Friday Faves: Food and Photography

Happy Friday all!

As we prepare to settle in for the long weekend, I thought I’d take a minute to share two things that are a big part of the leisure in our household. The first is food. The second is photography. A third is a combination of the two.

Our family is what I like to refer to as “the keeper of the memories”. We were snapping photographs of any and everything before smartphones with good cameras were as ubiquitous as automobiles. When an extended family member is looking for “a picture of Sally when she was about 6”, it’s a pretty decent bet that we have one in one of our many photo boxes.

Nevertheless, I am not the best photographer. I occasionally manage to get a decent shot, but my husband, and two of our daughters, have a much better eye and hands that are much more steady. What I occasionally achieve through luck, they regularly accomplish with skill.

One of my favorite food bloggers, up and coming though she may be, recently posted a great cake. Her latest recipe invention is the combination of everything I love in a dessert. It’s chocolate, it’s flourless, and it is very low in sugar. As a matter of fact, it’s easily modified by switching the coconut sugar for a substitute without losing much of its appeal. It tastes as good as it looks:

You should make this. Really!

It seems that lately our backyard has been transformed into Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. I’m totally aging myself with that reference, but I really don’t care. I’m not sure why my first thought wasn’t Animal Planet, but who knows what makes a person’s mind draw on the reference of an obscure television show from her childhood that she never watched and barely remembers?

Anyway, our backyard has been a hotbed of animal adventure of late, and my husband has gotten some great shots. I wondered briefly if the animals in our backyard are more active, or if it is simply that all the time at home provided more opportunities for us to witness it. I suspect the latter.

First up, the snake that we caught having an amphibious lunch in a backyard palm tree:

Circle of life?

Next is a couple of shots of a magnificent hawk. He hung out on the edge of the house for a bit:

A little later, we noticed that he’d found a mole in the yard, and was preparing to have a tasty supper before he decided that our fence didn’t make for a good table, and took off:

Do you see the mole in his talons?

There has been quite a lot of excitement on the animal front of late. I even stumbled on a rattle snake several weeks ago when I was taking out some trash. We [meaning my husband] disposed of him promptly. No time for a photo worthy camera shot.

Lastly, although this isn’t a new photo, it is one of my favorites because my daughter made my cornmeal biscuits look delicious and food magazine worthy:

Like I said: food, photography, and food photography.

Have a great weekend!

Off the beaten bibliophilic path…

In case anyone was wondering, the answer is yes. Bibliophilic is a valid word rather than one of my creative conglomerations. According to Merriam-Webster, bibliophilic is the adjective form of bibliophile.

My regular reading schedule has been pretty derailed over the past several weeks. This has been the case for both noble and less than noble reasons. I suppose the marked decreased pace of book reviews reveals that I haven’t been reading as much as I normally do. I am reading, but the breaks between sessions are much longer than normal.

One of the reasons I’ve read less over the past month is because the quarantine has induced within me a burning conviction to be productive in quantifiable ways. Stuff that wasn’t getting done while we were running the rat race now has no excusable reason for going undone. To that end,  more time is dedicated to larger household chores and projects. Among them:

• We cleaned the garage at the end of the first week of quarantine, although it’s quickly regressing.
• The tedious, eye-crossing, painstaking work of cleaning and clearing out our file cabinets and other areas of paper jungles. We just finished that over the weekend.
• Sewing a few masks, although I admit I haven’t worn any. I do make our youngest kids wear them on the few occasions they accompany me to the grocery store and two of our older children are required to wear them at work.
• I’ve begun blanching and freezing fresh fruits and vegetables as a preparation measure for whatever economic situation may be coming around the corner.
• I’ve helped my husband build out a couple of pieces of furniture to create storage in both the bedroom and family room.
• We’ve all been cooking quite a bit more than usual, exercising creativity in the kitchen because we have the time to do it.

I am still working on a few things as well as re-visiting jobs that were done but need to be updated:

• Rearrange and re-stock the pantry (again)
• Continue prepping fruits and veggies
• Gather unused items for Goodwill/Salvation Army pickup

In the midst of all of this, there is the additional work of staying on top of the kids’ studies and making sure that their assignments are scanned or emailed in on time. Because their school only met twice a week and the teachers work in conjunction with homeschoolers and their objectives, we haven’t had the kind of taxing experiences that have been reported from parents of children in school full time. However, there has still been some added work. Fortunately, for us, the formal school year ends at the end of this month so we will soon be on a much more relaxed schedule.

Our annual May vacation has, of course, been canceled this year, and a lot of other activities we would do in summer won’t necessarily be available either. Because of that, another challenge for me is filling the need for engaging activities through the months of May and June. I’m gearing up for that and am open to suggestions. The kids are 11 and 13, if that helps.

My time hasn’t only been filled to the brim with busy, productive activities. To pretend otherwise would be disingenuous. I have also recently gotten totally hooked on The Chosen, as much because of the back story of its creation and execution as because of the show itself. You should take a minute to read about it.

Despite all the distraction and upheaval brought on by this strange phenomenon called COVID-19, I am still reading, albeit at a snail’s pace. Hopefully, I’ll have a new book review up by the end of the week.

 

Friday Faves: Fall Planning

Never mind that it is literally 96 degrees as I type this. School is back in session, Labor Day has come and gone, and the calendar is flipped to the ninth month of the year. The official date of the autumnal equinox isn’t until September 23, but for all intents and purposes, fall is upon us. With the impending season change, it is time for me to kick aside the laxness that characterizes some of my habits throughout the summer months.

During the summer, we do minimal school, entertain more, and eat a hefty amount of birthday cake, as all 7 of our immediate family members celebrate birthdays during the four months between the end of school and it’s start. Family reunions, entertaining, eating out, sleeping in (if you consider 6 sleeping in) and a general relaxed approach to life has giving way to a more structured schedule.

In fact, I am far more motivated to resets, goal setting, and re-examining my whys and wherefores as September begins than I ever have been on January 1st. I never really pondered deeply why I am more motivated for kicking into high gear and resets in September while feeling militantly opposed to making changes in January, but Rachel recently wrote about her similar tendency, and it felt good to hear from a kindred spirit on the matter:

So, what to do with September, especially if one is a Southerner (possibly a Californian)? If one can ignore the protracted grasp of summer, like scorched gardens contrasted with tropical storms, and pools and lake swimming areas prematurely closing while the Costco parking lot appears as an undulating asphalt mirage, it’s a great time to do great things. Really, it is – stay with me….

September is the perfect opportunity to get ahead of the Holiday game, and to start a New Year without the burden of the Holidays on top of it all. And do most of it in the singular bliss of air-conditioning. I wrote a long while back about my New Year’s calendar not even starting until February. That worked better for my family than trying to cram our whole life plan into January, but it was still not entirely user-friendly for us and usually ended in unmet goals and a lot of aggravation. So, against my nature (rebel, though true to form, according to this model, I resent the label), I convinced myself that it was my idea to move the annual reset back to September 1.

My brain wants to already have accomplished and had my goals well under way by January 1, so Rachel’s post spoke to me. So here are some of the favorite things I have been anticipating and lining up over the past week:

• Organizing the reading queue based on genre (Christian, fiction, nonfiction, etc)
• More detailed menu planning for al three meals
• Purchased the HASfit 30-day muscle building plan to supplement the HIIT training I do with my husband
• Making a targeted but flexible daily schedule for myself and the kids for the days when they are at home
• Strategically setting goals for all the areas that I have let lax over the long summer months
• Resuming gratitude journaling because there’s something about mindful gratitude that enlarges the soul
• Exploring the range of recipes I can cook up using the apples, pears, and figs which will soon be in season
• Begin holdiday shopping in September rather than late October (aspirational)

Those are just a few of the plans and goals I have set as our family transitions from the lazy days of summer to the busy days of fall. Never mind that it’s 96 degrees out.

What are some of your transitions as fall begins?

 

 

 

 

Friday Faves: A Bibliophile’s Hurricane Necessities

Happy Friday, all!

Gonna keep this one short and sweet since those of us on the southern half of the peninsula are supposed to be super busy right now scurrying about, filling the coffers at Home Depot and Lowe’s.

And I probably would be, were I not married to the most prepared, competent man on the planet. I say that well aware of the bias which informs it. Did I mention he’s also 6’2″ and super cute? But I digress.

Even though we’re seasoned natives who are well prepared, there are a few things a reader needs to be on top of for herself. In the event of no electricity for days on end, she needs to power her evening reading. So now that the grocery is stocked, gas tanks are full, and the generator’s been tested, what does a bibliophile preparedness checklist look like?

• Charge all e-readers: Kindle, iPad, old Kindle, and the cell phone all need to be fully charged so that even when it’s dark and the lights are out, I can still read. My Kindle Fire is backlit!

• Booklights: You know, those little contraptions that snap on to the top of the book and then shine onto the page, however poorly. The key to those is to have several so you can use two at a time.

• Homework checklist and reading schedule for the kids. It’s highly likely they won’t have school on Tuesday and possibly Thursday, so it’ll be imperative that I make sure they stay on track with their assignments. That way, when they return to classes, they are prepared to turn in all assignments as scheduled. Things can get a little loosey goosey around here between Labor Day and the upheaval of the norm that hurricanes and power outages bring with them.

• Instant coffee (and tea bags): When you’re running on generator power, you must be selective about which components to divert the power to, and the coffee maker doesn’t make the cut. The stove might, though, meaning you can boil water. Morning reading feels better with a cuppa, so with instant coffee (I drink decaf) or your favorite tea bags on hand, you don’t have to forgo your hot morning drink.

Well, that’s all I can think of at the moment. Dorian isn’t due till Tuesday, as he keeps delaying his visit, so if you can think of another useful item I may have forgotten, do tell!

Preferably before Sunday.

Back to homeschool (or whatever this is) has arrived.

After attending an orientation last night and rush ordering a few textbooks with expedited shipping, it is official. Summer may not end formally until September 21st (some consider Labor Day summer’s official end), but symbolically, our summer is over. School’s beginning signals a massive shift from the way we’ve been doing things the past four months.

As homeschoolers -technically speaking- our summer starts in mid-May and ends in mid-August, hence the four months of down time. Most of the ancillary schools which support homeschooling families call it quits fairly early compared to traditional school structure. At home, we continue to work diligently into June, but by then we’re only operating at maintenance levels, tying up the academic loose ends of the recently completed school year.

As school starts, my reading queue shifts accordingly. In addition to reading whatever I happen to be interested in at a given moment, I also read whatever my kids have been assigned by their literature teachers. This semester’s list offers me lots of opportunity to revisit old friends that I haven’t read in decades. Titles such as Animal Farm and The Scarlet Pimpernel are on this year’s list, among others. I’m looking forward to seeing these books through my kids’ eyes.

After the orientation and meet and greet so reminiscent of the days when our older kids went through the government school system, I was struck by how the reality of homeschooling (at least how we do it) is so different from the perception most people have when I answer their queries with, “They’re homeschooled”.

We do have friends who have been homeschooling for a quarter century or more and are still at it. That’s one of the great things about homeschooling when you have a large family; so many other people have large families that not only are you not unusual, your family may even be small by comparison to many. Our five kids is no big deal. But I digress.

The point, which I was so easily distracted from, is that homeschooling in 2019 is very different from what homeschooling was in 1994, which was when several of my homeschooling friends started out. The vast number of co-ops, support networks, ancillary schools and opportunities to homeschool in community were far fewer and much farther between than they are today. Those ladies were doing almost all of the heavy lifting on their own, and from what I can tell, most have done an incredible job of it.

Even with all the publicity, resources, and information available related to homeschooling, I still get the same kinds of questions; even from people to whom I’ve answered them several times!

• Who are you accountable to for your curriculum?
• How do you know they’ve passed to the next grade?
• The state allows you to do that?
• And lastly…

Can you guess, dear reader, what the final and most often posed question is when we mention homeschooling?

I bet you’ll have no trouble coming up with the answer.

All of this left me wondering if homeschooling is even an appropriate description of what many of us are doing now. While our kids’ education is parent directed, we’re not the only teachers, and our kids aren’t at home with us all day, every day. One critical distinction is that what we delegate in time as we outsource some of the instruction, we pay for in treasure, because it’s not cheap, and no one is giving our kids their books as they would in the government school system.

So… if our kids do some of their learning at home, some of it in school, and some of it independently, what would be the proper term for such an education? I for one, believe it’s far more sane and reality-based than the traditional model. A model, I might add, which is only providing optimal results for the children whose family have the time or treasure to properly supplement with home learning and extracurricular support, which sounds eerily like what we’re doing.

We’ve chosen religious rather than secular instruction, but that’s the major difference.

A la carte education is here to stay, unless and until someone decides that is too harmful to the political status quo. I am of the opinion that proper acknowledgment of the a la carte educational model would be a very good thing.

For now, we’re homeschoolers.

More Short Stories and Mid-year Roundup.

Where did the time go? It’s the first day of the third quarter of 2019. I have a birthday coming up very soon, even though it feels as if I just celebrated one. Preparation for the upcoming school year is well underway, and even though we’re still 16 months away from our country’s next major election, we received a political call at our a few nights ago. The mother’s encouragement trusim about long days and short years rings quite true today as I consider how quickly time  seems to be flying by.

Short stories worth a look:

In preparation for the new school year when our kids will be studying British literature (last year was American literature), I had the great pleasure of meeting with several women much smarter than me for a time of literature appreciation. We read short stories by British authors.

One of the best things about short stories (I’m certain I’m repeating something I’ve said before), is that they can be read quickly. Because of that, even those  who have limited amounts of time for leisure reading can read great literature which transmits time tested values of what is True, Good, and Beautiful. Others, such as the first one I will highlight, are just a light and fun good time, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that either.

• Jeeves Takes Charge, by P.G. Wodehouse (read at link), is a story published in 1916 by the renowned British humorist. Wodehouse is one of my go-to writers when I want to read something that is not only funny, but intelligently so. This story is the one in which we meet the indomitable valet Jeeves for the first time. As the story suggests, he takes charge from the moment Bertie Wooster, the young heir, hires him into his employ.
• The Red-Headed League, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read at link) first appeared in a magazine in 1891, and is one of many Sherlock Holmes short stories. A red-headed client appears with a fantastically bizarre and mysterious tale which has left him confused. Holmes, using his masterfully astute gift of deduction, figures out that what appears on the surface to be nothing more than a curious story is actually the beginnings of an elaborate criminal heist.
• The Blue Cross, by G.K. Chesterton is the first of Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. Of the three stories I read this weekend, this was by far my favorite. Up until this point, I hadn’t read any of the Father Brown stories, but that is about to change. This story, filled with equal bits of mystery, humor, and profound -without being preachy- insights into the nature of man and nature itself, enveloped me from the first. I am very glad to be entering the world Chesterton’s fictional works, albeit a little late.

Mid-year roundup:

• I took a minute to tally up the book reviews I’ve posted to date this year and I’ve written a grand total of 20. That isn’t many, especially when you consider that four of those were chapter installments of the Feminine Mystique throughout January.
• In what counts as a pretty big departure from how I’ve handled this blog over the preceding three years, I’ve also written 21 discussion posts, covering everything from education to book trends,  genres and characters, and even a couple on current cultural trends. As I expected, when I began to add more of those kinds of posts, the conversations here were more animated and robust. I appreciated hearing all of your thoughts on the various topics. So thank you.

My favorite books of the year so far:

• My favorite book that I’ve read so far this year is one that I haven’t reviewed here yet. I haven’t reviewed it for two reasons. The first is that I’ve picked it up and put it down so many times that it took what seemed like forever to read it. I often needed to set it aside and let the ideas marinate for a few days. Now, I want to re-read it and I have a friend reading it along with me so I hope to have a review up in August. At that point, I’ll divulge the title. I do have other favorites which I’ll break down by fiction and nonfiction.
• My favorite fiction book for the first half of this year was A Girl of the Liberlost. The beauty, language, and deep relational insights of this book have stayed with me.
• My favorite nonfiction books of the year tied for first place. The first is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I find that I am still challenged by everything about this book. It is a magnum opus for the digital age. My second favorite nonfiction book to date at mid-year is Beauty Destroys the Beast, by my friend Amy Fleming. Yes, it’s a favorite because she’s my friend. More than that however, it’s a favorite because it speaks to a subject that I actually care about, and I agree with what she has to say about it.

Looking ahead to the second half of this year:

• I am currently reading a few books, including a novel by the British humorist P.G. Wodehouse whose short story I reviewed above. In addition, I have three non fiction books in queue. However:
• School starts around the middle to end of August, and we still have a lot of prepping to do for that.  At that time, my entire reading queue may be overtaken by British literature, so don’t be surprised if all the book reviews here are books by British authors -except for books I’ve already read but not yet reviewed.
• What we refer to as “birthday season” in our family has meant we’ve been partying like it’s 1999 since May, partying overtime in June, and won’t really let up until the beginning September when all the of seven birthdays in our immediate family are wrapped up. I’ve eaten too much cake. Speaking of which, here’s one I made for one of my girls upon special request:

This dark chocolate cake, with peanut butter frosting, chocolate ganache drizzle and Reese’s peanut butter cups on top was very good! It was also so rich that no one (guests and family alike) could finish an entire slice. I think that’s the sign of a good dessert; you only need a little of it to be sated. We’re on a sugar moratorium around here to recover, making exceptions for, and only for, each of our respective birthdays.

Summer in Florida is oppressively hot, but we’re still managing to have great fun because, why not? I still can’t believe that we’re half way through 2019!

How’s your year been so far? Read any good books lately?

 

 

My Final, Personal Conclusions of The Feminine Mystique

This is a more personal exposition, but because my Feminine Mystique posts may have been a jumble of ambiguity to those who wondered what I really think, I want to break it down a bit. I have learned the hard way that nothing goes without saying anymore. Everything which follows is offered from the perspective of my Christian worldview.

The book was pretty much what I expected. Liberals are quite predictable. They identify a thing that rightly needs to be addressed, and then offer a poison pill as the answer to the problem. Having had only secondary knowledge of the book mostly presented from the perspective of devoted feminists or devoted anti-feminists, I wanted to read it for myself. I’ve learned to mistrust the assertions of rabid ideologues.

What Friedan got right: It is silly and anti-Biblical to relegate women to a domain solely related to what they produce sexually. The notion that a woman is designed by God, filled with His Spirit, endowed with gifts, and no one except husband and kids is supposed to reap the benefit is nuts. When you look at Friedan’s source material, it’s easy to see that something had gone terrible wrong. After WWII, women reverted almost to a Disney Princess existence, where all of life -including attending college!- was about snagging a husband. Then upon marriage, nothing mattered but keeping the house perfectly clean and the husband perfectly happy. I’m all for clean houses and happy husbands, but stay with me.

What Friedan got terribly wrong -and feminists today, including Christian feminists get wrong- is this notion that women were unfulfilled at home because they were excluded from the greater world, and that the way to bridge that gap was to leave their homes and go to work. WRONG!

We can be homemakers, full time housewives, and make a difference in the world through the use of our gifts and talents. I will use my life as an example. I have been at home 24 years. When our older girls were in school, I volunteered at their school two mornings a week. I taught several struggling students how to read, offered them love and encouragement, and it only cost me three hours a week. My home was not neglected. This was before we entered the glorious years of homeschooling.

A Christian friend of mine from our neighborhood taught a parenting class in the school based on the book “Boundaries with Kids” and I helped facilitate it. I was on both the PTA and the SCA.  I served in the greeter’s ministry at our church two Sunday mornings per month, and authored and published the monthly newsletter for the helps ministry.

Later, our entire family, led by my husband, served in our city’s men’s homeless shelter twice a month for over 10 years. We cooked for those men, served them, prayed with those men, and our children from earliest ages were right there with us. When our 4th and 5th children arrived, my life slowed down tremendously, but we still worked with the homeless although my role moved farther into administrative stuff through the outreach ministry until the two youngest were tall enough and coordinated enough to fill ice glasses and roll silverware. They were 4 and 6.

During the slower years, I started taking my babies with me to visit a couple of elderly widows in our subdivision, and boy did they love being able to play with my cute little babies!

Now we homeschool, but we also utilize a classical group two days a week. I teach a literature and writing class there in exchange for a tuition break. Again, no career, but I am contributing to a community. Not to worry though. My house is clean and my husband is happy.

Who in their right mind would say I hadn’t contributed to the world outside of my home? Who would claim that my contributions would have been greater if they were offered in the form of a career? Friedan certainly would, but a decent chunk of traditional Christian teachers of women might argue that I dedicated too much energy outside of my home, even though I was doing exactly as my husband directed, and even though my kids and home were well taken care of. Americans, including Christians, have almost completely abandoned the role of women as community builders. What better way to use our gifts?

This is why I get disturbed by and perturbed with people on both sides of this argument. One wants woman to abandon her home and the other wants to imprison her in it. Neither is what God intended.

Currently, I am considering classes to prepare me for what I hope is a book that serves as a much better Christian approach to femininity for a group of women who are by and large, in a very tough spot on these issues. Many of my females relations and friends, even those who love me dearly, view me as either highly privileged or very weak for situating my life so fully dependent on my husband.

You see, we don’t have these “to stay at home or not to stay at home” debates among black women. It is largely accepted that most black women cannot stay home. I want to talk about how we can change that for our daughters’ generation besides simply saying, “Marry a man of a different race!” which is basically the prescription being offered to single, childless black women right now. When I write it, I want it to be readable, hence school.

I thought it was only fair when I reviewed the book to be honest about the fact that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Acknowledging that Betty Friedan raised some very good questions isn’t to say I think her conclusions or prescriptions were correct.

 

Because I don’t.