Author: JenniferFitz

Tripods Sequel Update

John McNichol (now added to the sidebar) posted this good news for fans of Tripods Attack!:

I am now working on the 2nd draft of the Sequel, tentatively titled “The Emperor of North America.”

Gilbert returns to his American homeland, Herb and Gil become separated in more ways than one, and both boys face temptations, trials and dangers in an attempt to survive the onslaught of the self-declared Emperor.

Here’s hoping you enjoy it as much as the last one!

If you haven’t read Tripods, I highly recommend it.  Not my usual genre, but I have both a weakness for all things GKC, and a boy who enjoys the normal quota of aliens, slime, plots-to-takeover-earth, etc.   Real win-win in the literature department.

(The Curt Jester approves, too, if that helps you decide.)

Made a section in the sidebar for Haiti blogs, including a few extras I didn’t have on my list the other day. The Pye’s write about their work distributing emergency food aid:

We talked with World Food Program and they said we could use their food if each pastor wrote their name, their church, a phone number, and each person’s name that would receive the food. So we did and we were given hundreds of list; from 14 people to 2,000 people on them. Saturday we started calling pastors. We would get a pile of food together that would feed the number of people on their list. They would come in a vehicle and pick it up. On Saturday we were able to give to 20 pastors food and water for the needy in their congregations.

I think this is a good response to the WSJ op-ed the other day questioning the role of foreign aid.  Using the Pyes as a distribution-point, World Food Bank is getting food into the hands of specific individuals.  There is a mechanism in place for accountability and transparency.  (On the topic of corruption and graft, see Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s  WSJ column today.  Chilling.)

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On another note, I signed up for the Coalition for Clarity.  I’m not usually the joining type, but I make an exception for this worthy cause.  Because you know, torturing people is just plain wrong.  FYI, you don’t need to be catholic to join.   Just as you don’t need to be catholic to know that torture is evil.

Haiti Blogs

Three blogs I’ve been following for Haiti updates:

The Anchoress, who has been posting reports from a friend in Petit Goave.

The Livesay Weblog, missionaries working in Haiti with several ministries — currently running a makeshift hospital at their location.

The Rollings — their ordinary work is making water filters for Clean Water for Haiti, based out of Pierre Payen.

Follow these.  When you can do almost nothing, at least you can know how to pray.

(Thank you to the several people who first pointed me to these.)

Castle News – January 2010

Time for our first moment of posting here what used to go up over at the other blog, in this case the periodic general update.   Enjoy.

[For those who never read at Greencastle:  We have a green castle in our backyard.   It is for this castle that our homeschool was named.  And hence the name of the ol’ homeschooling blog.  And thus why I refer to what is going on ‘at the castle’.  Because there really is a castle. ]

School: December devolved into unschooling by mid-month.  All good, but it was an abrupt return to the routine after the new year.  For this spring the big push will be penmanship, walking, math, penmanship, math, penmanship, math, ack — science! — and a holding steady on all the rest.  That walking bit mostly about the Bun, now five and not a strong hiker.  The current routine is to do our first hour as a group (as per the fall: weather calendars, penmanship, ASL/French, religion), then head out for a walk in the neighborhood.   Enthusiasm varies.

In a change-up that is going well so far, I’ve been giving the kids a snack after the walk, and doing read-alouds during that time.  Which solves two problems — children getting hungry before lunch, and not wanting Mr. Boy to miss out on the girls’ read-alouds, because a lot of the books I read really are good for older people too.  From there, back to the same old schedule:  send the girls out for a break while I work with Mr. Boy, then he works on his own while I alternate between girls on reading and math.  Andabelle (now 3) is very happy to be allowed to draw and play with math blocks during this time.  On a good day, we’re done by lunch — yay.

SCA:  We haven’t done a whole lot, but we’ve had fun doing it.  I’m slowly becoming less laughable as a rapier (fencing) fighter, and am nearly fully-equipped.  Fun sport.   Aria & I went to a 12th Night event this month that was heavy on the dancing (yay!!), and the baklava.  Oh my goodness I have never seen so much baklava in one place — and it never ran out.  I was floored.  Just floored.   Difficult to believe I’ll see a feast like that again in this lifetime.

Speaking of which: Death still packs a fair sting in this life, even after accounting for the vast and unfathomable richness of the next.  Please pray for the repose of the soul of my grandfather, Hank Holder.  Thanks.

Latin Watch:  The boy and I are learning to conjugate.  Very slowly.  We’ve been stuck in chapter six for over a month, and no end in sight.  It’s that ugly moment in learning a language where you can’t cruise anymore, you have to stop and force yourself to work work work.  I need to carve out some time to work on that.

Annual writing binge: Why yes, it is winter, I do have tendonitis.  Not helped by the encouragement of the SuperHusband, who went and got me my own computer for Christmas.   And I’ve been neglecting the blog while I’m at it.   Nothing publishable at this point.  I write the way other people knit: it is a vacation, not a vocation.

Around the house: SuperHusband and Mr. Boy have been renovating the castle yard, so that it begins to look less and less like barbarians own the place.  (Barbarians do own the place, but we are trying to conceal that fact).  Landscape timbers, flagstone walkway, new fence across the back.  I moved some ivy already, and soon I will get to put in a bunch of plants.  Yay.

–>  There are, by the way, no ‘before’ pictures.  You don’t want to know.

Everything else: I think normal.   Mostly the goal for the spring is to hold steady on regular life.   That should be plenty.

to know is to something

I’m surprised every Advent at how much giving birth has changed my spiritual life.  When we have actually done something, we know it in a way we can never know it second-hand.  The body remembers.

And so when I meditate on the incarnation, I now have physical memories that go with.  The sensation of a baby being birthed — I speak here not of pain, but of the pressure and movement and release as a the tiny person passes out of the pelvis.  Then the warm, naked baby snuggling against skin, looking around quietly with those froggy newborn eyes.  The way a baby fills the arms as it nurses, the rhythm of the industrious little mouth, the seriousness with which a newborn goes about the business of feeding.

If you have not done things, felt these things, then when you contemplate the birth of Jesus, you cannot understand it the same way.

But I would not tell you that you should, therefore, move on to some other mystery.

No, no.

To begin with, there is plenty to be gleaned from the Nativity without having the foggiest notion of childbirth or breastfeeding.   Christmas is, after all, much more than a report for labor & delivery.   Your own life, however un-motherly, and perhaps because un-motherly, has insights of its own to offer.  And then, those of us who do know something of these activities can surely at least explain a little?

I mention this now, when Christmas is more or less over, because I’ve been getting a lot of “you can’t understand” messages lately.  (Not to me personally, but to the world in general.  And written by people I respect, which concerns me.)  Bits along the lines of “you can’t understand what it is like to experience what I have experienced, so don’t even try.”  “You’ll just come away with the wrong idea”.  “You are not like me”.  “You are a ______, _______, or _______, and therefore you are incapable of correctly associating with a person like me.”

Now if I were getting these messages from someone who wanted to wall-up in an isolated compound and never have to do with my sort of riff raff, it would make more sense.  But I’m hearing it from some people whose usual message is just the opposite: that all people deserve respect and fair treatment, that superficial differences should not divide us.

And so my answer is: If I don’t understand it, explain it to me.  No, of course I cannot know what your very life is like, any more than you can know mine exactly.  But if you mean to make your cause more widely understood and accepted, then you must not give up on trying.  Whenever social solutions are built on “those people are fundamentally different”, the results are disastrous.

So in the interest of averting disaster, please consider sharing your experiences.  Which you cannot share the way you share a shirt or a lawnmower, but which you can share the way you share a conversation, or a friendship.

Not Amazing

William Peace rants here about misuse use of the word ‘amazing’.  Hearty dittos — go read and be inspired to curmudgeonliness.

As long as we’re on the topic, here’s my list of a few more things that are not amazing:

Parenting more than two children.  I have a mere four, and I get the ‘wow how do you do it??’ thing even from other Catholics.   (My answer: Not that well, frankly.)    Er, hey guys, I’m a married lady.  It’s a normal biological function.

Homeschooling.  Especially when you do it as haphazardly as I do.   Might not be your thing.  But again: It is entirely normal for parents to be able to teach their own children.  You know back all those centuries when married couples were still in the habit of procreating regularly?  Most of them also trained their very own children to follow in whatever trade they practiced.  Now I don’t know how to weave or spin or farm, but I can read and write pretty well.  So it isn’t particularly amazing that I can teach my children to do the same.

Teaching 5th Grade CCD.  Sordid truth: 5th graders are the best.  The rest of you guys are missing out.  Actually I’ve only had one person tell me this was amazing — and that one person was someone who possesses a number of  talents I only dream of.  So her comment wasn’t really about anything being ‘amazing’ so much as recognition that we all have different skills and preferences.

–> I don’t suppose there’s anything really wrong with using the A-word loosely, to merely mean “you are able to do something well that many other people don’t do very well”.   And certainly we shouldn’t lose sight of wonder of the every day world: flowers and children and birds and wideness of the sky are all amazing, when we are pulled out of our busy thinking and stop to consider them.

But back to my ditto, above.  It is woefully patronizing to gush over non-achievements.   If you’ve gotten into that habit, maybe not even realizing it, perhaps 2010 is the year for you to quit?

Venison and Democracy

So the SuperHusband went to a couple 3-D archery shoots this summer, and came to the realization that maybe it was time to set the sights on something more lively than foam. Enter a friend whose vineyard is being over-browsed, another friend unloading a Spigarelli re-curve, and a wife who does a modest impression of the Spouse Who Doesn’t Mind You Are Gone Hunting EVERY NIGHT After Work . . . and after a month or two, voila: Dinner.

Wow. One little doe = a lot of meat.

Living history on so many levels. There’s the whole butchering the animal thing, which was pretty interesting. There’s the waste-not-want instinct that kicks in — hence there is a nice doe skin sitting in my freezer, waiting for some boys to tan it. Or, watch some children amuse themselves with the spare parts, that’s a real eye-opener.

But the real kicker to me is land rights. Because, wow, the deer, they’re just out there. And the lower-tech counterpart of the SuperHusband’s bow is a relatively accessible weapon, for your average medieval european or native american or so on. Which means that if you can obtain the right to hunt on the land where the deer are, goodness! That’s a lot of food to be had.

It is hard to appreciate feudal Europe (or, the commandeering of North America) for an average resident of the industrialized west. Landholding means so little to us — we live in a little neighborhood, or an apartment, and yet magically have all the food we could want and nearly everything else besides. We lose track of how important the land = power equation was throughout most of history.

Depending on who gets to use the land, and under what conditions, your economic structures are going to be totally different. And of course, political structures are both the source and the result of the economic structures.

[And then there’s the bit about how the same weapon used to harvest Bambi is can be turn against fellow man, as needed. Handy in a pinch — though I don’t honestly expect our compound will ever be raided by despots on account of our archery arsenal.]

So that’s been our autumn living history lesson here. Things you sort of know, but don’t really quite get the hang of until you have it in hand.

*****

BTW: Our best recipe so far: Put a random slab of venison in the crockpot with a little liquid, to slow cook all day, pot-roast style. In the evening, shred and use in the _Joy of Cooking’s_ beef stroganoff recipe. Wow. Just wow.