I always knew the treadmill was evil.

But I had no proof until today. Today I climbed on for the routine torture,and the electrics turned on, but the belt wasn't moving. I briefly considered racking up the world's easiest workout as I stood there watching the calories roll by, but those results aren't taken into consideration by my scale. I tried various fixes, but it wasn't moving. I resorted to pushing all the buttons. The total mileage stopped me in my tracks. The darned thing had stopped at 666 miles. I kid you not.

Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

It was a nice year. I raised a grown up. The other five conveniently remained needy. I deepened a lot of friendships. I finally came up with a great excuse for reading the classics. I began to understand my life in new ways.

Happy Birthday to me! I am no longer the answer to life the universe and everything, but you can only carry a responsibility like that for so long. :)

There is too much...

A Taste of Redwall is coming down to a bunch of lasts, last rehearsal, last school to call, last reorganization of my paperwork. I've had a grand time and managed to float through other milestones and some unexpected and unwelcome stressors in one piece. I hope that God's will has been done, and that it will prosper, but it's out of my hands.

It's down to ticket sales and this weekend is our "Hail, Mary" and St. Zita, and St. Martin DePorres, and St. Anthony, and everyone else. It is maddening to work this hard for so little fruit. Pray for us, everybody! It's all that remains.

Winded

On my aerobics videos they always give the advice that you should be able to talk or sing while you exercise. This blog has been me singing while I do my Taste of Redwall workout. 

Exactly.

Fat Tuesday

I'm thinking about giving up the Beatles for Lent. They were my first taste of cultural butter, and the purposes it serves. My life had been one recording of the Life Action Singers after another. Occasionally, Doug Oldham or someone like him would take some risks, but not very often. My sister, with her musical ear collected an impressive knowledge of popular music from elevators and grocery stores. I was more inclined to return home to the safety of the Gaithers. 

Susan came over and for the first time in my life I was left unsupervised in my own home. Susan's sanctity was never questioned, so I was surprised when she recommended we ransack the record collection for contraband. We found The Letterman and were quite pleased with them. They were nice, but musically little different from Life Action or the other groups. From then on, any chance to ransack the records was a naughty little pleasure. That probably would have been the end of things if we hadn't moved to a suburb of DC. 

The kids in my new world not only listened to current rock and roll, they had sex and experimented with drugs. I was so lost. I had my first diagnosis of depression, and Dad pulled out all the stops--he rented Help! Mother would have nothing to do with it. Her disapproval filled the house making it all the more exciting as Dad plugged it in. It was hilarious, and the music was so fresh to us. After that, whenever it was all too much we'd get Help!

I still love Help! I love the Beatles catalog. Giving them up for Lent might not seem like big deal to some, but maybe there's a circle coming my life. While I'm not interested in a return to Life Action, maybe it's time for dry toast because I can, because of Lent.

Wonder Land

I'm beginning to realize that I'm working through the weird world of childhood in fiction.  I'm starting to let myself read my work as if it was someone else's. For example, I realized an Alice in Wonderland playhouse symbolizes my struggle to get help with or at least permission to interpret the Bible from the adults in my life.  The only book that was as weird as the Bible that I was allowed to read was Alice in Wonderland.  I worked rather hard trying to get the two to illuminate each other without much success.  The playhouse has always been there in my novel, but it was only recently that I saw the connection.

What a fascinating way to squint at your mind sideways, but I'd better not look too hard.  I'll never have the courage to publish anything.

In Bed.

Adding the phrase "in bed" to the fortune in a fortune cookie is one of my husband's favorite games.  I like to work in bed.  I like nice squishy surfaces, and our king mattress offers lots of room to spread out.  It also insures nightly cleanup as sleeping under books and papers is only appealing in college.  I have a desk that I love and work at occasionally, but a big project or a new project will almost always find me in bed.

Thanks to the snow day, my bed was covered in books, papers, pens, highlighters, my writer's desk, my iPad, and some Smurfs.  I was working out the literature class I hope to teach next year.  Selecting appropriate and interesting works turned out to be way more challenging than expected.  I thought I'd split the day with "A Taste of Redwall."  Thankfully we have another snow day tomorrow, because the following short list took me all day.

Crowhook Literature List for the Middle Ages

(I know the dates aren't accurate.)

525 Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy

529 St. Benedict The Rule of St. Benedict

660 Caedmon Caedmon's Hymn

731 Venerable Bede An Ecclesiastical History of the English People

975 unknown Beowulf

1140 unknown Song of Roland

1150 St. Hildegaard Physica

1175 Ibn Jubayr The Travels of Ibn Jubayr

1274 St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica

1317 Dante The Divine Comedy

1320 Marco Polo The Travels of Marco Polo

1370 William Langland Piers Plowman

1385 unknown Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

1405 Christine de Pizan The Book of the City of Ladies

The Book of Deeds of Arms and Chivalry

1500 Machiavelli The Prince

1516 Thomas More Utopia

1563 Montaigne Essays

1588 St. Teresa of Avila The Interior Castle

1605 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote

Good things come to those who think

A Tale of Five Iliads

Ok, it's six if you count The Children's Homer.  How does a woman end up with five copies of the Iliad?  It helps to be scatter-brained.  It all began when my mother-in-law downsized and gave us her set of The Great Books--the set I had envied since day one.  They are a reverend object not to be dragged around and read, but more to be admired from a distance.  Then my mother downsized her classroom and gave me a cheap, secondhand copy of The Iliad that sucked into our family book void, never to be seen until it was too late.  I wanted a copy I could write in, so I went to B&N and bought a copy of the Iliad, and--I thought-- a copy of The Odyssey.  When I got home I had two different translations of The Iliad.  One was much cheaper than the other, so I started that, intending to return the other one.  Came the day when I was in pressing need of reading material, so I grabbed the other version since it was close to hand.  Behold, sometimes, you get what you pay for and the Fagles translation is much better than the one I had started reading.  My legs were numb when I decided I could live with owning two, no three, no four copies of The Iliad.  You know how it is when you're a parent.  I wanted my kids to enjoy all the wealth I had just discovered so I bought them

The Children's Homer.  Still one short?  You are clever to keep up.  After watching it for months and encouraging others to buy it, I went into Love Inc, and they practically gave me a second set of The Great Books in a better binding and just loved enough that we don't feel bad about loving it some more.

Buying books is an adventure.  The great thing about the ancients is that they cost their publishers nothing, so you can get them in all kinds of modes, traditional bound, e-book, document file.  You can pay nothing, or next to nothing at thrift stores, or you can buy them in hand bound leather editions.  All of Shakespeare can be bought for the nook for about 6 bucks.  If you're comfortable with reading off your computer it's all there for free if you look.
So let my surplus inventory be a warning and a comfort.  If you end up with three copies of the Iliad, you're still two short of me.

PS. I have found Robert Fagles translations of The Odyssey and The Aeneid to be worth the extra dollars too.

Musical Toothbrush

There is always that one cool toy you buy your kids, but wish Santa had bought one for you.  This toothbrush is my secret wish this year.   Sure two minutes seems like forever, but you don't notice as much when the music is going straight into your brain.  The things they have for kids these days.

See it here. 

I Kissed Veritas Press

And I liked it, though I think they'd prefer I kiss dating goodbye. Veritas Press makes me so mad I border on apoplectic, and then they meet my needs so perfectly I can't help but be grateful.  It's a complicated relationship and has inspired many posts that were never posted--posts like "A Boy's Best Slave Is His Mother."  It started with the beautiful timeline cards they offer with their elementary level history program, but then there was day after day of racist and chauvinist content.  I was so glad to find Susan Wise Bauer and I promised myself I'd never look back.  Then there was the Omnibus.  Mea had finished The Story of the World Series, and I wanted her to take on something stronger but still classical.  Veritas had a beautiful book, the Omnibus with great readings and artwork, so I bought it.  It was a fine reading list and a beautiful book, but the racism and chauvinism pushed me to bench it on the bookshelf while we turned to The Great Courses for help interpreting the readings in a more balanced way.

I thought I was done with Veritas Press.  The very offensive catalogs had quit coming and I thought we were done.  Then I tried to teach Jimmy to read.  Our tried and true phonics program was a complete non-starter.  I had to find something else, and it had to have high interest and short work 
times.  I looked through many curriculums, and chose Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons.  I was afraid that might be too gimmicky and short on content, so I went back through everything, and realized I needed to look at Veritas Press again.  We spent a week this summer in Washington, DC going through many museums, and we had all enjoyed it.  The Phonics Museum recreates and uses the museum-going experience to ramp up the fun factor in learning how to read.  Instead of cartoony pictures of apples, master artworks by greats like Van Gogh and Degas are used for the ABC cards.  There's a great story about a knight and a little boy (I know) exploring a museum and finding the sounds, and a cardboard museum in which to hang the paintings and paper dolls to wander the museum.  It is perfect for Jimmy, and from the moment the box arrived in the mail, he has been excited about playing with it.  There are still moments when I step back and say, "Really?"  For example, the icon on the worksheets for man is a turn-of-the-last-century boxer--really, this is the sum of a man?  There are so many wonderful things about men that that icon leaves out, and there are so few things about boxers worth keeping in.

Nevertheless, long and the short of it.  I like the Phonics Museum, and more importantly, so does Jimmy.

Happy Sandals Day!

The day we set our feet free for the summer! All that shopping, it's quite a feat.

Two Feet on the Ground

I like my emotions in the mid-range. Problem is my emotion sensing equipment is overly sensitive. Discovering that the last hot dog bun is only partially moldy is roughly equivalent to getting into the college of my dreams. Dropping a glass and watching it shatter is like finding a cancerous lesion. It is all too much, so I tend to work with my feelings on the emotional layaway plan. Everything gets wrapped in cheesecloth, packed in a sieve and put on the back shelf to mingle with everything else to hopefully create a nicely modulated life experience. As with most things, some blends are better than others, but it's all great cheese for my art.
While this system makes things easier for me, it's hard on Kurt. Am I smiling because he's home or because I am remembering Canterbury Cathedral? Am I sad because I lost my car keys or because someone shot Malala Yousafzai? Sometimes I don't know either. Sometimes it doesn't really matter.  So, if you come to tell me I've won the lottery and all I say is "Wow, that's great."  I'll be dancing sometime next year.

Running Hot

Day before yesterday it rained packages at our house.  After months of thinking, my curriculum plans were made and thanks to Rainbow Resource and Amazon they are largely fulfilled.  This coincided with the discovery of a teacher planning app that felt more natural to me than my previous planner.  It's a bit touchy, and has wiped out as much as three days of plans, but it's more open, simple style lets me record only what I need as I want.
Most of the booty was stored in the Locked Door Room (see previous post) to wait as a surprise for the school year, but the teacher books went to my newly cleaned classroom desk.  I drafted a schedule and then it began.  Planning, planning, planning.  Now that I had a schedule and the resources necessary to make decisions about what to do when all I had to do was start putting all those puzzle pieces together.  First a subject, then a full day, then a week and then...to save the world!  Once I've planned a month, no, a trimester, no, the whole year, then I can do auxiliary things like make all the photocopies and organize supplies.
And then I couldn't sleep.  It's all good, but it's too much.  Today I spent hiding from my planner and curriculum guides and the copier.  I had to do summer school, but that's different.  We went to the library.  I almost stayed out of the shelves about next year's time period, but our third wanted to know about William Penn.  Kurt brought home pizza and we watched Real Steel (great movie for MI and engineers).  My desk is calling and all my stuff awaits, but I'm hiding in Kurt's office writing up a post.
Tomorrow I'll devote to physical preparations for next year and going through my to do list before another school year burns me up.

If you can't get enough at the grocery store

When I was young, UPCs were a novelty, and watching the cashier scan the groceries evoked scanner envy.  Then came the self-checkout, and my joy overflowed.  Now you can bring that joy home--with The Home Library App.  Just wave the camera over the UPC on the back of most books and seconds later you have a detailed record of your book.  For older books, you can do a keyword search, for really old books you can enter it manually.  So far I've scanned about 1/2 of our books, I think, and we have 1, 021 titles and the replacement value is 20,000.
I'm enjoying reconnecting with books I haven't seen in a while.  My library is one of my favorite ways of connecting with people.  Pulling the perfect book off the shelf never gets old, and most of my books get returned--though it's been a while since I've seen A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Great app!  Good clean fun.

Optimization

It starts the minute I walk through the foyer opening into the kitchen.  Left or Right?  Left usually.  I snag a 100% Whole Wheat English Muffin from the pantry rack and take a short step to the kitchen table where I grab a knife, a fork and a spoon.  Next comes a diagonal walk across the kitchen to the corner between the dishwasher and the stove.  I pull open the cupboard above the dishwasher and retrieve a small plate and a cup.  The silverware goes on the plate.  The cup stands by on the counter while I use the fork to split the muffin and pop it into the toaster oven.  I fill the hot pot with water and turn it on and then hop the cup over the stove to rest on another counter while I pull down my vitamins.  Currently, I am taking them in order of size and dumping them all out before taking them.  The vitamins go back to the cupboard, and I take two small steps to the fridge when I pull out the milk and the Smart Balance.  (I hate eating foods that require capitalization.)  The milk sits down next to the cup and them Smart Balance goes over to the toaster oven to await my muffin.  I pour 8 oz of milk, take the pills, and replace vitamins and milk in their respective homes.  The toaster has dinged by now, but I still need to visit the tea cupboard next to the fridge.  I pull down my giant mug and fill it with one PG Tips tea bag and the contents of four Splenda packets whose wrappers are trucked diagonally across the room to the trash.  I bring the mug back to the hot pot where I slide in the spoon.  The water can wait, but my muffin is getting cold.  I pull it out and place it on the small plate then butter it with thin curls of Smart Balance.  The water has generally boiled by now, so I pull out the spoon and let the water pummel the tea bag.  As soon as the water is dark enough I dump the tea bag in the trash, pick up the plate with the muffin and go sit quietly somewhere enjoying the last few minutes before I have to get to work.
 Right now that's as good as it gets.  It'll get better.  Managing cooking times is a bit wonky, and I want to reduce the number of times I leave the corner to do something else.  Optimizing things that I do frequently is one of my favorite games to play.  Breakfast is an especial favorite because there are so many variables.  I am also working on the best strategy for showering, settling into Barnes and Noble for writing time, getting through my workout, how best to put on and take off my backpack at different locations, and getting laundry smoothed out--amongst other things.  I used to worry that I was going to get stuck in a routine, but all these plans are about as permanent as a sand castle.  Take the English Muffins for example.  I love them, but Sam's has started to sell them in two packs totaling 18 instead of the 12 I prefer.  I may have to choose a new breakfast item which changes everything.  I think that might be part of the fun of it.

Those Cute Afghani Hats

When the war in Afghanistan began I had read maybe three articles about that country in Reader's Digest and U.S. News and World Report.  I may also have realized that that gorgeous girl, whose photo National Geographic kept trotting out, was from there.  Know thy enemy may be one reason that attempts at enriching our national understanding of the culture of Afghanistan have slowed down now that we are in the slog of war.  It is hard to think of such simple people giving us such trouble--but isn't that what I learned about Afghanistan from those three articles and a picture?  We were so proud of the way they fought the Russians and now we are the Russians.
I'd rather think about the pictures that we saw at the beginning--the poppy fields, the smiling girls, the tribal leaders.  I wish I knew more about the whys and wherefores of all the things that puzzle me.    I want to know if I'd offend Afghan men by wearing their Pakol hat.  Is it wrong to just grab a hat and go?
Life is a full time job.

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Santa Baby

I'm a collector. Nothing pleases me more than a complete set. If I let myself everything becomes a collection, which is why I've limited myself to books and cookie cutters--Comfort Grip Cookie Cutters. If I left it as unspecific as "cookie cutters," I'd have a room full of them. I thought I was doing pretty well, buying only the ones I liked not really expecting it all to add up to much, particularly not to rise in value. But they have.
I was searching for the Christmas stocking they offered last year. It was gone, out of stock, so I thought I'd give eBay a try. The price has certainly gone up from the four bucks I typically spend. As I explored eBay's offerings I found all kinds of great Comfort Grip Cookie Cutters I hadn't known existed going for as much as 80 bucks. Wow, is all I can say. I can also say while I'm not ready to spend 80 bucks to complete the set, I'm not letting any more cookie cutters slide. Who knows which one will be the kids college tuition? And Santa, if you're listening, I've got a list of the ones I'm missing. We could start with the Christmas Stocking.

I'm going to Disney World!

OK, not really, but that's what I've always figured I'd say when the last diaper was changed.  It's been sixteen years and I'm almost there.  We've made the big move to underwear and two accidents aside, things are moving along.  I'm not sure what I'll do without diapers, but I know our budget will be happy.  Maybe happy enough to save up for Disney World.

What did they do to my Bug?!?!

I like to look ahead. Just over the hill is a day where I will only need to drive one person around town. The mini-van will be a thing of the past, maybe not just for me. I will be needing a new ride. Cars matter to me. I like them. I tend to name them. I want something fun but established. This added up to a VW Bug, before the new redesign. It's so ugly now. My dreams, which were extensive and involved grand-children and a specialty paint job are looking for a new home. Perhaps I should go back to my original scheme--a Corvette.