Lift Up Your Hearts!

My teacher readers have permission to roll their eyes now, but I've finally figured out the reason for those stupid vocabulary exercises we did in school—look up the word, define the word (don't just copy the dictionary), use the word in a sentence ("XXX is a vocabulary word" doesn't count), test on Friday.  I dutifully complied, but don't believe I learned any new word that way.  I'm very good at remembering something long enough to pass a test, but what increases my vocabulary is reading, hearing, and using new words in context.

Having subscribed (thanks to my father) for many years to A.Word.A.Day, and recently extended my random vocabulary fun to Free Rice (thanks to my brother), I realized that the point of vocabulary work is not to learn new words!  The purpose is to increase one's awareness of new words.  Perhaps slower, more careful readers do not have this problem, but I devour books, and any word I don't know is glossed over, its general meaning derived from context and the word itself forgotten.  However, if my awareness of the word has been raised through seeing or hearing it before, even if I don't know the meaning it will begin to pop out of the page at me, and gradually become incorporated into my working vocabulary.

So for me, and I suspect many others, vocabulary lessons are useless outside of the context of an environment rich in words, but given that context they are a useful tool after all.  I wonder, however, if they are of any use at all to children who will not go on to encounter the words in real life.  Another example of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer, I suppose.

Thanks to the Prodical Kiwi(s) Blog for alerting me to this video of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson on nurturing (or not nurturing) creativity.  It wasn't as informative as I had hoped, but it hits some high points and is at least amusing.  Not everyone can take the time to read John Taylor Gatto's phone book sized The Underground History of American Education.  My apologies to all my teacher readers (who no doubt wish they had more freedom to nurture creativity) and epecially the university professors.  :)  I really like the story of dancer and choreographer Gillian Lynne.

The other day we were told, by one whose buisness it is to predict these things, that no matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, our taxes are going up.  He may be right.  If they're serious about stimulating the American economy, raising American taxes seems a foolish approach, but the public keeps demanding more services, and there's always a bill for services rendered.

So I got to thinking, at lunchtime, as I munched on my barbecue potato chips, about Switzerland.  They have some wonderful potato chips there, somewhat like our barbecue variety, but better—though that impression may have been due to Favorable Emotional Circumstances.  One day I made a hasty stop at the grocery store and grabbed some food for a train trip, only to discover, too late, that I had paid over $5 for a medium-sized bag of chips!

The bag I was munching from was more than half again as large, and priced at $2.50.  I actually paid half that; I generally don't by chips unless they're on sale.  It occured to me that a price tag of $7.50 would be a significant deterrent; I would probably still buy them for very special occasions, but casual purchasing would defintely be out.  Thus it would be in my best interest, health-wise, if the potato chip manufacturers decided to triple their prices.  But they wouldn't do it.  Without illegal collusion in the industry, competition would force the price back down immediately.

Unless the government stepped in.  Imagine a $5/bag tax on potato chips; applied to all, no one manufacturer could undercut the market, and suddenly Americans just might start reducing their consumption.  I only pick on potato chips because they are my own weakness, but let's not stop there:  corn chips, soda, candy, cookies, Happy Meals—all those top of the food pyramid, artificial ingredient, and preservative heavy "foods" that make up so much of our modern diet and have nutritionists and health professionals wringing their hands.

Sin taxes have their problems, I know.  The last thing I want to do is create yet another opportunity for organized crime to fluorish.  (Pssst!  Wanna buy an Oreo?) But it would be my favorite kind of tax:  likely to provide significant income for the government, yet completely avoidable simply by eating as we know we should. 

I hesitated (briefly) to post this, for fear the person concerned might, if she ever came this way, think I was making fun of her.  That's not it at all; she has, I'm sure, an important and respected job and I know she does it well.  But perspective is everything.  Having changed plenty of diapers in my day, not to mention my grandchildren's more recently, this auto-response to my e-mail struck my funny bone:

I will be out of the office beginning March 25th.  I will return to the office on April 3.  I will not have access to email or voicemail.  If your question pertains to diaper raw material, market or premarket requests, please contact K---.  If your question pertains to Wipes, please contact B---.

Somehow I think neither K--- nor B--- want to hear my diaper and wipe questions: Is it wet or dirty? Are we out of clean covers again? and Where do I put this?

As with much of my life, my genealogcial work goes in spurts; I love to get deeply into a project and run with it until the demands of life pull me, reluctantly, away—or until I get heartily sick of it and must set it aside for a while.  Genealogical research is not all success and great discovery; documentation and data entry are mostly tedious gruntwork, and mining for new data produces much more gangue than ore.  I'm now at a stage where what's needed most is organization and the above-mentioned gruntwork, so naturally I'm finding other projects more attractive.

Thus it is amusing as well as delightful to find myself showered last week with more new data than I can do justice to in a month.  Perhaps it's a case of casting one's bread upon the waters, for it began when, as part of my e-mail backlog reduction project, I organized and cleaned up my data on the descendants of Louisa Curtiss and Benjamin Wells for someone who had requested it.  (That was one of the e-mails from 2005!)  In the process I happened upon a piece of information that led to a major breakthrough in my Rice line, about which I will write later. (More)

I've added a new category to this blog:  Genealogy.  This won't be the first post, as I've reclassified some earliers ones to which that designation applies.  I haven't said much yet about this hobby of mine, but this may be the best way to keep family members up to date on what I'm discovering.  While you're waiting for another Christmas CD, that is.  :)

If this is the first of my genealogy posts you see, click here for a is a quick summary of why I found myself, against all odds, caught up in a hobby that is not only delightful and challenging, but also would have shocked my younger self.

The Cult of the Amateur arrived from the library yesterday, not that I've had time to crack it open yet.  But I thought about it when I read today's perspicacious post from "Et Tu?" on Mommyblogging and the water well. It may be debateable whether the amateur works of ordinary blogging folks provide a valid community for otherwise isolated people, or merely distract us from the more difficult task of creating real, physical communities, but there's no denying their significance in many of our lives.

I treasure communities of both kinds, as does the author of "Et Tu?".  One important dimension added by the Internet, I find, is the ability to interact with people who are dealing with the same issues as I am, and/or have perspectives similar to mine.  I value beyond measure my short-distance, in-the-flesh friendships, but in all the contacts we have had locally—church, school, work, music, sports, neighborhood,  Indian Princesses and even other homeschoolers—we have found, yes, good friends, but also big, aching gaps with no one to understand, discuss, struggle, and rejoice together.  A broader net was required to gather that community.

Many thanks to Liz at Smithical for directing me to "Et Tu?".  And thanks to my feedreader (Bloglines), without which I wouldn't have allowed myself to indulge in yet another interesting distraction.

I wouldn't have thought to search the pages of USA Today for Good Friday inspiration, but Google News thought otherwise and led me to this article on the decline of sin in modern times.  Not a decline of sin itself, sad to say, but of the idea of sin as a fundamental break with objective, universal, and time-independent standards.  Relativism is not new, but it is getting more pervasive, as if most people are thinking, "We'll never know for certain what's right and what's wrong; we have to make it up as we go along, and change it as circumstances change."  Which means, of course, that we have traded the tyranny of God-ordained standards for the tyrrany of mutable public opinion.  Good Friday and Easter provide a path to forgiveness for sins against God; for offenses against rules-of-the-month standards our only hope is short memories and a good public relations campaign.

Polls to the contrary, it's hard for me to believe that most people don't carry with them, however deeply buried, the knowlege that they are not living up to anyone's standards, especially not their own, and that they are in need of radical repair to be consistently or even frequently good, however they might define the term.  Perhaps what we need is not so much an understanding of sin, but encouragement to turn off the televisions, put away the iPods, get away from our omnipresent distractions and take time to consider who we are, what we think we should be, and what to do about the chasm between the two.

I’ve been a fan of the Mars Hill Audio Journal since the early 90s, though only an intermittent subscriber.  I enjoy and appreciate its insight into life and culture, but generally prefer to receive information in printed, rather than spoken, form.  Plus I was tired of finding places to store the cassettes.

Recently I re-subscribed, because they now offer an mp3 version.  This I can take with me on my walks, and it takes up no physical space in the house.  Works for me. (More)

I accept the challenge from Liz; the subject intrigues me.  What things are always found in your refrigerator?   I'll skip the "normal" (milk, eggs, ketchup) and list ten items that are nearly always in stock but might make our refrigerator unique, at least in combination. (More)

Dana Summers is one of my favorite cartoonists, partly because I like his cartoons and partly because he's a local boy.  Not a native, but few of us Floridians are.  He creates editorial cartoons, produces the strip The Middletons with Ralph Dunagin (also a Central Floridian and editorial cartoonist), and—the inspiration for this post—is the creator of the Bound & Gagged.  So, for Heather, who is tandem nursing and currently expecting...

Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty

Whether you attribute that quotation to Wendell Phillips, Thomas Jefferson, or Patrick Henry, it's the truth, and no less true when it comes to the rights of parents to educate their own children. (More)

Our spam filter usually works really, really well, but the stupid spammers are getting more and more clever, and there were two when I awoke this morning.  I deleted them, but those of you who use feedreaders will no doubt see them.  In case you were wondering, my posts were shanghaied—the spam came from Shanghai, China.  (Thanks, Feedjit!)

More disturbing, however, was that in the process of deleting them I discovered two legitimate comments that had been marked as spam.  I fixed that, but one was in made January and the other in February, so they don't show up in the Recent Comments list.  My apologies to Peter V and Stephan; click on their names to see the posts and their comments.

Last year when we went to Switzerland we tried several new Swiss dishes, but somehow missed raclette.  To make up for it, this trip we ate raclette four times, and lest you think we tired of it, we were inspired to purchase our own raclette set.

I call it our Swiss souvenir, though in point of fact I bought it from Amazon.com, in order to get one that didn't need a power and plug converter, and to save carrying it home.  Although this is a Swiss appliance (manufactured, alas, in China), it appears to have been super-sized for the American market:  the little pans are perhaps twice the size I was expecting.

Friday night we had our first raclette party, and though there are some modifications I would make next time, it went well.  I found raclette cheese at Whole Foods, but it was French raclette cheese, which may explain why it was softer and not quite as flavorful as that which we ate in Switzerland.  No matter; we spiced it up with the raclette spice and seasoned sea salt that did make the journey from Basel to Florida in my suitcase.

The cool thing about raclette is that, like fondue, it is a community cooking experience.  There's a bit of preparation involved, but the actual cooking is done by the guests as you all converse companionably around the dinner table.  Each person places a slice of cheese in his little pan and sets it under the grill to heat.  When the cheese is melted and bubbly, he  scrapes it out onto small, boiled potatoes (okay, so that part of the cooking is done in advance), seasons the mixture, and then digs in.  Accompaniments are traditionally pickled onions and cornichons.  (We substituted baby dills for the latter.)  One of our Swiss hosts cooked bulgoki on the top part of the grill, which was delicious.  I wasn't that ambitious, but did use the top of the grill to cook marinated green beans and mushrooms.

Dessert, of course, was Swiss chocolate.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver,  Steven L. Hopp, and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 2007)

When we were visiting Janet, a friend of hers was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  The friend wasn’t totally happy with it, but it sounded intriguing enough that I borrowed it from the library when we returned. (More)