Thursday, September 10, 2009

First Day!



E and Z started the much-awaited preschool yesterday. After much hemming and hawing and self-doubt (no! not me!) they both had a great day and I'm soooo relieved that they will be in an environment much more conducive to exploration, learning and creativity (for more on my preschool concerns, see here and here). When we dropped them off, they went right in and found some "work" to play with right away, and when I picked them up, they were busy examining rocks from the "rock museum." Good stuff all around.

I managed another "Buy Nothing Back to School" again this year--for the most part. All M needed was pencils (sharpened some we had hanging around and stuck cap erasers on the ends), crayons (bought a brand new box at Goodwill for 99 cents) and colored pencils (sharpened last year's pencils, supplementing with a black one from our art table). I did have to buy him shoes because the Simple EcoSneaks I bought in the spring fell apart within a month or two (I was VERY disappointed--the Simples we bought the previous year were MUCH sturdier). I bought him Keens and hop that they will last all year.

All E and Z needed were lunch bags, so I revisited my tutorial from last year and spent most of Tuesday putting them together (and have revised the tutorial for future reference). Although I came up with the bag from within my own brain, I would have had a super hard time recreating it without those instructions, so I'm psyched that I did it.

Here are the three bags all lined up, ready to go to school. I ordered them each a LunchBot as well, but they're backordered until October, so we're still using plastic containers.



Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Weekend at Camp

We spent Labor Day weekend at Granny Clo's camp on Toddy Pond...beautiful blue sky, lots of fishing (E and Z each caught their first fish and, apparently, became quite proficient at casting...I don't know about these things and plant to keep it that way), whittling, eating good food and (for me) reading and knitting...all while being fed and taken care of by the most wondrous of ex-step-mother-in-laws. I could have spent the whole weekend lying down and basking, but I did rouse myself long enough to canoe to Ten Pound Island to eat and lounge a bit more. Certainly this must be what Labor Day was invented for...














Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Windsor Fair

I'm not a huge fair fan, but C was out of town Friday, so I took the boys to the Windsor Fair, and had a good time despite myself. I prefer the right (north) end of the fair, where the animals and historic exhibits are (although I could do without all the bizarre commercial tents), and would stay on that end altogether if it were up to me (avoiding carnies and junk food at the other end), but of course we went over and went on rides (three each--no bracelets; that's what kind of mean mom I am), ate some hot dogs and French fries (I had the homemade falafel sandwich on homemade, wood-fired pita bread--yum!). E, Z and M were entranced by the pottery demonstration, and M could have spent the whole day in the blacksmith shop. We also spent a good half hour digging potatoes in the ag education tent. And I got my maple cotton candy fix for the year.
























Friday, September 4, 2009

Well Read? Well...

I have a shelf below my night stand, full of books unread. The top of my nightstand, more books, read, unread and half-read. I have a box of books in my room that I have either read and forgotten I read them, or I haven't read yet. Several shelves in my livingroom bookshelf, unread (lovely gifts from my lovely friend who recently moved away). Books on the floor, waiting to be read or re-shelved. I just requested three books from ILL and ordered three from Better World Books. I have books. I read books. I want to read more books.

But have I read the books I should have read (according to the BBC, which reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books below)? I found this meme on ZookBookNook and thought I'd give it a go to test my well-readness. If you want to give it a try, just:

1) Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2) Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (I read the first two)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
6 The Bible (I read some of it in Catholic school--obviously--and some in Western Civ.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (I read it in 7th grade and did not get it at all--may possibly have read only the first and last sentence of every paragraph)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I plan on reading something Dickens soon)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (I was in Washington DC the week we read this in AP English)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot*
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (just couldn't do it)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (again...painful)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen*
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne*
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (worst. book. ever.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery*
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (my sister just gave me a copy of this)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood*
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel*
2 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (just can't make myself like Steinbeck)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (read half, was disturbed, will try again)
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas*
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding*
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett*
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (I start it every December, but don't get very far)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro* (finally just read it! I know...shameful)
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery*
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Hmmm...only 28 that I've read all the way through (though much more respectable than 6)...and quite a few that I have no interest or intention of reading (and a number I've never heard of or should look into...add them to the list). How many have you read?

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Good God

Only four days into the school year and already "go brush your teeth, wash your face and comb your hair" translates as "go play Lego's and pick on your brothers." It's gonna be a loooong year.

In other news, I just joined Facebook after avoiding it for as long as possible. I caught up with a friend I haven't seen in years and years while I was in Colo and decided to join to stay in touch w/ her and others like her whom I email once a year. Now I have all of these people I haven't seen, heard from or thought about in 15-20 years flying at me as possible friends. Even people whose blogs I read, but don't know at all. How does Facebook know what blogs I read? It's kind of freaking me out. Yes I realize I share all manner of personal information about my various breakdowns and crises (see below for the latest), but somehow having people thrown at me and information extracted from me seems much more...I don't know...icky. I feel violated. Here I feel more in control (an illusion, no doubt). Besides, I only have like four faithful readers, while in just two days of being on Facebook, I have over 20 "friends." It's weird.

Crisis of the week (day? I'm losing track...is this just what being in your mid-30's is about or am I a basket case?). Yesterday I picked up a map of Kennebec Trails at a local coffee shop (for the price of $7.95). I have been toiling for years (at the pace of a land snail, yes, but toiling just the same) on my Capital Walks blog (and really I was working on it well before I started the blog) with the unstated goal of creating a book of hikes in Kennebec County (or possibly just the southern part of the county), and now here is this lovely, well-put-together map, beautifully illustrated with close to a dozen of my hikes out there and suddenly I feel obsolete. Slow. Lazy. A total loser.

And yes, I understand that I book can be much more than a map, that there are many more areas out there that the map did not cover (and a few areas on the map that I hadn't yet considered), and that there should be room for more than one resource on this topic...but still...just so frustrating that I can't seem to get out of my own way to see a project through (yes I do have lots of excuses ranging from bugs to weather to twin babies...but those excuses aren't going to get my book written before someone else beats me to it).

Grrrr....Anyway I have to figure out a way to get out there and get this done before competing interests and priorities, frustration, self-doubt and old-fashioned laziness take over. Any suggestions?

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Summer Earth Scouts

Monday morning Z said, out of the blue, "Let's go EarthScouting."

Still feeling not-so-great from my respiratory infection (hanta virus? black lung? TB?) I would have much rather curled up on the couch, but how could I say no to the question I've been waiting for since spring?
Without much of an agenda, we went out to see what we could see. We inventoried flowers: lots of yellows (black-eyed Susans, hawkweed, dandelion, evening primrose, goldenrod), some purple (clover, sage, chive), a bit of white (Queen Anne's lace, oregano), one blue (a renegade morning glory that comes back year after year despite all my neglect), some orange calendula and red staghorn sumac (truthfully, I don't really know how to tell when they change from flower to fruit, but they are at the perfect tartness for sucking on/making "lemonade" right now).
We also saw some butterflies, grasshoppers, spider webs and two sets of moose tracks.
When we were camping in Colorado, E and Z liked crawling in the bushes around our campsite and pretending it was their jungle (also coming out with discarded beer and whiskey bottles)...it surprised me because they never venture into the woods or brush around our house alone, but Monday, Z strode off into the overgrown field along the road (looking like Laura in the opening titles to Little House on the Prairie)...getting more adventurous!

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Back

I'm back! We had a fantastic time in Colorado. I was reluctant to get on that airplane home. Then, after two days of jet-lagged stupor, a day at the beach (damn that north Atlantic is COLD), followed by a very late movie/dinner night with friends, a day of rain and a trip to the weekend clinic for a nebulizer treatment because I couldn't breathe, I really, really, really wished I'd just settled in the hot springs and refused to budge. Now school (for M) is back in session, E and Z are back at the daycare of doom for one last week and I am back at...dum, dum, dum, work (and C is back at his crazy never-ending work-aholic schedule) and, apparently, in between the hurricanes, Maine's summer came and went while we were gone.

Some highlights of our trip:

Push-ups in the airport (who says vacations are lazy?)









Brotherly (and doggy) love






Dinosaur bones





and tracks (both real






and illusory)



Making a splash!





Turtle love (really...we saw these turtles mating)




Feeding lorries (that's Australian for parrot, mate)







Backyard piggies (these are residents of my brother's backyard)

Living history (where we also visited a house very much like Little House on the Prairie, which we also finally finished reading while we were there).


Hiking in a snow squall.



Close encounters with wildlife (though the radio collars kinda ruin the effect).




Junior Ranger honors all around.


Raving.

Seeing a bear swim across the Colorado River (that black spot is a bear, I swear!)



Your average grueling hike to a spectacular spot.



Tiny houses.


Also lots of time spent with family and friends, a terrifying drive ten miles up a winding road on the edge of a cliff (turning around before reaching the campground at mile 16.6 and driving down those now even more terrifying miles). Camping without a lighter or Coleman fuel (doughnuts for breakfast never tasted so good--and M has never complimented my cooking more. Thanks JM!) And, of course, the piece de resistance, an evening and a day soaking in luxury at Glenwood Springs. I was seriously ready to take up residence in a cave on the side of the mountain and get a job as a towel girl at the pool.


Oh yes, and I almost forgot to mention, C & I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary (ten!) and I turned 36. A very full vacation indeed!
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...