At Home on this Mountain

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Always running

Posted in Reading
And so far not running behind.  Our first week of lessons for the year was a great success.  The fact that my oldest is now required to be getting an "education" and spend 4 hours a day doing something "educational" has been a great motivator for me.  In the past we've done lessons 5 days in a row, maybe 4 times.  That's over the course of 2 years.  We had no problems last week squeezing in 3-4 hours of read alouds, math worksheets and Explode the Code.  Yesterday we started Cub Scouts but we still managed to get our time in beforehand and we didn't even have to have dinner at a restaurant- TH and I packed a picnic supper to eat in the parking lot and Daddy LOVED it.  It was pretty tasty, if I say so myself. 

Speaking of Cub Scouts, we belong to a great pack of all homeschooling families.  It is so nice to spend a little time with other families who are doing the same "crazy" things we are and see how their kids are just as goofy and normal as ours are.  Honey is the head of the popcorn fundraiser this year and seems to be enjoying his new role.  Our den leader from last year mentioned that his wife does lessons for 3 weeks and then takes 1 week off, all year round.  For some reason this had never occured to me, I think because I thought I would want a long break in the summer time.  Then I realized that I HATED summer break in school and was always bored after 2 weeks.  Also, spending 4 hours a day reading aloud and teaching phonics and penmanship doesn't leave a lot of time for big projects like sewing Christmas dresses, piecing quilts, balancing the checkbook or canning up gallons of chicken stock.  I think having 1 week off out of every 4 will be a great set-up for our family.  The boys are already counting the days until their "vacation."  Hopefully they realize that we're not actually going anywhere :D


Additionally, 3 on/1 off gives us 195 days of lessons per year.  We're only required to have 174 in this state so we'll have 4 extra weeks to play with, maybe taking 2 weeks at Christmas and 2 at Easter and an extra in the summer at some point.  We'll see how it goes.  What I don't want to do is waste those extra days here and there when we don't feel like doing lessons one day in the middle of the week.  That is a VERY SLIPPERY SLOPE for me.  I can't even get near the edge. 


Does anyone know of a good source for books on CD?  I have found these to be SO helpful in getting our daily dose of literature (or just-for-fun reads too) but our library's collection is pitiful!  My goal is to spend at least 2 hours per day reading aloud but that is a strain on my vocal chords, especially during allergy season (which is pretty much year round for me)  I plan to buy The Chronicles of Narnia on CD for the family for Christmas but we just finished reading/listening to those a few weeks ago and Christmas is a long way off.  So where can I find more?  I guess I need to start checking out the discount and used bookstores that I see from time to time and have the grandparents keep their eyes peeled as well.


Now it's time for lunch and I still haven't emptied the dishwasher or cleaned up the breakfast dishes (though they're in the kitchen instead of the dining room- that's a start!)  So it's off the computer for Mom and into the kitchen.  I'll be back again soon!!
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Banned book meme

Posted in Reading
No one tagged me for this meme but I am playing anyway :)

These are the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you've read or partially read.

#1 The Bible - of course and I'm still reading it...
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal - read it in French and wrote a Thesis on it...
#36 Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (this is on my "recently-acquired" pile and next up after I finish Light in August)
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius (just heard of this while reading Francis Schaeffer and decided I need to look for it)
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut - I've read all of Vonnegut's published works - loved them all, no matter how weird.
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (I have read the whole series at LEAST 10 times since I got them for my 9th birthday)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

I marked ones I know I have finished with bold print- 12 in total, although the Bible really should count for more than one book :)  Titles in italics are ones I have started but never finished.  There are 18 of those.  Sheesh.  I really should work on finishing some of those.  Maybe I should dedicate the rest of the year to finishing those books that I have often started but never finished. 
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Monday, June 11, 2007

Silly book meme

Posted in Reading
I saw this over at Small Things and  while it's not the first time I had seen is, it is the first time I have actually decided to do it.  Unfrtunately I don't have anything very cool lying (laying? someday I really am going to figure out exactly when to use which word) around on my desk but here's what I did have.

From The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book (an excellent, excellent reference for those who want to make bread from ALL whole wheat, rather than treating wheat flour like a redheaded step-sibling to white flour)

p. 161, 5th sentence:
Stir the honey into the water, add the oil, and then mix the liquids and yeast into the dry ingredients, making a dough that is quite soft.

That sentence may very well exist in 100 different places in this book but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read the whole thing.  I read the first 119 pages in 2 days.  Then I picked up my library's brand spanking new copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and haven't looked at another book (other than my Bible) since.  What can I say, I only get a week with the Kingsolver before I have to return it.

If you want to play along, follow these instructions:

Grab the nearest book.
1. Open it to page 161.
2. Find the fifth full sentence.
3. Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.
4. Don’t search around looking for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.
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Preserving the Harvest 2008


~June 22nd~
*11 half-pints
honey-sweetened peach-strawberry jam
~June 27th~
*7 half-pints and 2 pints
honey-sweetened peach jam
~June 28th~
*24 home-grown chickens in the freezer
(7 whole, 17 cut up
plus feet and backs for stock!!)
~July 6th~
*8 pints and 14 half-pints
honey-sweetened peach jam
~July 16th~
*18 cups fresh green beans,
blanched and frozen (a gift from the boss)
*12 pounds ripe bananas,
cut into 1 inch chunks and frozen for smoothies
~July 22nd~
*32 ears home-grown corn
blanched and frozen in meal-sized packages
~July 27th~
*8 pints cream-style corn
(home grown)
~July~
about *8 cups blackberries
and *5 cups wild blueberries
from around our property,
in the freezer
~August 4th~
14 pints
4 half-pints
and 1 quart
hot and spicy tomato salsa
(that's 18 cups altogether)

What I'm reading

The Bible- currently in the book of Acts

The Last Battle by C.S.Lewis

Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson



What I've Read Recently

At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

How To Be Good by Nick Hornby

The Book of Joby by Mark Ferrari

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

World Without End by Ken Follett

Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery (for the 12th time or so)



What I Watch


The Office

30 Rock

Doctor Who

Heroes

Eureka

Scrubs


2008 Crafty Stats


Yardage In:

13.5 yards

Yardage Out:

3 yards

Items Made:

Money Spent:

$58.06

Recent Entries

Always running
First Birthday Cupcakes
Sand Mountain Academy post up!!
Menu Plan Monday August 11-17, 2008
All sorts of things

Blogs I Read (almost)Daily

Pleasant View Schoolhouse