a banana peel; half a banana, slightly mushed; a whole banana missing a little bit off the tip; the tip that had been bitten off, peel and all, and then spit out!

An hour after I started the spaghetti, it smelled done. I stirred it and it looked done. But it was only 1pm, not even close to dinner. So I turned it to "warm." I checked again it an hour later. It was starting to get clumpy. I added a package of shredded soy cheese, hoping it would melt and make it palatable.

It didn't. I have a crock pot full of spaghetti that looks like refried beans and feels like rubber. It smells good, though! Miss M had some and loved it.

But Daddy is taking everyone to Burger King for chicken nuggets for dinner.

Book Publishing 101

Today I'm publishing my book. I realize that not many people can wake up and say that. One thing I've found since I published my last book - everybody has something they've done that they've always harbored a secret thought of seeing in print. Their lovingly collected family heirloom recipes from the past five generations, the geneology work they'd like to present to family members as a Christmas gift, their own Bible study curriculum, their grandmother's memiors, the novel they've had in their head. So here's the info:

Go to lulu.com. You can upload a Word document of your work and they'll convert it to a pdf file, then you pick a cover and choose a few details, and there's your book! The process doesn't cost you a dime! They'll print one copy at a time to order. They make their money when somebody orders your book.

Black and white books are pretty reasonably priced, but if you have color, even if it's just one color picture in the whole book, the price jumps for every page.

All the information you need is available from their various Help Topics, accessible from their Help page.

So, what are you waiting for? Let's see that dream project of yours in print!

BTW, my book (a modern paraphrase of Charlotte Mason's Volume 6) is done. Check it out here!

Tying Up Loose Ends

I spent the day finishing and taking care of a few things I'd been putting off--printing out a couple of poems that L and J are working on for memory work, dividing up our Shakespeare play (Henry V) for this term and printing out a copy for everyone, and re-sending Tim's application for our homeschool umbrella group. Now that he's in high school, they want a detailed list of subjects and which curriculum/books he's using for each of them. And the subjects can't be the subjects he's actually doing, but the subjects he needs credits for. So, although he's doing US/World history, we didn't list those because he already earned his required history credit last year. In fact, almost nothing of what he's doing with Ambleside Online this year will count. Even though his year's load is challenging, it looks like he's slacking off because he's only earning five credits for graduation this year, where he earned 9 last year. And he'll earn 4 next year, and a measly 3 his senior year, even though the work won't get any easier.

Yesterday we re-organized our chores assignments, and the result is that everything got done earlier today. Tim and J will each be making dinner one day a week, and I made a 3-week menu rotation that includes a good number of crock pot meals that we can put in early and forget about the rest of the day.

And I signed up with a few other moms online to work together to lose ten pounds by Christmas. I know I've slacked off on the exercise, but Miss M is making it more difficult. She cries when I get on the treadmill without her, and she cries to get down when I put her in the baby carrier.

The Golden Age

We just finished The Golden Age by Kenneth Grahame (he wrote Wind in the Willows) as our family read aloud. J and L liked it, which kind of surprised me, I struggled over it, since the sentences were long and some of the words were hard to pronounce. I'm surprised they were able to follow it with my terrible reading of it, and the big words.

I love the way he writes, although I'm not impressed with the book itself. It portrays a kind of heartless picture of childhood, which is probably partly true to life, but doesn't really give a reader much to aspire to. Still, nobody can put things the way he does. I love the part of Wind in the Willows where Toad is in jail and bemoaning the loss of "his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case--all that makes life worth living." Our copy of The Golden Age is illustrated by Ernest Shepard.

Our next book: Little Men.

This Month's Books - September 2005

A couple days late. And there were only two: school provides plenty of others. I've added a few movies we watched this month.

Eragon by Christopher Paolini
A fantasy written by a homeschooler, set in another world and focusing on a youth and his dragon coming of age. It wasn't Tolkien, of course, but it was good, and I look forward to reading the next book in the trilogy. There is more emphasis on practical magic than in Tolkien's work, which might bother some. I find it offers some interesting speculation on the possibilites for the supernatural in a world governed by different laws than ours.

Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
A re-read, but I saw much more in it this time. The continual harping on cuckoldry got annoying after a while, but the mastery of language was thrilling, entertaining, and sometimes simply astounding. If Shakespeare followed Humpty-Dumpty's rules, he must have paid his words well.


Movies:

Northanger Abbey (produced by the BBC)
What do you get when you combine Jane Austen, bad moviemaking, and bad gothic music? Seriously, I didn't know a movie score could be so bad.

The Sandy Bottom Orchestra
A very good movie about a young violinist growing up in an artistic family and somewhat less artistic town. After watching it, I've decided I want to learn Mozart's 23rd piano concerto. Da da-da Da tada-Da...

Ever After
A retelling of the Cinderella story set in Rennaissance France. It has become one of my favorite movies: the story is good, the script is good, and the cinematography is stunning. To quote myself, "The Sandy Bottom Orchestra is good, but Ever After is a work of art."

Full Sentences!

Miss M put her toy cup on the counter a little too far back. Then she said, "I tah ree daht." (I can't reach that.) I don't remember any of her brothers speaking in full, grammatically correct sentences before age two.

My Reading List for the Year

This year, I've decided to do half of Tim's Year 10 along with him. This is what I hope to read; it looks ambitious, and I hope I can manage it.

Knowing God by J.I. Packer
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Character is Destiny by Russell Gough
Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel and Harvey Bluedorn
Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Evaluating Books by Richard Maybury
Thinking Like a Christian by David Noebel
The Law by Frederic Bastiat,
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Essays by Montaigne: That It Is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity, Of Solitude, Of the Inequality Among Us, Of Repentance
Essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Art
The Attributes of God by A. W. Pink
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
One Blood by Ken Ham, Carl Wieland; Don Batten
The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell
The Deadliest Monster by Jeff Baldwin
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Essays by Quiller-Couch: The Practice of Writing, Interlude: On Jargon, Some Principles Reaffirmed, On Style
Essays by Frederick Douglass: Reconstruction, An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage, My Escape From Slavery
The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
How Should We Then Live by Frances Schaeffer
Graves of Academe by Richard Mitchell
Silas Marner by George Eliot
John Stuart Mill On Liberty
Essays by G.K. Chesterton: A Piece of Chalk, On Lying in Bed, The Twelve Men, The Diabolist, What is Right With the World

An Orderly Universe

"...All physics is rooted in the notion of law--the existence of an ordered universe that can be understood by the application of rational reasoning."

- Paul Davies, introduction to Six Easy Pieces


"If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milkjug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset."

- C.S. Lewis, The Business of Heaven