7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

Crazy. I thought about going to Rome next week.  Thought about it really seriously when I looked up the apartment we stayed in last November and saw that it was available 3/14-22.  I took it as a sign.  Airfare wasn’t hideous at that point (late last week), even from Birmingham – the only glitch being Those Darn Cardinals –  who have been in absolutely no hurry to set a Conclave date.   Would they jump right in and schedule it for the 11th?  Or wait the traditional amount of time and go for the 15th?  If the latter, this would work out. So I dithered and studied airfare some more. Then I actually wrote to the owner of the apartment who answered me that yes, it was vacant for those dates but the preceding guests were journalists, arriving the 7th..and they might want to extend their stay beyond the 14th.  Well, I said, of course they will if the Conclave doesn’t happen until the 15th…but go ahead and check anyway.  And of course, they’re staying for as long as it takes.

The owner offered me another apartment about a mile away from the Vatican, but that would mean walking that mile to get to St. Peter’s, squeezing on buses to get to St. Peter’s or sitting in a cab in traffic on the way to St. Peter’s, when the point of the original place is that it’s 3 blocks from St. Peter’s.  Making it, you know, very convenient. For journalists.

Well, that’s okay. It was just a spur-of-the moment crazy thing, anyway.

— 2 —

The only value that papal prognostications have  is the entertainment they produce after the conclave.

— 3 —

The other travel that I thought might be happening of late was a short trip to New Orleans this week with my daughter, home from college on spring break.  Then I looked up hotels on Kayak and wondered why the only hotels coming up were 1-star places in Houma and such.  Going to hotel websites turned up “no available rooms” time after time.  Finally figured out that there was a huge convention happening.  Bill Clinton speaking and everything. A friend suggested we go anyway and stay outside the city, but I said that I wasn’t interested in sharing New Orleans with 50,000 drunk health care managers.  So we’ve stayed put.

— 4 —

It’s always nice when she comes home because I have someone to cook for.  That is someone to cook for who will eat food that is a color other than beige.  Gives me a good chance for some Pinterest-ing culinary excursions. I’m also pleased to report that at long last, I think making pizza has entered the “routine” category for me.  I finally figured out that if you just make the dough at least a day ahead of time – I use this recipe - it handles much better, and the simple fact that the dough is done by the time it comes to fix the pizzas makes it all less daunting.

— 5 —

Watching House of Cards.  I’m enjoying it, and could easily binge-watch it, but am restraining myself.  It’s cable -ish, which means there’s profanity, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.  It’s not a documentary about politics, so don’t look for complete, careful and thorough excavation of life in D.C.  But Kevin Spacey is mesmerizing, to be sure.  His picture is next to “inhabit a role” in the Big Encyclopedia of Acting for this one. I’m five episodes in, and what I’ll say is that I’m sensing some unspoken, complex backstory – mostly in the relationship between Spacey’s character and that of his wife, played by the alarmingly and aggravatingly skinny Robin Wright – but if it’s not delivered (whatever it is)  - the absence of that layer is what will keep this series from reaching first-level quality.

— 6 —

Current reads in our house:  Swallowdale (11 year old) , The Castle in the Attic and Emil’s Pranks (8 year old), and all of us together, The Enchanted Castle and  Into the Unknown: How Great Explorers Found Their Way by Land, Sea and Air.    The last is a simply great book. There is no dearth of books on explorers and exploration out there, but this one is really special.  It’s well written – substantial, but not too overlain with detail – and the illustrations are marvelous.  In particular: each chapter includes a fold out section that incorporates a map and some other illustration   – of the structure of a boat or other craft, and so on.  This one is worth seeking out and even purchasing.

Over the past week, for history/religion, Joseph has been reading St. Benedict: Hero of the Hills.  After he reads a chapter, I have him narrate it back to me in some way, and I try to change it up.  So some chapters he simply tells me what happened (he takes notes and the point of the exercise is to teach him how to summarize and present), but then other chapters I have him draw using the whiteboard, and for the chapter in which St. Benedict dies, I had him pretend to be a monk come to give us the news.

— 7 —

Speaking of homeschooling, while I still generally try to not read homeschool blogs (agitates the soul and tempts one to anxiety), there are a couple of Facebook pages I find really helpful.  One is The Libertarian Homeschooler - in particular check out the lists she’s recently posted here and here.   The other is Kicking it Unschool.  I really appreciate the discussions and resources offered at both.

I may have recovered from house-shopping fever.  Not sure.  But I think that I’ve figured out a spot for a basketball goal.  That, combined with the feelings I get when I walk from my car, stop on my front porch and open the door to enter into the small, warm space of my living room – and then listen to the boys playing outside with the boy down the street or chatting with the older lady next door – I don’t think it’s time to leave that yet, especially with warm weather coming – I’ve seen some great decks and a fabulous back yard.  But none of it beats that front porch, not right now.

(This week, that is)

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7 Quick Takes

— 1 —

I have a bit of real estate fever.  Scratch that.  A lot.  In fact, I came back from Europe determined to do a couple of sort of big things to this place and then go shopping.  So far I’ve done nothing except clean out the basement, but that doesn’t stop me from spending an inordinate amount of time studying listings.   There’s no need , but what there is is a desire for a slightly different, more open layout, a little more energy efficiency than this 90-year old bungalow affords, and (frankly) space to put up a basketball goal.  My life would be transformed by a basketball goal.  No, not by me, personally shooting baskets, but other people. Not that they don’t play outside pretty much all the time anyway, oh, how they would love it.  And their play would be just that much more focused, which would be good.  And there’s just no good spot on my current property for it.  The driveway is narrow and slopes down from the minute it begins and the back yard is smallish.  If I had someone put in a even a smallish surface and goal back there..it would just have to be taken out before I sold the place – which I will, eventually.

Oh, and even though I’ve lived comfortably in a purging mindset for ages now and am not an accumulator, it would be a refreshing change to have more than three closets in my house.  People, I’m not kidding.  Three. 

So I’ve been looking.  Found a few possibilities, but I’m waiting to see what else comes up on the market this spring. I’m hoping just to find something else in my own area – in fact I have my eye on one house that’s not on the market, but records show it’s been put on and taken off a couple of times over the past two years…so I’m hoping the owner gives it another shot this year…that would be ideal.  Because I really love this neighborhood and I don’t really want to leave this part of town – there’s no traffic, I get downtown in about six minutes, I’m close to the airport, the interstate…as a friend who’s also toying with a move said, “My route.  I like my daily route, and I don’t want to mess that up.”

So we’ll see.

— 2 —

Curriculum Report I: 

We’ve started Latin.  I’m using Getting Started with Latin with the 6th grader, and I like it a lot.  It’s very laid-back, low key and..dare I say it? Easy. It’s just what is says – it’s about getting started.  We get through this, and then we’ll wind back around next year and begin a more formal study, but right now, this is perfect for a student unaccustomed to formal foreign language study who isn’t a strong memorizer, except of football stats.

I had thought Minimus would be good for the 8-year old, but I ended up sending it back.  It’s on a faster track than I had thought – too fast.  and since Getting Started is slower than I thought, he’s ended up just slipping in and joining us in that.

They like it – and probably partly because I like it.  I took four years of high school Latin and then two in college.  Second year was one of my favorite college courses.  It was taught by Dr. Harry Rutledge, who would stroll into class in his three-piece suit carrying only his copy of the Aenid, and we would spend the next fifty minutes sight-translating – turned out I had a knack for it – and listening to him spin yarns.

Latin – at the introductory level – elegant, pardoxically sturdy yet intriguingly flexible,  with the qualities of a puzzle –  appeals to my 11-year old boy quite a bit.

— 3 —

II

8-year old has been in Math Mammoth for a couple of weeks now, and I’m glad I chose it – and so is he.  It’s third grade, and so far it’s a lot of mental math practice with larger addition and subtraction problems, which he’s really glommed onto – again with the puzzle aspect – and he just started multiplication.  He knows his tables already, but the approach is such that it challenges him to flip problem around and look at them from different perspectives which he seems to find quite enlightening.  Thumbs up so far.

— 4 —

The Life of Fred is a very strange – on the surface – math series about a five year old who teaches mathematics at KITTENS University.  The titles of the volumes for younger children have nothing to do with math – Apples – Butterflies  - and such. (Middle school titles are more traditional  - 6th grader is on Fractions.)  You can read about the series here.  Some people use them as their sole math curriculum.  We are using them as supplements – again, to encourage them to think about numbers and mathematics in different, creative ways and to just learn to think mathematically.  All I can say at this point is that they are being devoured and Fred comes up in conversation several times a day….

— 5 —

So yeah, we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner this week.  Why? Because My Hot Shot Curriculum called for it?  No, because I was cleaning out the piano music and I finally found the Dover volumes of Dore illustrations – Bible, The Divine Comedy, and this – that my mother had given me ages ago, and I thought, “Hey!  Let’s do this!”

And what do I mean by “do?”  We sit on the couch and take turns reading it aloud – I do the bulk of it to save time and (my) patience, but they do big chunks, and are improving on this sort of thing all the time.  We read (over two days), I explain certain points, ask them to talk about other points, they ask (many) questions, we examine Dore’s rather gory pictures, and I point out a few well-known passages which they sort of memorize (if they’re short) and we might use for copywork later.  In this, for example: Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink!   

Since we’d read the Book of Jonah earlier in the week – it was the source for one of the daily Mass readings one day, so might as well just read the whole thing – it’s only 4 chapters – we played just a bit with bouncing the two off one another.  Just a bit.  Don’t be too impressed.  That part of it is mostly me going , “Hey!  Did you notice blah blah blah blah blah” with them looking longingly at the front door.

Perhaps I should be aiming higher, and they should be writing papers or at least paragraphs about these works we’re reading.  Perhaps at some point we will get there.  But right now, I just want to sit on the couch and have us read to each other and talk about these works, examine pictures, listen to recordings and watch productions or snippets thereof, and through all of that, learn to associate great literature as something a person spends time with in the normal course of a day or week because it is interesting, entertaining,  intriguing and fun to explore and talk about, and reveals truths about ourselves and the world.

— 6 —

I read another book!  To Be Sung Underwater.  (I bought it during a sale – 2.99 Kindle edition a couple of weeks ago)  It was the first book in a long while that I found hard to put down.  But it faltered near the end, and since finishing it I’ve been able to see the whole more clearly.  It’s basically a story about how the past impacts the present and a woman’s attempts to make sense of that (unique!).  There is some great writing here – passages that I highlighted and copied out because they seem to so succinctly capture a moment.  McNeal has a true gift for voice and dialogue.  Every single character spoke in a unique, identifiable voice that was also recognizably human, from the main character’s husband and his rather arch self-regard to her mother’s frankness.  

But it was, in the end, that main character – Judith – who gave me second and then third thoughts.  I can’t really explain without going into plot detail, which I don’t have time to do and which will bore you if you haven’t read the book, but I’ll just say that this was a book I certainly enjoyed reading for the beauty and knowingness of much of the writing, but, in the end, the central character just didn’t ring true and the final turn of events was over-the-top contrived and neat.

Next up – more light reading as I revisit Venice and France…..

— 7 —

Praying for the Pope.  And his successor.  And us.

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7 Quick Takes: Put a Bird On It Edition

As you know, we recently hosted a Robin family on the ledge of a window of my room. They’ve been gone a couple of weeks now, but we still think and talk about them.  That first day after they all left was very quiet and just a bit sad.  They were separated from us by many degrees of species-dom and by a window, but there watching them was more like looking in a mirror than through glass.

— 1 —

Surprising, beautiful new life. 

The eggs weren’t laid on Easter, but it was on Easter that our neighbor pointed out, “We think you have a bird’s nest on your window!” – and so, it was the day on which we discovered these gorgeous, perfect eggs – Easter eggs.

— 2 —

Helpless and dependent.

And ugly.

Sorry. They were.  Not a judgment!

But, my goodness. That yellowish skin, rubberband necks and pretty scary eyes that dominated their little heads?

 

Songbird babies are altricial  – that is, they are hatched completely helpless, in contrast to precocial (rooted in a word meaning “precocious”) birds who are hatched more matured and able to walk and obtain their own food, once it’s shown to them.

 See! You learned something!

Speaking of which…

— 3 —

4 days after the first two hatched.

Why?

As you can imagine, this was an amazing learning experience.  We watched, we observed, we wondered, we asked, and we learned.  The best life science class ever.

Why do the babies stay in the nest? How do they know? How do their feathers grow? When will they open their eyes? What do they eat? Will another animal come eat them? 

— 4 —

5 days old

Change

Five days after the first two hatched, the change is amazing to see.  They’ve not just grown bigger, but are transforming.  What most fascinated me were the development of the wings – compare these with the little stubs they begin with – and the feathers.  It all happened so quickly, you can see why they must eat all the time..it almost looks painful.  It put in mind of horror movies where someone suffers strange attributes popping out all over his body.

7 days old

— 5 —

Feed me.

This photo says it all – all about parenting, don’t you think? Cross-species, at any age?

The parents were just as interesting to watch as the babies.  Both mother and father brought food, which was primarily worms and berries.  Joseph said he saw a bee being fed to them once.  If they were coming with food and saw one of us at the window, they wouldn’t land, but rather fly quickly away to a nearby branch.  They didn’t get too upset (in contrast to the mockingbirds at the front of the house, who regularly and violently chase after squirrels who venture too close to what I presume is a nest somewhere in a cluster of vines), but simply sat on that branch, waiting and chirping.  It seemed to me as if the adults definitely communicated vocally with each other when this happened, as if one was asking, “All clear?” and the other responding, “Not yet!”

(In order to get close-ups while they were feeding, what I did was to just set up a stepladder in front of the window. That way there was a standing structure there all the time which they could get accustomed to seeing as just part of the landscape.  If I saw that it was feeding time, I’d just stand on the ladder with my camera pointed down, and wait, never for very long.)

One of my readers reflected that this might be what we look like to God – always hungry, needy, begging.

— 6 —

12 days old

Trust your instincts

One of the most astonishing aspects of observing natural life, to be sure.  Such a mystery, this thing called instinct.

The instinct that tells them to crane their skinny elastic necks and open those beaks when they feel a jolt on the edge of the nest.  That tells them to stay put in that same nest, even as they crowd each other, must lie atop of each other and are slowly gaining the ability to move on their own. Still – they stay put.  All day, every day, they sit in the nest, little growing balls of fluff, waiting. As their eyes opened and they grew more aware, they began to watch for the parents, and follow their movements in the trees and on the ground.

But still, they remained. They knew it was not yet time to go.

(Except for the one that I’m thinking got blown out of the nest one blustery night a couple of days before this picture was taken…)

— 7 —

13 days after hatching, ready to fly away.

You’re ready. Go.

But then one day, like clockwork – or instinct – it is time to go.

I had worried about the baby birds before this day, because even though they waited with great patience most of the time, I could see their restlessness and watch them stretch and flap their wings.  I could see an accident happening, and that they weren’t quite ready to make it.

But then this day came – and they were.  As I wrote at the time, it took about 45 minutes.  One ventured to the edge of the nest, teetered a bit, then tumbled/flew to the ground.  Then the next, and finally, only this sibling was left. He remained in the nest alone for about ten minutes. He chirped, sat in the nest, popped up to the edge, then back down, then finally up – and down.

I could see them all for much of the rest of the day in the back yard, following one of their parents around, pecking at the ground.  I try to avoid anthropomorphizing the whole thing, but I swear, down there, those little ones really did seem…excited.

As if this is what they had been waiting for, as if this freedom to go, to be, to…fly – was what all the preparation, the resting, the growing, the endless eating, the watching and waiting had been all about.

Which, of course, it was.

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7 Quick Takes: First Time for Everything Edition

Yeah – a first time for everything. I’m trying to get back into a blogging groove (both here and at the other place – where I have, incidentally, posted all my posts related to my 2008 trip to Rome)..and these memes are a good way to get there.  For this 7 quick takes, I thought I’d share my 7 favorite items I’ve brought from my parents’ house – I haven’t brought much, but what I have, as they say, “speaks to me.” They are items that both match my own style (simple, color, not design-based, strong, not “pretty.”) and/or are suggestive of a time and place.

— 1 —

These glass mushrooms stood in our kitchen windows from some point in the 60′s on.  Had to have them in mine.

— 2 —

I don’t remember this ever hanging anywhere in our house. I found it in the basement. My aunt (my dad’s sister) was really into needlework during the 60′s and 70′s, and lived in the Southwest, so I’m guessing this was made by her. I really love it.  It’s so mod!

— 3 —

My mother was an artist. Unfulfilled and, well…enough about that.  She did manage to do some larger pieces that I brought, but I really like this one the best – small, simple, suggestive.

— 4 —

She was also a theater major.  This is a notebook she evidently had to do for a costume design class. I have it propped up and change the pages every now and then.

— 5 —

My parents were low-income academics during the 60′s (as were all academics at that time!) but from the beginning, despite the tight resources, they committed to buying one nice piece of art every year.  One resource for people like my parents – people of moderate means seeking to expand their personal art collections  - was Associated American Artists.  My parents bought several pieces through them, including two Thomas Hart Benton prints. This is one.

— 6 —

The last time I was up there – two weeks ago – which I hope will be the last time I’m up there before a real estate closing occurs, I thought I was almost done – I thought I was done going through everything, thought I had found every single box that I needed to go through…when tucked away in a closet, I found not one, but…four boxes of…MY STUFF.  Now, I had sort of been wondering where all of that had gone..and there it was.  All my gee-gaws and knick-knacks and dolls that had decorated every room from Indiana to Knoxville from 1960-1978. It was tempting to take it all, but upon reflection, I decided that I really didn’t care all that much, it would just be a few more boxes sitting here in Birmingham..and someone would find it all in the estate sale and take great pleasure in scooping up this treasure of mid-century girlhood.  So I just kept this one thing.  Manageable, small – a kicky, bright little wooden pencil holder that I probably got in the mid-60′s.  Sally Draper wants one, too.

— 7 —

Finally – this is the oddest thing of all, the least valuable, and the most valuable of all.
I always knew I would take this when it was time. There was no doubt.  The last time I was up there, I considered whether I should take it then or just label it as “DO NOT SELL” for the estate sale and then retrieve it later.  The risk was far too great, I decided, so I stuffed it in the back of my car and hauled it across Tennessee, southern Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, and back to Birmingham.

It’s a stepstool.  That’s all. We’ve probably had it since the 70′s. But the role it played at my parents’s house was high chair. Every child of mine – every grandchild, from Chris, born in ’82 to Michael born in ’04 – sat at my parent’s kitchen table in that chair.   Sometimes we’d turn it around and the back of the chair would function as a front rail to hold on to, and sometime it would face properly. But every one of them sat in it on visits, eating their morning cereal, their lgrilled cheese and lunch, and the hamburgers my dad cooked outside for dinner.

It’s beat up and dirty, but there’s no way I was going to let anyone else have it – if they wanted it.

And you know what? I expect that when I die…this just might be one of the items – one of the few – that there’s a fight over.

So what about you? What valueless, but immeasurably valuable items have you acquired?

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