Haven't You Been Wondering How to Do This?

Just when it seemed like it couldn't be done, this came across my RSS feed:

How To Describe a Smell

God's World

(For Giselle.)

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Snake

This fellow (or was it a she?) showed up on our porch yesterday. It was about four feet long and was in no hurry to leave, so we got a good long look at it.

Graduation

This post has been long delayed. First, following right on the heels of my graduation, was the Charlotte Mason conference (whence we came home full of bloggables), and then we were waiting for my official diploma, which took a lot longer to process than it should have because of paperwork problems. (For my graduation ceremony we used a fake--ahem--symbolic document.) But now my diploma has finally come in and it's time to blog about my graduation.



Every year our local homeschool group does a graduation ceremony at a nearby church, with caps and gowns and a commencement speech and all of that, just like a real school. It's nice, but after seeing their ceremony, I decided I wanted to do something smaller and more intimate. And once that was decided we thought that this would be a good opportunity to have the formal dinner party that I'd been wanting to have since before the prom. (Bother--I didn't blog about that either, did I? That was remiss of me.)



So we started planning. Date: June 10, 2008. Location: our house. Guests: a handful of close friends. Programme: a round of drinks from the bar during introductions, then dinner and table games, then the ceremony, followed by music to be provided by self and guests. Menu: (on an Italian theme) salad and pasta and cheesecake. Theme: words--books, authors, word games, etc. Colors: light blue and peach. Decorations: chinese lanterns, candles, table runners, special place settings.

A dish for each place: two clear plates stacked together, with a piece of paper between them. The papers are title pages photocopied from my favorite books and dyed in tea.

The bit that was the most fun to plan was the bar. We decided to give it a poets' theme, so the bar itself (arranged on one end of the kitchen counter) was called the Poets' Corner, and each of the drinks (all virgin, of course) was named after a poet. We spent many fun hours in the kitchen beforehand with bottles of juice and grenadine and club soda, experimenting with drink mixes and trying to decide what drink went best with which poet. Edgar Allen Poe, for instance? Dark red, I think; deep and heady; with a mysterious flavor. (Result: a concoction of pomegranate and cranberry and some other juices that looked and tasted a bit like wine.)



The dinner was also fun to plan. A salad of romaine and arugula, followed by chicken fettucine alfredo with peppers and onions, and then cheesecake with a berry topping for dessert. I originally wanted to make the whole dinner ourselves, but when it came time we decided to buy the cheesecake already made (there is nothing to compare with a slice of Johnny Carino's vanilla bean cheesecake). The other parts of the meal my mom and dad ended up making the morning before the party while the rest of us cleaned house and decorated.



My first thought was to have the party outside, but the nearer the day of the party came the hotter that idea sounded (some of us had to wear tuxes, after all), and on the day of the party I changed my mind. (Or had my mind changed for me. You'd have to ask the others on that point.) And it proved well that we moved the party inside, because we had a lovely rain just as we were sitting down to dinner. However, because of that last minute decision carefully orchestrated adjustment to the plans, the boys and Giselle and I were still setting places and putting up decorations when the rest of the guests arrived. It's the first rule of planning, but may I restate it one more time? Always assume that you'll need more time than you think you will. Even when you think that you're assuming that you'll need more time.

We put the grown-ups at one table and the rest of us at the other. Our house wasn't really made for this many people...but we managed to fit.

The dinner went splendidly. Afterwards we played Bananagrams (which is like Scrabble solitaire among eight people) and talked and worked on the cheesecake. After that was the actual graduation ceremony: my dad made a short speech about my education up till this point, then I made a short speech about things changing, and then he gave me my diploma (the symbolic one). Cheers and toasts and perhaps some tears.



By that time it was dark outside and the weather had cleared up, so we moved to the deck and had an impromptu concert / worship session.

The boys enjoy a serious moment, expressing themselves...artistically.

After that people began to leave and the party slowly ended. I was left with graduation cards and a diploma, a mess of tables and decorations and a suitcase to be packed for the conference next day--but above all those the feeling of blessedness which David put into words so beautifully:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul...

Life's a bit daunting at times, but I'd have to agree with Clarence: no man is a failure who has friends.

The deck, when all the guests had gone away.

Pauline Baynes passes away

The news comes via NarniaWeb. This makes me sad; I loved her illustrations for Tolkien and Lewis. Her vision of Narnia has always been the real Narnia for me.

Photo Op

I was taking pictures of the boys and a friend, and took the opportunity to get this one of all the boys and Miss M.

Two Quotes

Sometimes when you're reading you find a quote that makes you stop and think--the mental equivalent of stepping on the brake--but you merely note it as you pass, assuming that it was an interesting tidbit which shall quickly be forgotten. But you don't forget it. It stays with you and keeps coming back at unexpected times, like a theme in a Wagnerian opera, displaying its depth and strength over and over again until it gains a place in your mental library of leitmotifs. These quotes were like that for me.

The first is from a book about E.M. Bounds, a Civil War chaplain and writer of books on theology:

[E.M. Bounds]...was never overheard to vindicate or defend his own actions or stand. That intensely human need to explain ourselves and make others understand, what St. Augustine called "this lust of always vindicating myself," was overcome by this magnetic preacher of the gospel.

- Lyle Wesley Dorsett, E.M. Bounds: Man of Prayer

The second is a C.S. Lewis quote that the Headmistress used in one of her posts over at the Common Room:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s ‘real life’ is a phantom of one’s own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it’s hard to remember it all the time.

- The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (20 December 1943)

May I say that I think this a comforting thought? It means that I don't have to worry about my life not turning out the way I think it should, because my idea of What My Life Should Be was never real anyway. The true meaning of my life isn't what it means to me; it has meaning beyond all my thoughts and dreams, grounded forever in Something that is true and unchangeable. As the hymn says:

My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ my Savior and my God.

Found It!

Last year, when Tim was working on his essay for his national merit scholarship, I was looking around for some information and accidentally found a blog with a cartoon that I loved. I tried to find it again, and I retraced my steps, but I never could find the blog again. I spent days trying to find it.

MerryK posted some comics she found and as soon as I saw her post, I knew that the comic I had been looking for was one of these. I started flipping through the site to find that particular one, and Tim saw me, asked what I was looking for, and I described it to him. It turns out that he had bookmarked the exact same comic after flipping through the site after he saw MerryK's blog!

Here's the cartoon; it's home is here:

Six Quirky Things

Kim tagged me with this Six Quirky Things about Yourself meme.

Here are the rules:
1) Link to the person who tagged me.
2) Mention the rules.
3) Tell six quirky yet boring, unspectacular details about myself.
4) Tag 6 other blogger's by linking to them.
5) Go to each person's blog and leave a comment that lets them know they've been tagged.

So 6 uninteresting quirky facts about myself are . . .

1. I don't like to talk on the phone. If I have to make a phone call (except for a quick call to a close friend), I have to psyche myself up for it, sometimes with many cups of tea.

2. I don't like drinks either really cold, or really hot. I make tea by the half-cup so I can add cold water to bring it to lukewarm, and I add tap water to cold drinks to make them less cold. When I'm out, I never get drinks with ice, although, if I order hot tea, I'll add ice cubes with a spoon to make it lukewarm. I found out a few years ago out that my sisters do this, too.

3. I never learned to type, so I've become a pretty fast two-finger typist. I always look at the keyboard when I type. I have small fingers, so I use a small keyboard - it's actually made for a PlayStation.

4. I never took a driving test. I learned to drive late and had an out-of-state ID, and I went to to take the driving test to get my license, but the lady behind the counter insisted that my out-of-state ID card was a drivers license and wouldn't listen when I insisted that it was only an ID. So she issued me a drivers license and I never took a test: government incompetence in my favor.

5. I rarely leave home without a jacket no matter how hot it is because I get cold easily, and many places over-compensate with the air conditioning. I never order cold drinks in restaurants for the same reason.

6. I like to sleep with the radio on. My tastes in music have changed over the years, from rock to Christian pop, to classical - but I've always had a radio playing all night.

Here's who I'm tagging:
1. Roxie
2. Mrs. Sensibility
3. Mama Squirrel
4. Dogwood Mama
5. Dawn ;)
6. Phyllis

New Camera

Tim needed a camera to take to college with him, and I wanted a smaller camera that I could carry everywhere in my purse. Since he likes the features on my camera (it lets you set the speed, light, etc), it made more sense for me to get a new, small camera (Sony Cyber-shot), and to give him my older one.

So now I have a new camera, and lots of new pictures!

One interesting feature is the "smile" setting: the camera waits, locking onto the person's face, and, when it senses a smile, it snaps a picture. At first I thought it was a dumb feature, but now that I've had such good results with it, I think I like it:

It also does very well in extremely low-light with no flash:

I tried the "twilight" setting, which is supposed to flash just enough to provide a small bit of light, but every picture I tried was blurred like a double exposure. Oddly enough, low-light pictures came out better with no flash than a "twilight" flash.

And, another neat feature: it takes pictures in vintage sepia:

This was also low-light without a flash, no tripod.