Sorry about the unexpected hiatus

Violin Daughter had her senior recital last weekend, so my Minnesota daughter flew in at the beginning of last week, then my mom flew at the end of the week, then Minnesota daughter flew back home at the beginning of this week and my mom flies back tomorrow afternoon. So, no blog post this week, either.

As a consolation, here are a couple of recordings from the recital. This first one is the Meditation from the opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet, accompanied by her former music teacher.

This next one is the 4th movement from JS Bach's Partita in D minor. When we were discussing whether to hold her recital in the parish house where there is a grand piano (she also played two piano pieces, a Rachmaninoff and a Debussy) or the sanctuary of our 250 year old church building, she said she needed the acoustics of the sanctuary, "Because that Bach piece is LIT."

Out of the mouths of babes

Once when my sister, Anne Marie, was two or three years old, we were out driving when a particularly low quality song came on the radio. When it was over, she remarked, “That song isn’t real. Somebody just made it up.”

Naturally I DID NOT LAUGH when she said it, even though I laugh every time I remember or retell it.

But I have remembered it and retold it regularly, not just because it was funny, but because I think there’s real truth in there.

I was reminded of it again this morning while reading Stratford Caldecott’s Beauty for Truth’s Sake. In his chapter on music he quotes the English composer John Tavener, who says that, “all music already exists. When God created the world he created everything. It’s up to us as artists to find the music.”

He goes on to say:

Music just is. It exists. If you have ears to hear, you’ll hear it! . . . I believe we are incarnated in the image of God in this world in order for us to re-find that heavenly celestial music from which we have been seperated. Our whole life is a continuing return to the “source.”

(p. 96)

Saint Crispin's Day festivities

Last night we had our annual bash -- a bonfire/cookout/St Crispin's Day feast/Henry V/Medieval everything party. Some guests come in costumes and we give a prize to the crowd's favorite. We set up an archery range and take turns shooting. We play Medieval music, several of the menfolk put on the first part of Act IV, Scene II of Shakespeare's Henry V, the part with The Famous Speech, and this year we sang Non nobis Domine at the suggestion of one of our guests.

But the highlight of the festivities is always the dragon tail we serve.

We neglected to take a prettied-up picture of it

Creepy, isn't it?

Work in progress

Eldest Daughter has made it for us every year and I usually decorate it, but this year my youngest son asked to be in charge of decorating, so we bought him some fondant and told him to go to YouTube and figure out how to work with it, since we've never used it before.

I think it turned out really well.

“it smells like spring”

~ Violin Daughter (b. 1998)


it smells like spring

     the grass’s new growth is soft and green and

     the air is alive

peach blossoms are soft beside the dark wood of winter

    and when i look up

    i see new green buds

against

   the

         soft

                  grey

                            sky

Sunday afternoon on the Potomac

A half-mile hike through the woods

Looking for fossils

 That thin blue line on the horizon is Maryland

From the observation tower at the edge of the woods

Hats

[This recent post from The Imaginative Conservative, Men in Hats: An Endangered Species, reminded me of a post I wrote in the spring of 2007 about my husband's hats. He still has the tweed driving cap and wears it in cool weather, but the others have had to be replaced.]

Over at Favorite Apron talk has turned to hats for men, and it inspired me to set off again in search of information on the proper wearing of hats, no easy task.

After wearing a hat to work every day for nearly twenty-two years in the Air Force, Mike wanted me to get him something to wear to the office where he works as a civilian in his retirement (hah!) and of course he needs something on when working out in the sun around here.

This latter was easy enough to find - we bought this leather one, which is especially nice for cool damp weather, at the local feed store.

And this one that he wears in warmer weather, was practically a no-brainer:

Notice that neither of these hats is a cowboy hat, which would have been by far the easiest thing to find.  They are everywhere -  the feed store, the Tractor Supply Store, Wal-Mart, gas stations, the mall... everywhere.  But Mike doesn't own a single pair of cowboy boots, and since we own neither cows nor horses it's not likely that he'll ever own a pair.  It's my opinion that man's hat (well, probably a woman's too for that matter, but we're talking about men's hats here) ought to go with his shoes, and his shoes ought to be appropriate to the activity at hand.  Mike usually does his farm work in the rubber boots you see here, or in a pair of leather military issue boots, and the straw farm and leather outback hats seemed to be more fitting than anything else I've seen.

A harder task was finding something for him to wear to the office, and this is where I first started trying to find out what the etiquette is for what kind of hat to wear where.  There's some information on proper behavior when wearing a hat - taking it off in church, for instance - but precious little about different kinds of hats and when and where it's appropriate to wear them.

My 1950s copy of Emily Post's Blue Book of Social Usage is not very helpful since not only is our lifestyle not formal, but we don't even live in a formal era.  I'm not opposed to moving slightly in the direction of more formality, hoisting the culture up so to speak, but I certainly don't want my husband to look ridiculous - like he's in a costume or something.  He doesn't even own a suit, so whatever hat I chose for him needed to be dressier than his farm hat, but still informal.

I don't have a photo of the first "office" hat I bought for him, but it was a straw hat along the lines of the one above, but smaller in scale - a narrower brim and such.  For the fall, I finally hit upon this wool tweed driving cap:

Nice, isn't it?

His office "suit" is usually an oxford-cloth shirt (sometimes flannel as you see above), trousers, and burgundy oxfords or brown loafers, with a sweater (pullover or cardigan) in cool weather.  Casualish, but nice.

But now it's spring again and I was still dissatisfied with his old warm-weather office hat, not to mention the fact that it was falling apart, being a pretty cheap thing, so I've been looking around again, asking the questions, What is the right style?  and What is the right material?

My daddy never wore hats, but I remembered something he told me about my grandfather.  Granddaddy was an engineer (that is, he drove a train) and a farmer, so he usually wore his pinstriped overalls and engineers cap, and boots, but he was also the mayor his small town for many years, and of course, the men of that generation always wore a suit to church.  Daddy told me that Granddaddy had four dress hats:  two felt ones (a black and a grey) for winter, and two straw ones (a black and an ivory) for summer.

So, armed with this information, I set off hunting for some kind of dress hat in straw.  My mental image was of Bogart - a fedora of some sort.  It took a lot of googling around, but I finally found something I really like - a Panama.

I chose this putty color over either black or ivory, thinking that those colors would be too formal.

Well.  Another time, maybe I'll discuss actual hat etiquette - from an historical perspective, at least.  There seem to be only about three rules for wearing hats nowadays, but I'm in favor of moving in a slightly more formal direction, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel, now is there?

Fresh paint

This is the color we're using for our new laundry room. It's kind of a robin's egg blue, and you can see in the pictures below how it changes color a bit depending on the light.  I love colors that do that -- more blue in some lights, more green in others.

When you read advice on choosing paint, you're usually told that the color will be much more intense on the wall than it is on the little paint card, so you should decide on which shade you like, then use the one that's one step lighter than that.

It doesn't work that way for me. I guess I'm afraid of getting too intense a color, so I naturally pick something that's lighter than what I'd really want. And then I put it on and I'm always disappointed with it.

But this time I ignored the advice and bought the color I liked best.

And this time the color is perfect.

Randomness

While we were traveling last month I read Tom Sawyer to the kids, and started Huckleberry Finn.  I'd forgotten how funny Tom Sawyer is and was glad that the kids spent most of that book laughing aloud.  Huckleberry Finn's quite a character.  He can make up the most fabulous, detailed story to explain who he is and what he's doing in order to fool whoever needs fooling at the moment.  We stopped several times just to marvel at his ingenuity.  Not that I'd consider that sort of thing a virtue, exactly.

But then this week while reading The Wanderings of Odysseus we came to the part where he wakes up on his own island, but doesn't know where he is, or who the young man is who tells him he's on Ithaca.  It's Athena in disguise, but Odysseus, true to form, makes up the most fabulous detailed story about being a Cretan who was running for his life with his treasure and had sought help from the Phoenecians, and on and on.

At that point I put down the book and said, "I never thought of Huck Finn being like Odysseus before!"

To which one of my children (and you know they're all a lot smarter than I am) replied gently, "Well, it is a story about a guy on a raft having adventures away from home."

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Speaking of Odysseus, that book is so annoying.  When I was reading today's chapter, the one with the dog and the old nurse, I could hardly read two paragraphs together without all the waterworks in my head springing a leak.  It was ridiculous.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

During our Morning Time on Tuesday afternoon *ahem* I inadvertently let slip that at least 90% of the time I squelch the impulse to burst into song at random times during the day, and I got fussed at.  For not singing random songs like we live in a musical or something.

They wouldn't accept my excuses that even if I could sing in a way that made the song recognizable to the hearers, they still wouldn't know what I was singing because the songs were mostly show tunes and the pop music of my parents' generation, with a smattering of 70s pop and TV jingles thrown in.

Kids like to hear their moms sing.  Even when it's far from perfect.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Be sure to read the comments to my last two posts if you're interested in some practical bits of information on incorporating music lessons for little ones into your day on a tight budget and math story books.

Also, in case you missed the update to my last post, Dawn will be hosting Wednesdays with Words from now on. :-)

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Last month my mom introduced me to the wonders of cherry juice for easing joint pain.  Let me tell you, after taking this elixir for a week and then forgetting to for a couple of days I've become a convert.  It is amazing the difference it makes in the way I feel.



You add two tablespoons to water and drink it once a day. I just add it to maybe 4 ounces of tap water and drink it that way, but it's awfully tart and you might need to dilute it more and ice it the way it is in the picture, if you decide to try it.  It's kind of expensive -- $30 for a quart -- but the quart will last you a month, and surely it's better than taking pain killers on a regular basis.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous this summer.  Usually by this time I'm exhausted from the heat and sorely tempted to curse my Scots-Irish ancestors who came to Virginia instead of Nova Scotia, but we've had several cool nights this month and the days not nearly as hot as usual, so it's been really pleasant.  Now, if we could just ditch Daylight Saving Time so that the sun would come up in the morning instead of staying up till bedtime it would be perfect.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Here's something Eldest Daughter drew yesterday, commenting, "I need to work on Maria, so instead I drew this girl with horns and a mullet."

I can't imagine where she gets her randomness from.

Easing back into school

Our formal studies always kind of peter out in the spring when life starts getting busy.  This spring and summer we had Mike out of work for several weeks, seven kids born (and one mama died), several animals sold, lots of repairs done around the house, out of town guests on at least three occasions, one music recital, two concerts, two auditions, traveling. . . . .  Lots of traveling.  Three of the children and I spent almost the entire month of July out town between the CiRCE conference in Houston and visiting [nearly] all our friends and relations along the way.  Oh, and my 15 year old daughter, the violinist, had her first paying gig -- playing in the pit orchestra for a local production of The Music Man.

Writing it out like that makes me feel less bad about not doing "school" for so many weeks.  Do y'all struggle with that kind of guilt, too?

Also we joined the Y and Mike and #1Son have been taking the kids swimming nearly every day for the past few weeks.  I wish we done this years ago!

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Pictorial Interlude

I traveled half-way across the country, saw practically everyone I love,
and this is the best picture I took.
There's a reason I'm not a photoblogger.

Memphis

Oh, and this one.  It's the radiator hose in my van, which ruptured on the first day of the journey.

Thankfully it happened just before we pulled into Kelly Rose's driveway where we were spending the night.  (I mean, spend the night with them at their house, not in the driveway.)

Her husband took care of the repairs for me -- such wonderful friends!

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

So this morning we had our first official school day in about twelve weeks, if my notes are correct, opening with Morning Prayers and our Bible reading (picking up where we left off in Luke and the Psalms), followed by a poem by Tennyson ("Crossing the Bar," which was the last one in this collection, so now I need to pick a new poet to begin reading tomorrow), and the next chapter in Rosemary Sutcliff's The Wanderings of Odysseus. That took an hour and half because we had to stop and find the calamine lotion to put one one child who got into the poison ivy, and then we had to stop and find out why the dog was barking -- it was the Blackhawks.  He hates helicopters. Never a dull moment.

This time last year we were starting Black Ships Before Troy, so it's taken us an awful long time to get to this point, but we were interrupted by reading The Ballad of the White Horse, and then Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves, followed by Mary Macleod's Stories from the Faerie Queene (which I highly recommend).  I'd intended to pick up there, but my Kindle was dead this morning.  It's had so many near-death experiences that I expect it'll revive presently, but I suppose one of these it'll be the real thing.  It's a first generation Kindle so it's had a good long life -- it's seven years old, which is, like 105 in technology years. ;-)

Randomness: Music, poetry, and Star Wars edition

Sometimes I play a piece of classical music to call the children to Morning Time.  Usually it's something by whatever composer we're studying, but today it was the beautiful Kyrie from Haydn's Missa in tempore belli, which my fifteen-year-old daughter and I will be singing this spring (the whole Mass, that is, not just the Kyrie).



There's a point where the words "Christe, Christe eleison," are sung dramatically with a long pause on the last note and the music stops for a breath.  Then the soloist comes back in with "Kyrie eleison, eleison."  It happens at about 3:17 in the video above.

When the soloist started singing again, my eleven-year-old said, "I thought that wasn't the end!"

After the song was finished, we talked about how you can tell whether a song is finished by the way it feels -- it has resolved the conflict.  That Christe eleison ended on a cliffhanger.

Then someone mentioned "The Empire Strikes Back," and somehow we started talking about all the Star Wars movies and how the Anakin Skywalker that was portrayed in episodes two and three couldn't possibly have grown into the magnificent Darth Vader, and eventually we segued into our day's reading from The Fairy Queen.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

From Canto V:

VII

The Sarazin was stout, and wondrous strong,
And heaped blowes like iron hammers great;
For after blood and vengeance he did long.
The knight was fierce, and full of youthly heat,
And doubled strokes, like dreaded thunder's threat:
For all for praise and honour he did fight.
Both stricken strike, and beaten both do beat,
That from their shields forth flyeth fiery light,
And helmets hewn deep show marks of eithers might.


VIII

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right;
As when a Gryffin seized of his prey,
A Dragon fierce encounters in his flight,
Through widest air making his idle way,
That would his rightfull ravine rend away;
With hideous horror both together smite,
And souce so sore that they the heavens affray:
The wise Soothsayer seeing so sad sight,
The amazed vulgar tels of wars and mortal fight.


IX

So the one for wrong, the other strives for right,
And each to deadly shame would drive his foe:
The cruell steele so greedily doth bite
In tender flesh that streams of blood down flow,
With which the armes, that earst so bright did show,
Into a pure vermillion now are dyed:
Great ruth in all the gazers hearts did grow,
Seeing the gored wounds to gape so wide,
That victory they dare not wish to either side.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

I'm having to rethink our school day.  Mike has been home on furlough since the beginning of April -- the contract his company was working on came to an end and the bidding and selection process for the new contract dragged out for weeks and weeks.  We've finally found out that the whole thing is done and he'll be officially out of a job on Friday... maybe.  The way things have been going I wouldn't be at all surprised if it works out differently after all.

So our days feel different and flow differently, and because some of the new jobs he's looking into are work-from-home jobs this might be the new Normal.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

By the way, you could consider that a prayer request.  We really, really, really want to be closer to my mom, so ideal for us would be a job somewhere between Little Rock and Oklahoma City.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

The girls and I are watching a new drama, a melodrama called Angel Eyes about a girl who loses her sight in an accident.  She is befriended by a guy and his family, they fall in love (well, I mean the guy and the girl, but really it's his whole family and the girl), but then the family suddenly has to leave the country because Reasons, and it's years before the guy is able to go back to Korea and find the girl.  In the meantime, a corneal transplant surgery has restored her sight... so she doesn't recognize him when he comes looking for her.

So far, this show has been just perfect -- the acting, the music, the script, the camera, the directing and editing, the characterization... Just perfect.

Of course, we're only eight episodes into a 20-episode show, so that could always change.

Here's the title sequence.



I think it's going to have a happy ending, even though it's a melodrama -- they sometimes do.  I'm thinking especially of Missing You, which was the melo-ist melo I've ever watched and had such a happy, well-written ending.

Good news, bad news, good news...

The good news is nobody got hurt and the house didn't burn down.

The bad news is my clothes dryer caught fire last week and burned up, along with most of the clothes that were in it at the time.

The good news is that we're in the middle of converting a larger, useless room into a new laundry room, and we'd already bought the replacement dryer (a discontinued floor model for only $75).

The bad news is that it's a gas dryer and the line hasn't yet been run from the propane tank to the dryer's new location nor have we bought the kit to convert it from natural gas to propane.

The good news is my retractable indoor clothesline was delivered today and #1 Son installed it for me.



Well, this could probably go on forever.  Instead let me just tell you the story.

Friday afternoon I was sitting at the computer with my two youngest girls in the room next to the kitchen when I started smelling smoke.  It didn't really register at first because we burn our paper trash and one of the boys might have been out doing that, but eventually I realized it didn't smell quite right.  Then I looked up and saw smoke blowing past the kitchen window.  Now, the place where we burn trash is way out behind the house on the other side of the detached garage. Smoke from the trash normally doesn't blow this way, and it if was there must be some strange weather thing going on, so I casually got up to investigate.

Going into the kitchen and looking out the window I could see that the smoke wasn't coming from away past the garage as it should be -- it seemed like it was originating right near the house.  I looked at the door to the laundry room and saw a little smoke through its window, so I opened the door and looked into the room.  There was a thin stream of smoke leaking from the joint where the dryer vents outdoors, right near the kitchen window.

I quickly opened and shut the dryer door.  This is known among firefighters as "ventilating the fire" and is a major no-no, but I wasn't thinking of that, and it is the quickest way to turn the dryer off, and I figured it was probably a problem with the wiring.  It didn't occur to me that I might get electrocuted, touching that thing, but then, my strength during a real emergency is calmness of demeanor, not clarity of thought, as you have probably figured out by now.

During the second it was open I saw flames inside.  My fifteen year old daughter, who had followed me in there, later said she could see that the drum wasn't tumbling.  It's nearly as old as she is and had been acting up lately and apparently could no longer handle a full load.

I figured that just turning off the dryer would stop whatever had caused the fire in the first place and the flames would die down right away, so I wasn't at all worried.  But just to keep him in the loop, I wandered into my twenty-three year old son's room (the son who's a volunteer firefighter) and told him what had just happened.

The word  fire had barely left my mouth when he charged out of the room, ran to the closet where we keep the fire extinguisher, and back to the laundry room, which was now completely filled with smoke.

Turns out the door hadn't actually shut when I slammed it, so the fire was getting plenty of air and was burning even more merrily.

#1 Son unloaded the fire extinguisher into the dryer, unplugged it, and opened the window in the room. 

Then he -- and I don't know how he did this, but he hauled the dryer out onto the porch to keep any more smoke from coming into the house.

It's so nice having grown-up children at home.

Wednesday with Words: "House and wife and an ox for the plough"

This semester I’m taking a seven week-long class from Coursera on The Ancient Greeks. Check out the syllabus – it’s brutal.

This quote is from one of my assigned readings this week, a selection from Aristotle’s Politics, on the polis.  I’ve deleted a longish section because I wanted to focus on Aristotle’s description of the oikos, the household or family.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them. In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved…. 

Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says, 

        ‘First house and wife and an ox for the plough,’ 

for the ox is the poor man’s slave. The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants, and the members of it are called by Charondas ‘companions of the cupboard,’ and by Epimenides the Cretan, ‘companions of the manger.’

Source:  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/Aristotle-politics-polis.asp

You can listen to me on Blogtalkradio tomorrow night

Scott Terry is hosting a round table discussion on making the transition from a suburban to a rural and agrarian life and has invited me and two other women to participate. You can hear the live broadcast, Transitioning to Rural Life, on Friday the 24th of August at 9:00 pm, Eastern time, or you can download the talk later and listen whenever it's convenient.

Whether you listen or not, y'all pray for me, okay?

The Book of Common Prayer and how we use it: Introduction

Brandy asked me to write a bit about how we use the prayer book in our family and I’d be glad to share that as best I can (even though I know I still owe y’all an Abolition of Man post), but first I thought I’d give some background information so you can see where my husband and I are coming from.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, going to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School and youth camp every summer. I loved that church and am so grateful for the pastor we had and his Bible teaching. Though I’d loved Jesus as far back as I could remember, it wasn’t until I was fifteen that I made a public profession of faith in him and was baptized. I figured I’d spend the rest of my life in that church.

My husband’s family started out Southern Baptist, then attended various charismatic churches for several years, but joined an Episcopal church around the time he was twelve because it had an active youth group that they wanted him to be part of. This particular church also had a charismatic bent, which wasn’t unusual in mainline churches in the seventies.

When I was nineteen, one of my friends started going to a Southern Baptist church that had had a charismatic revival, and I liked her new friends so much that I started going there on Sunday nights. You might expect that it would be hard for a Southern Baptist girl to fit into a charasmatic church, but I had a kind of conversion there, and loved that church and those people.

Speaking of love…
That’s where Mike and I met. :-) After we married we joined a non-denominational charismatic church that was considered to be very conservative by other charismatics. That was in south Georgia where we lived for the first six years of our marriage.

Then we moved to Upstate New York and attended an Assembly of God church for the eleven months were there. After that we moved to Alabama and spent several months looking for a good charismatic church, but never found one that suited us, so we joined an SBC that a coworker of Mike’s invited us to.

Then in the spring of 1998 we moved to Virginia and began looking for another charismatic or Baptist church. After a long and fruitless search we wound up, through a series of fortunate events which I will not go into here for brevity’s sake, joining a Presbyterian church. And when I say “join” I mean whole hog. It really was another conversion experience and on the day we joined we had all of our children, there were five at the time, baptized, and if you know anything about Southern Baptists and charismatics you’ll realize what a huge change that was.

Into the desert
In the fall of 2001 we were sent to Texas where the nearest Presbyterian church of the same denomination was two hours away. We went there for a couple of months, but really, it was just too much. There was another conservative Presbyterian denomination that was only an hour and a half away, so we visited there for nearly a year. Eventually though, Mike decided that we needed to be part of a community that was closer to home, so we began attending the Traditional service at the base chapel.

This was a good choice for us for another year or so, especially the Wednesday night Bible study and Evening Prayers led by the Lutheran chaplain. But then the base chapel isn’t technically a church and the elders of the Presbyterian church we belonged to in Virginia wanted us to join a real church. Owing to some things that were going on at the chapel we realized that not only should we do what the elders suggested, but do it posthaste.

Oasis
Knowing my husband had an Episcopal background, someone recommended one of the two Episcopal churches in town—the priest was a friend and very conservative. We tried it and loved it, so we joined there.

In 2005 my husband retired from the military and we moved here (we’re back in Virginia, but three hours away from our former church). After a while we decided that we needed to find a more conservative, or “Traditional,” as Anglican-speech puts it, church, but we wanted to stay within the Anglican tradition, so now we belong to an Anglican church that uses the older Book of Common Prayer—the 1928 one.

We have much to be grateful for. Every church we’ve been touched by has enriched us. Love of Scripture from the Baptists. Zeal from the charismatics. Deep wonder at God’s supreme power and goodness from the Presbyterians. The beauty of holiness from the Lutherans.

Home
And from the Anglicans? That’s so hard to define. We didn’t mean to stay Anglican. It was meant to be a temporary lodging until we could get back to the Presbyterians. But after eight years in this tradition, the Anglican church has become our home, with all that that implies and I can’t imagine being anything else now.

I don’t mean to insult anyone else’s church service, and I’ve participated in and been blessed by and loved many different styles of worship, but let me tell you, the Anglicans know How to Do Church. When we visit other churches, we feel like we’ve been to a really good Bible study, good Christian fellowship, but it just doesn’t feel like Church.

Please, please, please don’t take that as an insult to other churches. I’m just telling you how I feel about my own church, and I know you love your church tradition as much as I love mine. At least, I hope you do. Just take it the same way you’d take it if someone said, “No one can make Sunday dinner like my Mama.” You know that’s not really a swipe at your mama.

But now, I think I finally understand what is meant by the term Mother Kirk.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

You can read Part 2 here.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Edited to add:

I've created a new tag "Book of Common Prayer" and have scanned over my older posts trying to tag things that mention the BCP or quote from it. I didn't tag all the Psalms I've posted, but all those Latin titles for the Psalms come from the Psalter in the BCP.

There were a handful where I mentioned it so briefly that I decided not to tag them. Mostly they were short quotes from the book. In the post "Grief, a year later," when I said, "I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come," that's from the Nicene Creed, which we recite every Sunday after the Scripture readings.

In a couple of different places I mentioned that some of my favorite words are these:

"With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and all my worldly goods I thee endow," from the 1662 BCP.

"Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again," said by the congregation during the Eucharistic Prayer, 1979 BCP.

"These are the gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you, and feed on him in your hearts by faith, with thanksgiving," said by the priest while holding the bread and the cup, just after the breaking of the bread, inviting God's people to the Table, 1979 BCP.

I would like to do an average day post...

but we don't seem to have any average days right now.

Tuesday is our crazy day. I'm actually having to use Google Calendar because we're so busy this term.

I was up at six (which isn't average for me this time of year -- I tend to get up with the sun and right now the sun isn't up till seven) so I read for a while. I'm re-reading CS Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress. Then I started breakfast and a load of laundry (usually laundry comes later in the day, but Mike needed a clean undershirt. OOPS! I still haven't gotten used to my new washer. I hate it. It's not simple and obedient like my old one and I'm having to change my laundry habits in order to accommodate it.)

Ate breakfast, sent Hubby off to work (with a clean undershirt that was found at the bottom of a basket of clean clothes on top of the dryer), cleaned a little.

Called family to prayers. We use the 1979 Book of Common Prayer because we're used to it, but we're using the Lectionary from the 1928 since that's the prayer book our current church uses. We have a Psalm every day, plus an Old Testament and a New Testament reading, but we got behind and everyone wants to hear the OT stories (we're in II Samuel reading about David's exploits) so we're skipping the NT readings for now.

The OT reading reminded my 12 year old daughter of the story of Perseus in Charles Kingsley's book The Heroes, which we read last spring, so we talked about it, and that led us to our Wall Chart of World History to find when the Trojan War happened (less than a hundred years before King David).

By then it was ten o'clock and time for the three music students to leave for their lesson. The three remaining children and I went back to the kitchen to finish cleaning it while listening to Beethoven's 7th Symphony, and then a friend dropped by for half an hour or so. I haven't seen her in a few weeks so we had a lot of catching up to do. The younger kids played a few rounds of their Monopoly game in the living room while we chatted in the dining room. I sent her off with a half gallon of goat milk.

Then the music students came back home and I remembered that I hadn't fixed any lunch yet (OOPS! I'm still used to Eldest Daughter being here and taking care of that), so we we cooked a chicken/spinach/ricotta cheese dish, but it wasn't finished before the two older girls had to leave for their drama class, so I gave them some money so they could buy fast food on the way (sigh).

I don't remember what I did after that. I know I spent some time on the computer and then I laid down for a while. I also spent fifteen or twenty minutes with my eleven year old son who's playing baseball for the first time this fall, helping him with his batting. Then I went to doctor my injured finger and decided it really was infected and I should call the real doctor, so I did and the nurse said "Come now." Took my Kindle with me and read a couple of chapters of Thomas Shields' The Making and the Unmaking of a Dullard while waiting for Doctor C.

Got back home at four; #1 Son went to pick up his sisters from drama; I took Baseball Son (along with two of his sisters) to practice, then went to Walmart to get my prescription filled (another round of antibiotics, and this time it's completely my fault; I injured my finger on purpose. That is, I asked #1 Son to do it. Long story, but I have cyst or something under the skin of the middle finger on my right hand -- my pencil-holding finger, you see, and it's right in that spot, which makes it uncomfortable. Well, I had this brilliant idea: instead of wasting time and money going to the doctor about it, why don't I just cut it open myself and let the cyst out? Only I'm not brave enough to cut myself, so I asked Son to do it for me and being a good boy, he did. Only the cyst didn't come out -- it's attached, which I was not expecting at all. That's not the bad part though. I was planning to let it heal up and then go to the doctor and let him remove it properly, only my bandage would get wet from doing housework and I wouldn't get around to putting on a fresh bandage until bedtime... so it got infected. Yes, I took a lot of ribbing from the doctor about DIY surgery. He wasn't best pleased, but he's a grandfatherly sort of man and didn't make me feel like a criminal for doing it.)

Went back to the park for the rest of ball practice, came home, ate supper, listened to Hubby reading The Hobbit to the younger four, and wasted another hour in front of the computer. Where I still am, typing this report of our non-average day.

This wasn't even an average Tuesday, what with the doctor and all.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the children did their farm chores -- looking for eggs, milking the goats and straining and chilling the milk (twice), walking the dog, bringing the goats home when they escaped over the fence... stuff like that. I noticed my twelve-year-old reading Diana Wynne Jones's Dogsbody. My eighteen year old daughter spent some time singing into the computer so she could analyze her voice and improve it. #1 Son spent at least an hour on his algebra and another reading Clarence Carson's Basic American Government and working on his paper. The youngest two spent a lot of time adding up Monopoly money and figuring rents.

I never meant to be an unschooler, but it seems that we are by default.

So, how's your day been?

We just had an earthquake -- a 5.9, reportedly, centered about fifty miles southwest of here. Lotta rumbling and rattling, but nothing worse, thank the Lord.

My son, who's a volunteer fire and rescue guy, went straight down to the station when it was over, and for the last half an hour it's been non-stop sirens on our highway. I hope it's just lines or trees down, and no injuries.

Depart, O Christian soul, out of this world

In the Name of God the Father Almighty who created thee.
In the Name of Jesus Christ who redeemed thee.
In the Name of the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth thee.
May thy rest be this day in peace, and thy dwellingplace in the Paradise of God.

Jewell C., 24 June 1909 - 3 August 2011

My husband's dear sweet grandmother passed peacefully into the arms of her Saviour today. Thankfully, we knew she would be leaving us soon, and Mike and our oldest son were able to go to her on Sunday and stay with her till the end.

Summer school

So, yesterday morning after reviewing all his phonograms and other memory work (Psalm 8, the seventh day of the creation week, The Parable of the Sower from Matthew 13, the latter portion of Ephesians chapter 4, Pater Noster, and Poe's "Eldorado"), and having a handwriting lesson, I sent John outside to run around the house three times while I set up his French lesson. I've found that his eleven-year-old mind works better when his body has had some recent exercise, and it had already been more than an hour since he'd finished helping with milking the goats and putting them out to pasture, investigating the death of a chicken, taking the dog for a walk, and collecting and taking out the trash.

His run took a lot longer than I'd expected and when he came in he was mad as a hornet. Four of the goats had gotten out and gone to our neighbor's house to feast on their apple trees, and while running up the path through the woods to get them, he'd been stung twice by yellow jackets. I put baking soda on his wounds and sent him back out to find another way around. No good. The yellow jackets were stirred up all along the ridge he has to cross to get to the neighbor's.

Naturally I panicked and called my husband. Then, having sent John and Nathan on one more vain excursion, I fitted them out in ad hoc beekeeper's gear: jeans tucked into socks, a cowboy hat with a sheer curtain draped over it and tucked inside a jacket, plus a pair of gloves. By the time Mike got home, John had brought Psyche, the herd queen, home, and penned her up and the other three were following... slowly, but since the queen had gone home, they were on their way, too.

While the guys were out managing the mischief, I made half a gallon of lemonade to serve them when they came back inside. It's awfully hot here now -- in the 90s and muggy. It was past lunch time by then and my two oldest had come back from the library, so we made quesadillas and Mike went back to work.

It was nearly 2 o'clock by the time we finished eating and I didn't feel like doing anything else, so, remembering that Tuesday was the day that The Eagle was supposed to be in the Redbox, I sent Number One Son out to pick it up, and we spent the rest of the afternoon watching it. My three youngest girls are at their grandmother's and they're going to be sorry they missed the movie.

Oh, the two oldest were at the library because Eldest Daughter had an internet class which began at 11:00 (James Taylor's short story class through CiRCE and those of you who didn't sign up for it ought to be ashamed of yourselves), and our internet was down. We have this theory that our local provider houses the equipment in a leaky basement because service goes down whenever the weather gets a little damp.

Today we saw a bluebird in the bird bath and stood watching it for a while. Other than that, it was less exciting than yesterday, but we didn't accomplish much more.

I'm not worried though. It's too hot to do anything besides stand and stare.

I'm enjoying the time off, but I am looking forward to the fall, when all the children are home again and we get back into our cozy routine.