April Vacation--Part 2

We spent two days in Colonial Williamsburg. We put all three of the older kids in the stocks, but IM's picture turned out the best. Finally, a use for the pout she's been practicing.

Did you know it took about 20 minutes to grind enough corn for one person for one meal? It's a wonder they had time to do anything else.

All six of us fell in love with the newest cousin (Michael's younger sister's daughter). LW was particularly taken with her. The first thing out of his mouth each morning was, "Are Persy and her mommy up yet?"

April Vacation--Part 1

April was all about vacations. First, holding down the fort while Michael was in Mexico and then a family road trip down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for a week spent with Michael's parents, sister, and niece. With stops on the way down and back, we were gone for two weeks.

Our stop on the way down was in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It's not really beach season there yet, but my poor sun-deprived northern New England kids didn't care.

More books

Reading is definitely down from January levels, but I have finished two more books.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution is a fascinating and easy read. The scientific evidence is not as solid as it was in Endless Forms Most Beautiful, but the authors' ideas seem probable and I'll be curious to see how future research supports or refines their ideas.

Similarly, vitamin D shortages in the new [agricultural] diet may have driven the evolution of light skin in Europe and northern Asia. Vitamin D is produced by ultraviolet radiation from the sun acting on our skin--an odd, plantlike way of going about things. Less is therefore produced in areas far from the equator, where UV flux is low. Since there is plenty of vitamin D in fresh meat, hunter-gatherers in Europe may not have suffered from vitamin D shortages and thus may have been able to get by with fairly dark skin. IN fact, this must have been the case, since several of the major mutations causing light skin color appear to have originated after the birth of agriculture. p 78

One of the most interesting chapters compared the European settlement of the Americas with the attempted settlement of Africa. In America, the native populations had not evolved immunities to the diseases the Europeans carried, and vast numbers died from disease. In Africa, the opposite was true. It was the Europeans who lacked immunity to the main disease (malaria).

But Africa did not become another America: Africans were not displaced by Europeans. In order for limited numbers of colonists to become the predominant population, the locals must die off, and Africans didn't. Powerful tropical diseases, combined with the local biological defenses (evolved at vast cost), kept Africa African. As in the case of the Columbian expansion, recent human evolution played a key role in determining the victors. p 173

I was also intrigued by the explanation of the how Indo-European languages became so wide-spread.

If this picture is correct, the occurrence of a single mutation [lactose tolerance] in a particular group of pastoralists [the Indo-Europeans] some 8,000 years ago eventually determined the spoken language of half of mankind. p 185-186

I also read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, which was just awarded the Newberry Medal. I started it as a read-aloud with the big kids, but they decided they would rather I read it on my own instead. It has, I must say, the most disturbing opening to a children's book I can remember reading. Once you get past that though, it's an enjoyable book. The ending made me cry, but I don't think it would make most kids cry.

Jumping the gun

I had a series of meetings for work this week that required my presence in Boston. Since we only have one vehicle, I rent a car for these trips. The drive down on Sunday was one of my smoothest yet. No weather issues and light traffic.

I woke up Monday morning to snow . . . and discovered that there was no ice scraper in the car. I improvised to get things clear enough to drive to work, and borrowed a good snow brush from a co-worker to clean my car off at the end of the day. She had an extra ice scraper she let me keep in my car, which spared me from using my credit cards to scrape the windows Tuesday morning.

When I turned the car in at the end of the trip, I mentioned that the car was missing its ice scraper.

"Oh, I know. We've started taking them out. It's spring."

?!?

It's March. Early March. We live in northern New England for crying out loud. We get snow storms in April.

Granted, spring is supposed to come early this year, but taking the ice scrapers out in March is ridiculous.

Inventing a higher authority

LW was singing loudly downstairs during breakfast. I told him to please sing upstairs.

"I have to sing downstairs because my invisible mom said I can't sing upstairs."

What's wrong with pajamas?

Back in the fall, we had a hard time convincing LW to wear his pajamas. He spent most of the summer sleeping in just a pull-up and didn't see the need for more clothes at night. The fact that he was waking up freezing (his bedroom has no heat) did not do anything to change his mind. After weeks and weeks of bedtime arguments, he began wearing pajamas without complaint.

Until recently.

First, it was pajama tops he objected to. I'd help him get into this pajamas at night and tuck him in. When I checked on him later, before I went to bed, he'd be wearing a t-shirt and pajama bottoms.

Tonight he upped the ante.

I found him in my bed, wearing a t-shirt and shorts. Not the fleece pajama bottoms he was wearing when I tucked him in his bed.

Stubborn? My child? Whatever gave you that idea?

More book reviews

I finished three books in February:

Vanity Fair--I've already posted about Thackerey's habit of addressing the readers. He also responds to reader mail in the novel, which made me laugh. (Vanity Fair was originally published serially.) The book is enjoyable overall. It's basically a romance, with a villianess straight out of a soap opera. Unlike Austen's novels, Vanity Fair is laced with lots of contemporary references. Although the book is still understandable and pleasurable without understanding those, I would have preferred an annotated copy.

The Polish Officer--This is a World War II spy novel. I appreciate the great research that went into this book. I learned a lot about Poland. The plot is episodic, and the ending left much to be desired. The book didn't so much end as stop. But I love the writing.

"And the Clarais cousins? They're coming?" Bonneau said.
Soulier shrugged. It scared de Milja a little, the quality of that shrug. He understood it, he feared, all too well--the Clarais cousins hadn't shown up where they'd promised to be since the spring of 1285, likely tonight would be no different.

And this:

The mood in the cafes was now resignation, the defeat by the Germans called the debacle. De Milja found this a curious expression once he thought about it--just the sort of linguistic trap that the French liked to construct. It meant a complete route, a total collapse. But somewhere in the spirit of the word was a touch of the absurd, the comic: it wasn't anyone's fault, no point in assigning blame, it was just that everything went wrong all at once--a moment of Divine slapstick and poof, we lost the country.

Highland Fling--this is a British chic lit novel I checked out in anticipation of getting the stomach flu that's been sweeping through the family. And it's a perfectly servicable sick-day read. The romance seemed even stupider than usual though. Shouldn't the couple have at least two solid conversations before they get together? And why do Bristish novels always make me hungry? As Michael reminds me, the UK is not exactly known for its good food.

I've just started The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution.