For the Intrepid Few who might actually venture here...

MOST RECENT EDIT: My "green" blog has moved again, it's now at www.greenmomintheburbs.wordpress.com --so come check me out there! All the greenmama stuff got moved over, and I'm doing a lot of new bloggage.  Had no idea I'd have so much to say!

EDIT: I've recently gotten an acount at Dreamwidth (yay!) and am over there at greenmama.dreamwidth.org .  From here on out I'll be posting most of the cooking, gardening, and herbal posts over there.  What's already here will stay, but probably eventually be crossposted.  I'll keep doing General Live Blogging, belly dance stuff, books I've read, etc. and so forth over here. Come see me there! Subscribe to me! Make me feel like one of the cool kids!

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LOVE THIS!

I just finished reading The Poisonwood Bible. 

Amazing book.  Superb book.  Unspeakably sad book I don't think I will ever be able to read again.  Had me sobbing helplessly for hours at more than one point, and one night in the middle of the book I ended up reversing childhood roles, going into my daughter's room, gathering her up in my arms, and taking her back to bed with me so I could sleep with my arms around her and feel safe.

And yet...while stretches of the book could not hold my interest (the entire novel is told in alternating first person accounts by a missionary's wife and her four daughters, dragged into the Congo in 1959...I only actually liked three of the daughters and only loved two, so while I listened well when my friends spoke I had trouble focusing on the other(s)...), there were these shining moments of acute truth and beauty throughout...Kingsolver understands a mother's heart, good and bad.

It's also a book that's gotten under my skin and into my gut, changing and affecting the way I look at the world I live in, and my own world's relationship (a fairly abusive one, at that) with the rest of the world, with the poor, with the earth...

A beautiful book.  Read at your own risk.

A big part of the reason I haven't been posting much here lately is that a few months ago I shifted over to another blogsite, greenmomintheburbs.wordpress.com, to do most of my green/crafty/food kind of blogging. (It's been going well over there, with a small but at least regular readership, and I've even had my first troll!) (whom I did not feed, so he went away.) So now this journal is more just about my life, and I don't have all that much to say, I guess, because I don't really have much of a life. :-)

But...just wanted to post a small squee that I was invited to be a monthly guest-poster on my favorite green blog, The Green Phone Booth.  They are very cool women, and among the group they cover a lot of topics--I have enjoyed reading them for months, and now I get to write there as well. So come and visit!
--J

Sad news.

Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Dies at 72
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/arts/music/17travers.html?partner=rss

From my friend Alan Hommerding's article in the autumn issue of AIM Magazine--

"There is an emerging scuffle...that some have referred to as re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  But when the deck chairs are skittering around, it's likely a sign that something is seriously wrong with the ship, so let's not ignore them."

--J

But wow.

". Recently, 87 percent of Colorado teachers said that testing was crowding out subjects like music and art. But we need to look no further than MESA [Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts] to see that accountability does not need to come at the expense of a well-rounded education. It can help complete it — and it should. "...

"It begins with the understanding that from the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from. It's not who their parents are or how much money they have.

"It's who their teacher is."...

..."And I will make this pledge as president to all who sign up: If you commit your life to teaching, America will commit to paying for your college education. "

***************

Okay, I think I love this man.  Hell, even if only a tenth of the things he talked about in there actually happen,  he's at least saying the right stuff.  He gets it.

A G.I. Bill for teachers?? Huzzah, is all I can say.
(full text here http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_9405199)



 

http://community.livejournal.com/blackfolk/7656648.html

This is really intriguing.

I'm so tired.

That's all.

I hate September.
--J

A pair of Chihuahua/hummingbird hybrids sucking on a bellflower.

So...do the women who go into public toilets and somehow feel the need to squat and contort and assume really bizarre positions in order to not sully their pristine thighs on the toilet seat realize that maybe if they didn't contort and twist like that and actually sat on the toilet, they would be less likely to miss and the seats would be a lot less gross for everyone else?

--J

A genuine conversation I had with the Peanut today:

She: Mommy, someday I will grow up to be as big as that tree.

Me: Wow, I hope not! Then you wouldn’t fit in the house any more! We’d have to rip out the floors and ceilings to make room for you!

She: (excited) Then we can build a new house! We can make the walls and ceilings and floors out of tissues.

Me: ???

She:…so then if  someone comes in and has a cold, they can blow their nose on the walls! And then eat apples.

My daughter is so cool. :-)

Okay, so there have now been three days of first grade.  His homework over the weekend was to work on "sight words." I heard this and groaned, because he was drilling sight words last fall, and effectively hasn't had to look at them since, because he's been, like, reading instead.

So we pull out the list of sight words (for the non-grade-schooled among us, those are words they're supposed to memorize without sounding out, just recognize at a glance), and Bear zooms through them at an alarming speed. Stuff like and, it, was, the, and so forth. The first page we have him read in order.  The second page we start pointing at words in sequence trying to make silly sentences. ("We like to make with the first we can...er...okay, try again...you can be..." etc.) The third page, we grinned at him (knowing what was coming) and pointed to the page heading. He reads, without missing a beat, "Kindergarten Frequency Words." Then we turn over to the parent letter on the front, and he reads through that too with no difficulty, and it has words like "appropriate" and "comfortable" in it.

It also says that they will spend the next few weeks working on the kindergarten level sight words.  I am slightly alarmed.  The novelty of first grade is keeping his behavior good for the moment, but unless he has some challenging stuff to work on, he's gonna get bored really fast.  And the teacher also mentioned on parent night that they wouldn't start doing real "math problems" (as in writing down figures and such) until after winter break. 

I'm not sure what to do...do I wait and see what happens? Or do I make an appointment with the teacher now, before things go bad, and just try to have a talk with her? I mean, no teacher wants to talk to that parent who comes sweeping in and saying, "oh my goodness, my child is so gifted you know, we must challenge his intellect, and I'm afraid he won't be working to his full potential"  and all that crap.  But now as the parent, with the possible exception of the "gifted" part (I hate that word in its academic context; it's so loaded.  Bear's very bright.  And he's had good schooling up to now, that didn't hold him to someone else's idea of what level he should be learning on. Gifted? Yup. More gifted than the other kids in his class? Likely not so much.), it's sort of exactly what I"m feeling.

Any suggestions? Anyone been there?
peace,
J

I love where we live.

I love that my son, starting first grade, won't be in a class full of Matthews and Caitlins and Jacobs--his classmates have names like Aziri, Samir, Rohan, Jose, and Asia.  He'll get to grow up in an environment where white isn't necessarily normative, where people with different colored skin and accents different from his aren't aliens and "other" than he's used to.  I know he still has the white male privilege thing and we'll work with that, but we're finally out of an "all white people" environment, and I'm so glad.

I can't believe, though, that I have to put him on a bus every day and send him off to other grownups...just so weird.  It was different when I drove him and put him directly into the care of those grownups, now he gets on a bus.

Weird.
--J

This is a good article:

John F. Dovidio and Samuel L. Gaertner,  Color Blind or Just Plain Blind?: The Pernicious Nature of Contemporary Racism
academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/racism10.htm

(So sue me...one of the things that makes it helpful to me is that it is scholarly and straightforward, and not...angry.)

--J

It's a figure of speech.  We probably won't fish. Although we will go out in boats, and we will eat fish. But I'm going on vacation with the fambly, to lovely downeast Maine (Jealous, Reg? :-)) and then to Ocean City, Maryland.  The wireless internet  up there isn't so good, and besides, I need a little Away From LJ time anyhow...my friendslist is mostly fun, but things in some of the anti-oppression communities are getting so generally ugly and hateful that I just need to go away from them for a while. Not everybody in them, of course.  But enough that the toxicity is wearing me out. 

So I'm going away for a bit.  That's the nice thing about LJ communities, or any internet community, for that matter: anyone, at any time, can choose to leave. 

So I'm goin' fishin'. 
--J

My folks sent me this; they are prone to sending the "Someone special sent me this and wanted me to send it to you, so if you don't send it to twelve special people in the next five minutes you're a loser" forwards, but this one was really interesting...

******


..something to think about...

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.
4 minutes later:
the violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
6 minutes:
A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes:
A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.
45 minutes:
The musician played continuously.  Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace.  The man collected a total of $32.
1 hour:
He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.



 

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people's priorities. The questions raised: in a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

(EDIT: Here's a link to a much more comprehensive Washington Post article about the experiment:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html )

My husband remembers something one of his teachers told him in high school.  Considering he barely paid attention in high school, this is saying something.  Also that it has stuck in my brain so hard.  It's this:

When I talk with you,
I am not who I think I am.
I am not who you think I am.
I am who I think you think I am.

On the one hand, utter bullshit. I choose to be who I am. 

But the difference between the second and third statements, and the almost overwhelming tendency to yield to the third, hits home with appalling squirge.

The resurgence of lj conversations about race relations has also made me think of these three sentences a lot.

But no way could I explain why.
--J

So I'm working on my Flemish costume, making my first t-smock using Drea Leed's authentically pieced pattern (http://www.elizabethancostume.net/smockpat/index.html) .  It's actually fairly delightful--I'm getting a smock AND a lined partlet out of only 3 yards of material.

So last night I'm stitching away, and it's nearly done, and I try it on, and the biceps are too tight.  As in, way ridiculously too tight.  And I can't figure out why.  So I put it aside, figuring I now have to make some extra gussets (which would look weird since it already has gussets), and I'll finish it tomorrow.

This morning the alarm goes off at 6:15am, much earlier than usual.  My first two thoughts, both fairly irrelevant to waking up:

1. You need to remember your drum this morning.
2. Ya stupid moron, you sewed the sleeves on upside-down, with the bicep part where your wrists should be, and vice versa.

So now I have to disassemble pretty much the whole thing, re-gusset the sleeves at the correct end, re-sew the sleeves on, and try again.  This is what happens when you save trees by not printing the directions and run back and forth from the sewing room to the computer, deciding sometimes that you don't need to do that because you know what you're doing.  And when you don't plug your brain in.  Doh. (But the nice flared sleeves were working so nicely... :-)  The good news is that I will have nicely-fitting smock when this is all done.

peace,
J
at least I did remember my drum.

I know a lot of Franciscans.  They tend to be fairly appalling liturgists (with one notable exception), but they are invariably kinda sweet guys.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/28/AR2009072803220.html