Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day!

Did you know that Independence Day is one of the few civil holidays the Book of Common Prayer offers a prayer for?

"Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this coutnry won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace..."

Recipe Swap Box: BBQ Edition

Today is Randi's Recipe Swap Box day! She's asked everyone to submit BBQ related recipes, so go check them all out. You'll get some great ideas for the Fourth of July!

My recipe comes from my lovely and hostessly-talented friend Julie. I do not have the recipe, but it wasn't too hard to figure out. Amounts are "ish", so adjust to your preferences. This sounds like and odd combination, but is SO GOOD! And the beans and corn chips are a great protein combination.

Frito, Bean and Green Salad
One head of romaine lettuce (or iceberg)
One can of red kidney beans, drained
One bag of Fritos
Enough Catalina dressing to coat said lettuce, beans and fritos.

Rip or chop the lettuce into bite-sized pieces (or however you prefer your salad greens). Pour on Catalina dressing and mix well. Go easy here - you can always add more! Finally, mix in drained beans and Fritos coating them with the dressing, too. Enjoy!

The Fritos will get soggy if you mix this up too far ahead of time. If you want to make it ahead of time, just leave off the dressing until you are ready to serve.

A quiet day for us

My mom headed home today after visiting for about a week. She brought her new puppy, Callie, with her to visit which was so much fun for all of us. Over the weekend, hubby went on his Men's Retreat with our church up to the NC hills. The weather was lovely for him and all the guys had a great time up there. So, mom and I enjoyed just hanging out with the kids while he was gone.

We did go see Wall-E which I highly recommend! It is a sweet movie with a lovely message about friendship and a sober message about consumerism and our culture. If you go see it, let me know what you think.

Monday, I had my first meeting of "Libri Antiqui" a group of ladies and gentlemen gathering to read the Great Books together. We are starting with The Iliad. I cracked the book yesterday afternoon - I'm on page 7 of the Introduction - only 607 more pages to go! I'm not going to skip the Intro, but I sure do want to just dig in.

Today will be a quiet day. They always are after a visit as we get the house back to normal - or normalish. We'll spend it cleaning up the playroom that got trashed by "Not Me", finishing up the laundry Mom helped me get on top of, straightening up the multitude of piles that somehow seem to grow when I'm not looking and maybe a bit of relaxing, too.

Guess we have to decide what we are doing for the 4th. We've been invited to a big shin-dig pool party, but some of us are tempted to just enjoy a family backyard celebration. It sure is nice to eat watermelon, cookout, make smores and watch Daddy's backyard fireworks show! We'll see...

So, what are you doing for the 4th?

Art Resource: Roman Artifacts from the Louvre on tour

Roman artifacts from the Louvre will be in Oklahoma City for their final stop in the states from June 19th - Oct 12th. Even if you can't attend the website has some good educational downloads, online info, videos, and 40 or so of the 184 pieces for you to view online.

GAFCON statement is published

For my Anglican friends - I'm sure you've been following GAFCON, but if not, here's the final statement from the bishops meeting in Jerusalem. I've not read it yet, but the word on the 'net is that it is strong and committed to the long-haul solution rather than a "quick" split.

Peter Piper's Picks: June 28

Homeschool Launch: a great place to gather and share wonderful homeschool files (created by other homeschoolers!). HT: Jimmie

How to visit a museum with kids - some really good advice here.

Prayers for your personality type (what a hoot!) (HT: PalmTreePundit) FYI - I'm INFJ.

Oh, he's just so funny and so on target: The Judgement Olympics from Stuff Christians Like.

Here's the Daily Office (for the Anglican church) RSS Feed - you can load that right to your Google homepage!

My print out and dig in for the week: Practice Makes Perfect: At What Cost Humanity?, a look at bioethics today and a review of 3 current books on the subject. (HT: First Things blog)

Book Review: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Who would have thought poor punctuation and plodding prose could be so absorbing? But in Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road it is. Don’t be misled, the poor punctuation and plodding prose are not mistakes, but techniques which convey the mood of the story in The Roadand enhance the story-telling. And while the story lumbers along, McCarthy’s poetic descriptions of a post-apocalyptic landscape gives one the sense of walking along with the father and son protagonists.

The setting is America after some great catastrophe which has left behind an entirely scorched, physically and psychologically, land. Very few people have survived and those that have struggle to survive both the environment which is utterly devastated and the roaming bands of marauders.

The father and son slowly make their way to the coast where they hope to find … Hope. They don’t know what the form of that Hope will be, but their love for each other keeps them moving.

Within the story, McCarthy’s simplistic third-person, prose style is so (I hate to use the term) monotonous (in a good way!) that when he alters this style (switching briefly to the 1st person in one scene and in others using an almost poetic style) he draws attention to particular parts of the story. These parts are so entirely different they almost scream out from the page.

Here’s an example. Imagine pages and pages (180 to be exact) of this:

“ They went through the last of the cars and then walked up the track to the locomotive and climbed up to the catwalk. Rust and scaling paint. They pushed in to the cab and he blew away the ash from the engineer’s seat and put the boy at the controls. The controls were very simple. Little to do but push the throttle lever forward. He made train noises and diesel horn noises but he wasnt (sic) sure what these might mean to the boy. After a while they just looked out through the silted glass to where the track curved away in the waste of weeds. If they saw different worlds what they knew was the same. That the train would sit there slowly decomposing for all eternity and that no train would ever run again.

Can we go, Papa?
Yes. Of course we can.”

(Then it launches into this – the first of a handful of these poetic moments)

“They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterns. The first he’d seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all the stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land…the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes. Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.”

Then back to the simple prose for another 80 or so pages. Does that make the simple prose sound boring? It really isn't - the characters and the story are remarkable!

There are some distressing scenes in this book, so be warned. The food has run out in this world and you can imagine the result.

But there is good and hope and redemption even in this most evil, hopeless, and lost world. Truth and beauty have somehow managed to stay alive in the hearts of some; the father and son call it "the fire", I call it faith.

From my Commonplace Book - June 25th

Last night I read a thought-provoking article from the blog Mere Orthodoxy entitled "Music and the Soul". I'm not going to elucidate too much mostly because I've not had time to really give this more thought than that I want to think about it (how do you like that...I've thought that I want to think - that's sheer brilliance right there), and also because it is almost kiddies' bedtime, but I am curious what some of you might think.

Here are the entries I made into my Commonplace Book from this post....

...human beings have generally lost the perception that we live in a hierarchical universe...(a hierarchy of the Holy Spirit, one's own spirit, the mind [thinking, feelings, will], and the body).

...human beings today do not first respond by asking questions about their spirit or thinking, but mostly always about their emotional and states of will.

Everything is reduced to the level of the ordinary...defined principally in terms of states of feeling and will. - the above was quoted in the post from a Dr. Overman.

From the rest of the article:

Christian love...enables men to think of themselves as something other than a bundle of emotive staes and corresponding impulses; it restores the dignity of being a spirit-and-flesh being in communion with God.

Rather than viewing worship as being an emotional expression, and limiting one's self to emotive music devoid of intellectual and spiritual expressions, the Christian ought to respond to God with the totality of his being.

When it comes to the music that we use to worship God, then, we must not first ask ourselves, "What kind of music do I like?"...but rather, "What music best expresses the full heart of a complete human being to God?

...starting with the question, "What does it mean to be human?" and then moving from this answer to explore the sorts of music most appropriate to human beings in communication with God is a far cry from the common complaint that certain forms of music don't arouse our emotions...

I didn't add this to my Commonplace entry, but I loved how the author ended the article:

The answer to this question might also leave everybody a bit surprised—the hymnodists as well as the hip members of your church praise and worship team.

So, what does it mean to be a human and how do we then answer the question, "What then should we sing?"

Art Resource: Master Photographers

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is featuring two photography exhibits this summer:


Framing a Century: Master Photographers 1840-1940 now through Sept. 1st and Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium since 1960 now through Oct. 1st. Both exhibits offer images for online vieweing.


You might also enjoy some of the links the Met suggests for photography. Here are some I found particularly interesting:

• Smithsonian 's online collections of American Photography.


• National Archives' online gallery from their exhibit, Picturing a Century.


• The Getty's exhibit, Photographers of Genius has an excellent online preview of some of the pieces. Each image is coupled with great background on the artist and image.

Peter Piper's Picks: June 21st

A useful and interesting article from Slate: How we read online. There are some great tips for bloggers (and other online publishers) for making your articles more easily readable.

The 100 Things Challenge has been sending out some ripples in bloggyland.

A good *snicker* at the expense of my church.

I'm posting this guide to packing efficiently for my own benefit. And really, if George Clooney calls for dinner, I'll go buy the extra outfit. :)

How about a good nap? Know how to get the most out of your sleep schedule.

My print out and dig into for this week: The New Learning That Failed.

Weekly Reporter: June 16th-20th

Our summer schedule had some bumps and jostles the past couple of weeks, so we are finding ourselves "punting" quite a bit. (MiL had unexpected surgery which meant no trip with eldest son and hubby spent a week at her house helping her. Then I had a 3-day, all day class - which was planned, but harder on our family than expected.) So, after two weeks of "just trying to get by" we are slowly getting back on track.

We are planning on taking all of July off, but I do have some work to do the next couple of weeks with my eldest - mostly Math. And there are some lessons I want to do with the kids that I'll keep doing even when we are "off" (mostly art).

This we accomplished:

• The first lesson of our art appreciation unit;
• A Saxon math placement test (to see what the eldest son needs to work on before we move him up to 8/7 next year);
• Eldest son tried his hand at making a cheesecake;
• Youngest daughter spent lots of time drawing pictures of Jesus, her feet, flowers, etc.;
• We went on a nice long nature walk;
• Built a few forts;
• Eldest son finished reading "War of the Worlds" and then we watched the movie (I enjoyed the movie's message about technology, humanity, and fatherhood, but be warned there is some cursing - and some of the imagery might be disturbing to some children.)
• Middle son has started the read-aloud "Gentle Ben" with his Dad.

How was your homeschool or summer school week?

Art Resource: My Lesson Plan for French Impressionism

Would you like to have a ready-made lesson plan to study French Impressionism in your homeschool? I put this together using the National Gallery of Art's FREE Loaner: "Picturing France", an educator's resource packet. (Scroll down that page to order the entire packet including prints, slides, a CD and the book - it is free, you only have to pay for the return postage.)


Here's a photo of my daughter enjoying the first day of Unit 1 from my French Impressionism lesson plan. She decided she wanted to try drawing a picture like Pissaro's:










From the lesson plan, we talked about how point of view can change a scene. We experimented with this using our dining room:

We also talked about the details of the painting, the color and lighting, how we'd change the picture to make it look like afternoon, how the street might look different if it were painted from a diferent angle, and what would be different if the painting was done today.

Let me know if you download the lesson plan...and what you think of it! (If you have any trouble downloading, leave me a comment and I'll be happy to email it to you.)

The Commonplace Blog

Last week, I attended our area Classical Conversations Parent Practicum, which was wonderful, by the way. Unlike many attendees, my children did not attend with me. This meant that during the lunch break, I was blessedly ALONE. (I know all moms enjoy alone time, but trust me when I say homeschool mothers enjoy it the most!) I packed a light lunch and some good reading, which for me was the May 2008 “First Things” journal.

While the weather was pretty hot, I was able to find a shady spot in the grass that caught a little of the passing breeze. It was just lovely to sit and nibble and read. That one hour of break was more time than I’ve had in a long time to focus on simply reading and thinking – outside of school, family or house-related subjects in some time. (Which made me realize how desperately I need to carve that time out on a regular, even if not frequent, basis.)

The first article I read was by Alan Jacobs who is a professor of English at Wheaton College. He wrote a fun and intriguing piece on the blog as a commonplace book. One of my favorite bloggers (unfortunately she’s no longer blogging, but her blog is still a great source of wisdom and wit) often featured “Commonplace Book” posts, so this idea is not particularly new to me. However, the article helped me think a little more deeply about my blogging – why I started, why I continue, where I want to go in the future.

Mr. Jacobs describes a Commonplace book as a place where one records “memorable ideas, wise sayings, or beautiful lines of poetry – words of rare value, distinctive enough that we dare not trust them only to our memories.” He tells us that the Commonplace book came into practice during the 16th century as the printing press gained steam as a way to deal with the seeming deluge of print material (imagine what they'd think of today's deluge of print!). The wealthy “found themselves … with access to more books than they could read, or at any rate read with care” these books became a popular way to “select the best and wisest passages from those books.”

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Jacobs sees great similarities in the impetus for many blogs, especially, if you look to the first weblogs which were “simply a log of interesting stories” discovered on the Web. However, he recognizes that most blogs now have another component: the online journal. (In fact, most of the blogs I read are more online journals with some interesting links thrown in, too.)

In the past year, I’ve drifted a bit more to the links emphasis rather than the journal emphasis. It doesn’t take as much of myself to list links, which makes for easy content for a busy homeschool mom. While I’ve no intention of abandoning that aspect (I love sharing what I find!), I do want to make sure I’m not neglecting one of the initial desires that brought me to blogging, the journaling!

At the end of the article, Jacobs launches a good challenge for bloggers or commonplace book keepers:

“The task of adding new lines and sentences and paragraphs to one’s collection can become an ever tempting substitute for reading, marking, learning and inwardly digesting what’s already there. And wisdom that is not frequently revisited is wisdom wasted.”

Perhaps the journaling (about those linked-to articles), is one way to revist wisdom.

What about your blog? Do you tend to have more of an online journal or a links blog…or do you walk the via media between the two? How do you revisit wisdom on your blog?

Art Resource: Online Art History Timeline

Here is a very useful tool to help you bring Art History into your homeschool from the Metropolitan Museum of Art - a Timeline of Art History. This website is SO much more than just a timeline, however. You'll find:

• A great map which shows the progression of art across the world. At a glance, you can see what types of art was being produced in across the continents and centuries.
• Pages showing the art of a particular time period and across cultures. (ie. you can see all the types of art being produced in the 16th century from Asia to Africa)
• As well as pages showing the art of a particular culture across the centuries.
• Thematic essays on subjects from "Chinese Hand Scrolls" to "The Labors of Hercules" to "The Bauhaus".

This website would make a great research resource for the older student as well as you, the teacher!

Peter Piper's Picks - June 15th

The weather is turning hot - time to start planning for next school year, BUT WAIT! Before you do that shouldn't you get last year's school organized, filed, and put away? According to Dianne, you should; and she is going to help you get started.

So, once you are done planning for next year you need some fun summer stuff to do, right? Here's a great list of 20 Frugal or Free things to do this summer.

It is summer and it is HOT. Do you ever wonder if going to church on a HOT summer day is worth all the trouble? Hmmm...here's what one pastor has to say about it.

In case you've not heard - Spunky's back!

Modern-day Barbarians or worse?

Thomas Edison has something to say about blogging.

This is going to be my "print out and dig into" article for this week: The Sadness of Higher Education (HT: Sarah Hey at StandFirm)