Do other bloggers do this?
I was just looking through my list of saved drafts, and I have twenty-three unfinished posts sitting in there. There are two or three quizzes I took and never posted, probably because I figured the blog needed a post for a change. At least two I never posted because they were snarky, but the rest range from brief notes to paragraphs of unfinished material.

The draft this quiz appears in was dated the 19th of September, 2004.


You're an earth mother! Your friends sometimes
call you Gaea, because you're the original
earth goddess! You and your kids both have
dirt under your fingernails, and you spend as
much of your time as possible out of doors.
Your kids have an incredible appreciation for
nature.


What kind of a freaky mother are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Found at Alexandra's blog



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My eldest is taking an online Rhetoric class from Studium Discere Tutorials and it looks very good. The textbook was written by Peter Roise, the teacher, and each chapter includes three exercises, one on Theory, one on Imitation, and one on Practice. The Theory exercises are reveiw questions of the lesson's material, the Imitation exercises are outside reading of excellently written material, and the Practice exercises are generally writing paragraphs using the principles taught. The first few weeks the students will be reading the Psalms, followed by Pride and Prejudice. You can see the complete reading list here. Throughout the year, the students are supposed to keep a commonplace book, and submit one extract each week in a class contest. The first class was yesterday, and my favorite phrases keep popping into my head - I've offered a couple of them to my daughther, but dang, I wish I were taking this class!

A few things I would enter into a commonplace book, if I kept one:

"[T]he lady was of apparantly a British innkeeper of that orthodox school who regard guests as a nuisance."
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Thanks to Valerie for reminding me of this one!


"For the great Gaels of Ireland
"Are the men that God made mad,
"For all their wars are merry,
"And all their songs are sad."
G.K. Chesterton, "The Ballad of the White Horse"
Miss Kelly M. introduced me to this one.


" 'Thank God!' said Wimsey. 'Where there is a church there is civilisation.' "
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors


"Complaint is the flag of ingratitude - and it waves above the center of unbelieving hearts."
Douglas Jones, Angels in the Architecture


"With this Ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow."
1662 Prayer Book


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It's starting to feel like fall here now. The highs are still in the upper 80s and into the 90s, but the nights get down into the lower 60s and the humidity has dropped significantly. I love fall - it's my favorite time of the year... until spring comes, that is, and then spring is my favorite.

We're planning for next year's garden and this one looks to be our first Real Garden. Up until now we've not had the room to freeze much, and I've never canned and don't have supplies, but here we've discovered something wonderful. Under the garage is a root celler! We'll spend the winter figuring out how much we should plant in order to keep our family in root crops for a year. We're planning on potatoes, turnips, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, and parsnips. We're also planning on growing dried beans for the first time, since I recently learned from a commenter at Scott Terry's blog how easy it is to preserve beans.



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Mike's searching eBay for an old-fashioned reel mower that the younger boys can use to help manage the lawn here. And of course, there's always the added advantage of being able to run the machine on bread and butter instead of gasoline.
:-D



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Next Wednesday, September the 14th, is Holy Cross day. Does anyone know the history of this holiday? Specifically, why do we commemorate the Cross in the middle of September?