Twelve Things I'll Remember About 2012

1. Spending an entire year in a home instead of in the inn for the first time since 2002.
2. All the wildlife sightings and hearings on our property: red-bellied snake, turtles (including the teeny tiny one I found while weeding), coyotes, deer, a white-coated weasel (short or long tail hotly contested), owls, salamanders, too many frogs to count (the noise from the spring peepers literally hurts your ear drums if you are near the pond), a variety of birds, and approximately 1001 squirrels and chipmunks.
3. A wonderful trip to Florence with friends and two days in Holland with just Michael on the way back. The train from Lucca to Florence Piazza del Serchio. (Don't know where that is? Look it up. I'll wait. Hint: Not near Florence.)
4. Finally getting comfortable enough to swim in the deep end. And to go snorkeling in Hawaii.
5. A great trip to Hawaii with Michael's family--and getting to see my family on the way back home.
6. NB and IM graduating from elementary school and starting middle school.
7. EM and Michael fighting a brush fire in Utah while supposedly setting up for a wedding reception.
8. Having the most fun six months of my career and also the worst six weeks, while documenting a product that changed names four times during the year, only to end up with name we started with.
9. Learning to enjoy the effects of exercise more than I hate the discomforts.
10. EM scoring a 5 on the AP Calculus test as a sophomore . . . and having to call in to get his results because he combined our inn mailing address and our house mailing address into one undeliverable mess.
11. Numerous discussions on language rules with LW as he learns to read.
12. Singing with IM in the choir for the Christmas Eve service.

CSA Success

We are participating in a CSA this summer. We did this for a couple of years and then took several years off.

The kids got sick of some of the staple CSA vegetables. Michael's Scottish blood felt it wasn't a good economic deal. Especially when I *cough* didn't use all the vegetables before they went bad.

This week--our third--we consumed the last vegetable from Wednesday's pickup at dinner on Friday.

What did I do right this week that I haven't done in other weeks?

• Right after I unpacked the CSA bag, I sat down with my cookbooks and made a list of the recipes I would make to use the vegetables. Granted, it helped that pickup this week was on a holiday, so my day was less scheduled than usual, but even on normal weeks it would probably be possible for me to actually take a lunch break instead of eating at my desk. I posted the list on the fridge, so I wouldn't forget my plan.
• I ate vegetables for lunch. I took a few minutes to cook lunch from scratch, and I was surprised at how little time it took. Wednesday I made Nova Scotia Hodge Podge using the potatoes, beans, onions, and some of the carrots. Thursday I made Greens with Peanut Sauce using the unidentified (not kale, not Swiss chard, not smooth spinach; is there such a thing as curly spinach?) greens. Friday I sauteed the zucchini and yellow squash in butter and added salt, pepper, and fresh basil.

I'm already wondering what we'll get this week.

Lost in Translation

What I said: [Child], please get the rest of your stuff out of the basement.

What I meant: [Child], please get the rest of your stuff out of the basement and put it back in your room, from whence it came originally.

What Child heard: [Child], please get the rest of your stuff out of the basement.

Where I found Child's stuff: On the window seat in the living room.

Child was honestly confused when called on this. "But, Mom, you only said to get it out of the basement!"

I think I'll start saving my pennies for a law degree.I'm going to need it once we hit the teenage years with this one.

Why I Have to Say No

Parenting experts often advise parents to say yes to their kids more often than they say no.

It sounds like such a lovely idea. It's so much more fun to say yes.

However. It would be much easier to say yes if my kids' requests were even remotely feasible.

Well, to be honest, I'm really talking about LW here.

In the last three days, he has asked me

1. For explosive arrows and a flame thrower for his birthday or, failing that, Christmas.

2. To go to Hawaii right now.

3. To let him kill a badger so he can get a badger skin, and then to make him a coat out of the badger skin. (According to him, badger skin keeps one cool instead of making one warm, so it will be perfect for summer wear.)

"No" is getting a great workout around here.

De-inning

Many parents who pull their kids out of brick-and-mortar schools to home school them speak of the need to let the kids de-school. During the de-schooling period, you should avoid setting up a rigid schedule or expecting much academic work from your kids. Instead, you are supposed to read a ton, watch educational videos, and take field trips. Just get used to being at home, they say. The recommended de-schooling time varies, but some suggest one month for every year your child was in school.

In many ways, I feel like I've been de-inning since we moved to the house at the end of August. I haven't been a complete lump on a log; I don't think that's possible with four kids. I'm still working full time. The house is at a reasonable level of cleanliness. The kids are maintaining their usual level of outside activities, which, admittedly, is not much this time of year, and I have my weekly Pilates class. Michael and I have joined a monthly book group that we enjoy, and we were both involved in a local theater production in February.

All that said, I find that home is my favorite place to be. If we don't have a specific invitation (which I do enjoy!), I have no desire to seek out something to do. I'm quite content to sit in front of the fire with Michael and read. Or, when the weather is nice, sit out on the deck and listen to the birds and the sound of the creek.

I can't even quite muster the energy to start the projects that await. With eight acres, there is plenty to do outside. And at some point I really would like to paint over the orange walls in the basement.

I've been feeling guilty about my sloth, but when I mentioned that to a pair of local innkeepers, they immediately pooh-poohed my professions of guilt. "Of course you want to stay home and not do anything!" Which reminded me of de-schooling.

According to the one month for every year formula, I should be approaching the end of de-inning sometime between the end of March and the end of April. And I have noticed a faint desire for spring cleaning and yard work stirring deep inside.

Maybe, just maybe, it's time to come back to the real world.

Reading Life--Part 2

The Book of Mormon Girl--I bought this for my Kindle because one of my college roommates mentioned it on Facebook. Joanna Brooks and I were students in BYU's English department at the same time; I knew of her but didn't know her. Her memoir made me both laugh and cry with nostalgia. I highly recommend this to anyone who grew up Mormon in the 1970s and '80s.

Duty Free--elliptical fluff. Tolerable, but I won't seek out more books by this author.

The Thin Man--another book about the stereotypical hard-boiled, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking detective. Except, of course, it wasn't a stereotype at all until Dashiell Hammett created it in this and other books. This is very short and a quick read. I didn't see the solution to the mystery ahead of time, which is always nice. I don't think I've ever read a book with a higher drinks-per-page ratio.

Galileo's Daughter--another pre-trip read. Galileo had three children, all illegitimate. He purchased legitimacy for his youngest child, a son. The two daughters he put in a convent just outside Florence. He and his oldest daughter kept up a regular correspondence, and although his letters to her have not survived, hers to him have. Despite the title, this is really a biography of Galileo, not his daughter, but the inclusion of her letters in the narrative provides a different view of him. I knew only the barest outline of Galileo's conflict with the church, so I learned a lot reading this.

I won't talk about Michael's latest book in an attempt to provide some anonymity for my blog, but I enjoyed reading and proofreading it. It'll be out in the fall.

Witches Under Way--the newest book from my favorite fluff author. This was supposed to be my elliptical book, but I finished it off early on a day I was recovering from a cold.

In the Garden of Beasts--the book club pick for this month (although I suggested it). I have read a fair bit about WWII Germany and Hitler, and yet I really didn't know much about the events of 1933 and 1934, and I'm not sure I'd ever heard of The Night of the Long Knives (June 30, 1934). This book is based on the writings of the American ambassador to Germany and his daughter Martha, who dated a number of Nazi officials during her years in Berlin. I found Rudolf Diels, the head of the Gestapo, to be surprisingly sympathetic and shockingly sane and moderate. He realized just a little too late that the Gestapo attracted sadists and made sadists out of even the normal men and women who worked for it.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--this book was on so many reading lists--including the "I Can't Believe You Haven't Read *That*?!" list--that it was only a matter of time before I read it. I enjoyed it. I chuckled a time or two. I don't understand those who say it is the best science fiction book ever written. I need more depth in my great books. I did jot down a couple of quotes I may use in the future.

Slaughterhouse-Five--I found this while alphabetizing the paperbacks left in the ping-pong room by the former owners. I'd heard of it, of course, but knew no details, so I was a bit surprised to find myself back in WWII Germany. Excellent book. I should read more Vonnegut, because so far I'm 2-for-2 with his books.

On Writing--Michael recommended this to me more than once, and I was finally in the mood to read it. I enjoyed the memoir parts the most; the writing advice less. It was interesting to get a look at how he works, especially since I share my office with a fiction writer.

The Human Factor--Stephen King recommended some Graham Greene books in On Writing, and I knew from alphabetizing the paperbacks that we had some of Greene's books. We didn't have the ones King recommended, so I picked this one because the cover quote said, "Probably the best espionage novel ever written." I haven't read enough in the genre to speak to that (and the quote is over 30 years old now), but I did enjoy it. The author has some nice turns of phrase that I meant to write down, but I was too caught up in the plot to do that, and now I can't find them.

Reading Life--Part 1

I have been a reading machine this year, but unfortunately not a blogging one. I considered not blogging about my reads, but frankly, I use the blog regularly to remind me of what I've read. So, this post is for me. If you'd like to come along, great!

Thrush Green--This book is the first in a series that was recommended to me as an English version of the Mitford books. Pleasant enough, but I prefer Mitford. I doubt I will seek out the other books in the series, but I won't avoid them if they stumble onto my path.

If only people would realize that light-hearted and gay things were not any less significant than the violent and brutish, what a step forward it would be. Because a song, a book, a play, a picture or anything created was gay it did not necessarily follow that it was trivial. 47

The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon--Another book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. I snatched it up from the New Books shelf at the library. I am not a fan of Paul, and I doubted that Borg and Crossan could change my mind. They argue that some of the letters attributed to Paul were not in fact written by him.

The post-Pauline, pseudo-Pauline letters are anti-Pauline with regard to major aspects of his theology. They represent, as we argue in the next chapter, a taming of Paul, a domestication of Paul's passion to the normalcy of the Roman imperial world in which he and his followers lived. 15

They also made explicit one of the things that bothers me about much of the religious discourse in our country:

For Luther, Paul's message was about the end of requirements as the basis of our relationship with God.
For other Protestants, including even many descendants of Luther, Paul's theology has been understood not as the abolitions of requirements, but as the new requirement--namely, believing his theology is what we must do in order to be saved. 8

I wouldn't say I'm a fan of Paul yet, but I am willing to consider that I might have misunderstood him under the influence of writings falsely attributed to him. I look forward to doing more reading and research.

100 Cupboards and Dandelion Fire--I asked the kids for recommendations, and NB recommended Dandelion Fire. Since it was the second book in the series, I had to read the first book first. These were good enough that I stayed up late reading to see what happened next, but not so great that I picked up the third book. Of course, the author also wrapped things up nicely at the end of the second book. Had there been a thread dangling, I might have read on.

Scarlet Feather--My first Maeve Binchy. I was supposed to read this in Ireland, but didn't get to it. Instead, it became my elliptical machine reading. Pleasant. I might read the other books with these same characters. Some day.

Brunelleschi's Dome--I checked out this book to prepare for my trip to Italy in April. I feel too lazy to learn Italian (really, if I'm going to study a foreign language, I should work on my pathetic Spanish), so the least I can do is supply the background trivia and human-interest stories. This is the story of the construction of the dome on Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral in Florence.

For the past fifty years the south aisle of the unfinished cathedral had housed a thirty-foot-long scale model of the structure, in effect an artist's impression of what the cathedral should look like once finished. The problem was that the model included an enormous dome--a dome that, if built, would be the highest and widest vault ever raised. And for fifty years it had been obvious that no one in Florence--or anywhere in Italy, for that matter--had any clear idea how to construct it. The unbuilt dome of Santa Maria del Fiore had therefore become the greatest architectural puzzle of the age. Many experts considered its erection an impossible feat. Even the original planners of the dome had been unable to advise how their project might be completed: they merely expressed a touching faith that at some point in the future God might provide a solution, and architects with a more advanced knowledge would be found. 3-5

Not only did Brunelleschi solve the puzzle, he built the dome without any scaffolding support during construction. I loved this book. The descriptions were so clear that I got dizzy at times. My only small suggestion would be to add a few more diagrams toward the end.

Resolutions Redux

My sister-in-law wrote about how she sets and follows through on goals at her blog. I'm busy this morning figuring out what specific steps I'm going to take this week to make progress on my resolutions.

My sister also wrote about resolutions yesterday on her blog. The title made me laugh and shudder. I was around 10 when Mom decided we each needed a daily dose of cod liver oil. Raspberries are much tastier.

New Year's Resolutions

As a child, I loved New Year's resolutions. With the eternal optimism of youth, I determined each January that this year I would become perfect. I would clean my room. Not fight with my brother. Brush my teeth and say prayers twice a day. Write in my journal and read scriptures daily. As I entered double digits, I added lose weight and exercise to the list.

Of this list, I have mastered brushing my teeth twice a day.

I don't fight with my brother anymore either, but that resolution has been replaced by one to show more patience with the family members I live with now.

I eventually ditched New Year's resolutions altogether, in an attempt to relax and accept myself.

Then I decide to challenge myself to read 52 books in one year. Unlike many of my earlier resolutions, this one played to my strengths while stretching me to grow. Not only did I complete the challenge, I enjoyed it. Last year, I made a different soup from Sunday Soups each Sunday we were home. Although my blog posts failed partway through the year, the cooking continued, and I had fun discovering my buried cooking skills and developing new ones.

Neither of these goals felt like New Year's resolutions because they were fun and were things I wanted to do, not things I wanted to want to do. But maybe these were what resolutions were supposed to be?

I became fully committed to setting resolutions again this year as the result of a conversation I had with Michael's sister during our trip to Ireland. I have admired her accomplishments for years, but without giving a lot of thought to how she does so much. Learning more about how she sets goals and follows up on them inspired me to give it another try, but this time with some of the self-forgiveness and self-acceptance that I developed during my years off.

I'm still flawed, of course. Last night I wrote down some personality traits I'd love to leave behind and watched the paper burn to ash in the fireplace. As I finalize my resolutions today, there are still some that speak to impatience, procrastination, and a lack of mental presence in the moment. But these resolutions are gentler and more forgiving than in years past, and most of my resolutions focus on things I want to accomplish that keep getting buried in the minutiae of day-to-day life.

Here's to a great 2012.