Tricotomania and more

I admit that I spent most of today sitting here in front of the computer. My big accomplishment was my quarterly GST return, a job made more difficult by the recent breakdown of my bookkeeping system. And one that made me realize that I owed my graphic designer quite a bit of money. Oops. All sorted now. Phew.

But at the end of the day I decided to tackle the other end of the room again. One of the first things I found was a box of Freya’s stuff. Including her elusive clock/radio. So I set that up and moved the boom box in here. Went and got me some Robbie Williams CDs from downstairs and a cold beer…

Here is the result (do click for bigger; it gets cropped oddly for the thumbnail):

you can almost imagine sewing here…

that’s the corner of the “look there’s floor” photo from yesterday. Lots more floor. A bunch of boxes that were there didn’t even belong in this room. 2 small boxes of Freya’s books and another large box of her stuff.

I had been contemplating putting the sewing machine behind the door next to the closet. And then I thought about putting it in that corner you see in the photo. But when it was in the space it occured to me that looking out the window is at least as important for sewing as it is for working (my computer faces a window).

Those boxes stacked up next to the sewing machine table all contain related supplies. Fabric, a really cool thing with lots of spools of thread on it (wrapped in paper for moving), that sort of thing. There are more boxes of fabric in the closet. Sorting the fabric will be a whole other project.

I figure that if the cubic foot issue really is problematic, I could get some low trofast for that corner and still have space for a quilt design wall above it. Maybe the spool holder thingamy will go on the wall between the window and closet. It doesn’t stick out very far so wouldn’t impede access to the closet.

As you can see, along the wall there are a lot of plastic boxes. Mostly yarn and fibre. Two contain stuff for junk modelling, building miniatures etc. I’m not sure F does enough of that to justify the space taken up with boxes of toilet roll tubes, plastic caps, etc.

There are now only 3 carboard boxes remaining and they are the smaller ones used for books. On top of that, they are almost empty.

Those have bits of stuff I’m not sure what to do with. I’m going to have to take Jen’s advice and just do it one piece at a time. (That pile of stuff to the left is for the recycling.)

There is still an orphan pile of jigsaw puzzles in the middle of the floor. Not idea where those want to live nor if they really need to live in here. And some random craft supplies. And all the knitting and spinning stuff.

BUT the important thing is that I can now imagine actually moving this table I’m using as a temporary desk over to that side of the room to be a worktable for crafts and homeschooling.

Which is what feels like real progress.

As always I have been remiss with the photos so there isn’t really a “before” shot of this. Too depressing to contemplate anyway.

This is the view from my desk after todays contribution to the effort.

The craft room 2 July 09

When we moved in, those boxes were at least 2 high. You couldn’t really see the windows. And there wasn’t anywhere near as much visible floor.

Those bookshelves on the left were bought in an earlier phase of getting unpacked. I decided we needed to have bookshelves that left wall space to hang art on. IKEA afficionadoes will recognize that they are Billy. I’m seriously considering whether to squeeze another narrow one in at the end there.

Look, there is more floor today…

newly cleared floor

I know, it doesn’t look like much. But it is. Believe me.

Today, I did a couple of things to move this project along. I took a bunch of stuff the movers put in this room down to the basement or to other rooms.

Shelves we aren’t going to put up in here. Games that we play downstairs so they need to be downstairs. That sort of thing.

But mostly, I just plodded on with unpacking and organizing the craft supplies.

When we first moved I got stuck on the best “storage solution”. And I know that sometimes the urge to go out and buy a solution is just displacement from other things. But in this case, I knew we needed something.

In the old house, the craft supplies were stored on regular shelves. Yes, there were plastic bins but somehow it didn’t really work. No one could get at anything. When something got taken off the shelf, the stuff next to it shuffled over so it was never clear where it needed to go back to. Ick.

I had some idea in my head of what might work, but I was really struggling to find it in a real shop. And I didn’t want to build it myself.

Then, when I was in IKEA buying all that Billy, I noticed that they did tall Trofast units. I bought one for inside Freya’s closet so she could have drawers for her underwear and socks and shelves for t-shirts, sweaters and things. And no chest of drawers in the main part of the room. And I started to think ….

So I went back and got 2 more tall ones. And lots of shallow tubs and shelves. The closet in this room will fit 4 but I only have 2. I want to make sure this is right before spending even more money. Here’s how it’s working:

craft supply storage

Some of the old plastic bins have just been put on a shelf. The beading stuff on the left there, for example. And some things are more organized. The two bins at the top right contain drawing and painting supplies, with 2 shelves of sketchbooks, pastel paper, etc. underneath. I need to figure out what to do with the large pads of newsprint but that’s a minor detail (and the major thing still in the box nearest the closet in the first photo).

There is a lot of fabric, yarn, and fibre in the remaining boxes. And I have no clue what I’m going to do with them. There are several plastic boxes of fabric in the other side of that closet already. And half a dozen boxes of yarn stacked up under the window. Oy vey.

It is slowly coming together. I think the next priority is to get the sewing machine (that white piece of furniture under the end window in the first photo) into a useable place.

But now, I have to stop procrastinating about organizing by blogging about organizing and go eat my dinner.

It seems that sometimes I need to be bullied to do things. Especially on line things.

I started blogging when MamaCate bullied me into it (and set me up a guest blog on her account).

And now I’ve joined Ravelry. Blame M-H.

These two are some of the nicest bullies on the planet.

And my Ravelry bio is competing for most crap bio ever.

I started searching for people I know and gave up when there were 163 Stephs and the one I wanted wasn’t on the first 2 pages.

I’m JoVE (still can’t believe that wasn’t taken. Thanks for saving it for me folks.) so if you are my friend from some other online thing, like this blog, go ahead and friend me and maybe I’ll even start hanging out over there.

Now, I’m off to have a beer and maybe talk to my pigs.

Despite the fact that I am not super keen on how I look in this photo (what’s with the double chin thing going on?), I’m going to post it anyway. Because it has my new tool in it:

JoVE & her new scythe

I give you my scythe.

I’ve been figuring out how to make hay using the tools I have available. Which was mostly a pair of long handled garden shears (the kind you use for cutting the edges on your lawn if you hate weed whackers) and a lawn rake.

Now I have a scythe and a 3 prong pitch fork. Of course now it is raining every day so no hay will be made, though what I cut using the old method is drying in our big machine shed (which is very open and airy but doesn’t get rained in).

Mat has new tools, too.

Chainsaw & paraphenalia

That’s a chainsaw, steel-toed boots, Kevlar chaps, and (not in the photo) a hard hat with ear protection and a visor.

We have a wood-burning furnace and 15 acres of woods. And a lot of learning to do. As well as a lot of hard physical labour.

You asked for it…

Two of their favourite activities: munching on the grass (and digging it up to find goodness knows what under there) and having a snooze in their pen.

The pen was the dog pen for the previous people but we don’t have dogs. The door into the inside bit (where they sleep at night) is probably too small for it to be a permanent solution but it is working well now.

And to keep this from becoming  just another cat pig blog…

  This is Willow. (I let children name animals we don’t plan to eat someday.)

You can see that she is scratching in the deep leaf litter along the fence. She’s in that area alot. I can only assume there are were lots of grubs.

On today’s list of things to do: check out the feed store in Packenham. They stock organic chicken feed.

But first, getting the COG newsletter into envelopes and mailed. And then the Carp Farmer’s Market.

We have chickens:

  Homeschooling/Canadian Organic Growers (COG) friends brought them as a housewarming gift. We cleaned out the hen house and spread some hay on the floor. We’ve been feeding them in one of our camping plates, which has a bit of an edge to it. And one of them laid an egg the first day she was here. On the floor. Hurray!

Today they got to hang out in the barnyard and had a great time. The cats are not at all sure about them.

We also have pigs:

  They are living in the old dog pen with an indoor place to sleep. They seem to like it. There are clearly tasty things buried there. Things that are way more interesting that whatever we put in their trough. Which is fine with me.

They are about the size of a beagle. 3 months old. Large Black is the breed. Very cute.

They were out in the barnyard, too. They are very good diggers. I can’t wait to get them onto the field with the vegetable garden to dig up the areas we want to expand into.

More from my week of staring at the Wiley/Blackwell booth… Though this one I almost missed. Essaying the Past: How to Read, Write, and Think about History by Jim Cullen is a thin book. I might have missed it had I not gone over and taken a really good look at the history section

This is another book that I might not give to Freya (at least not immediately) but really helped me see how to guide her learning in history. Regular readers will know that I do not think the purpose of studying history is to know a lot of facts about important events. And Freya seems to have a natural attraction for history so I don’t really need to worry about getting her to do any.

Essaying the Past is written for high school and undergraduate university students. It is a discipline specific look at how to write an essay. And that discipline specific focus is important because, as I used to tell my students, most academics use the same words to describe what they want but they don’t all mean the same things by them. “Argument”, “evidence”, “theory”, etc mean different things to different people. And “discipline” in the academic sense is not that far removed from “discipline” in the military sense — it is about training people to do things in a particular way.

Taking a discipline specific approach to the topic of essay writing also allows Cullen to discuss details of the process that are usually treated as outside of the essay writing process per se. The first seven chapters are actually about reading and include an excellent discussion of how to skim read a large range of possible sources in order to home in on your question and choose sources you will read in more detail. It also includes a solid discussion of the appropriate uses of internet research in academic work, as well as detailed guidance on evaluating sources.

The first section ends with a chapter on analysis, which is what distinguishes an essay from a report. This is an excellent discussion of the subject and makes it clear that students do need to take a position and communicate it, but that this is not any old “opinion”. Rather, students are required to engage with the material and make decisions and persuasive arguments.

The next 7 chapters go through how one might do that in some detail. Throughout the text Cullen uses examples from both published histories and student essays written for his classes at the Fieldstone School in New York. The importance of choosing a good question, first broached in Part I, is fleshed out here but the focus shifts to the proposed answer (the thesis). He also situates all of this in terms of the motive, the reason why anyone should care about this question and argument. But he does so in a way that keeps the student tied firmly to the evidence.

The 15th chapter is an extended discussion of one student essay demonstrating how all of this works in practice in a novice piece of history writing. I think this is important because it is impossible for high school and undergraduate students to write at the level of professional historians, and unreasonable to expect them to do so. They are, by definition, novices. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can’t make arguments of their own and support them with evidence. In fact, the availability of primary sources in digitized format on the internet makes the possibilities for novices to “do history” much greater than they were in the past.

The Appendices deal with various technical issues including citing sources, plagiarism, and writing answers to DBQs (Document Based Questions). Excellent information that is appropraitely located here.

I highly recommend this book for all students of history in high school and college/university. It is easy to read and easy to dip into as a resource.

I also recommend it to parents of younger children to get a sense of where you might be going with your children’s history education. Influenced by Julie Bogart (at Bravewriter), Jena (at Yarns of the Heart) and others, my approach will be to develop a lot of the skills orally at first — asking good questions, making arguments, and supporting arguments with evidence .  And by “at first”, I don’t mean for a couple of months. I think a few years of primarily working in this mode will provide a good basis for developing solid essay writing later. (Look at Jena’s post on her son Peter’s first college paper for evidence of this.)

At this point, Freya seems to be doing very well with writing fiction based on historical sources. Her latest success in this is a poem based on the biography of John McCrae (who wrote In Flanders Fields) that has been accepted for publication in Canadian Stories. It’ll be in the October edition.

Warning: if you have a thing for cute small wild animals you may not want to read this post. I lack sentimentality. Don’t worry, there are no photos (I have no idea which box the camera cable is in).

So we moved to the country. And my cats couldn’t be happier. Particularly the 3-legged boy cat, Blitzen. (For those that don’t know he had his leg amputated a couple of years ago after an altercation with a motor vehicle.) As my vet says “Nobody told him he’s missing a leg.” As far as I can tell his main disability is an inability to scratch his right ear.

Blitzen has been hunting. He brings me dead chipmunks. But I know he also catches mice. I don’t think he eats them but the local crow population are onto him and clean up.

One thing our new place has is rabbits and hares. We’ve seen the cats eyeing them and even chasing them but figure they might be a bit big. Nevertheless, Mat and I were joking the other day that if Blitzen managed to catch a rabbit, we’d learn how to skin it.

Tonight was the night. He caught a little rabbit and very kindly left it by the back door for us.

We pulled out the John Seymour book on self-sufficiency, and the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall cookbook, opened a couple of beers and got to work. Well, Mat got to work and I read directions from the books and took the guts back out to the field for the crows.

This is a pretty small rabbit. Not really a meal for 3 people. But we are all pretty excited about fresh rabbit caught by the cat and skinned by us.

Oh, and we’re going to pick up some pigs on Sunday. In the station wagon (estate car for the Brits) because that’s all we have and we’re weird like that.

Note: I’ve edited the link for the H F-W cookbook. I had the wrong book in there yesterday. And in relation to Audrey’s comment, we have no desire to get into major hog farming. We’re talking about 2 pigs. Heritage breed. Free range.

So, I went to a big academic conference. And I had a booth in the trade fair bit, which is called the Book Fair because it is mostly publishers. And I spent the entire week staring at the Wiley/Blackwell booth and maybe spent some money on the last day.

One of those books was How to Read a Poem by Terry Eagleton.

Eagleton is a big cheese literary critic (nay, theorist) in England. But this book is written for students near the beginning of their undergraduate studies and for the general reader. I think you’d have to be the kind of general reader that likes academic writing, but this is probably a fair description. And he does say that you can start at chapter 4 if you want to skip his discussion of theoretical debates.

I’m the kind of person that actually finds the discussion of debates in literary theory helpful. Because I know that literary criticism, like other forms of academic analysis, takes place in the context of debates. So it is helpful for me to have a sense of what is at stake in those debates. Eagleton’s first few chapters help with that enormously, while attending to the specific case of poetry.

They also situate certain trends in poetry historically. The influence of the Romantics on our everyday notions of what poetry should be (or at least mine) was particularly enlightening. And freeing. As was the discussion of the historical shift in the meaning (and moral/political value) of “rhetoric”.

He uses examples throughout to illustrate his points and kind of walk you through the particular aspect of literary criticism that he is dealing with. And then the last chapter walks you through 4 poems from different periods.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I never “got” literature in high school and university. And I’m particularly lost when it comes to poetry. But this book really helped me.

Just to reassure you, despite the fact that he’s a big cheese literary theorist, here is his definition of a poem.

A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or wod processor, who decides where the lines should end. (p. 25)

Chapter 2 goes through that definition. In addition to explaining what he means by each term –”fictional”, “verbally inventive”, “moral”– he also talks about why his definition doesn’t include anything about rhyme, rhythm, metre, and all that other stuff we associate with poetry.

All his points are illustrated with appropriate examples. I particularly enjoyed the introduction to the section on the term “fiction” (which follows that on the term “moral”).

The distinction between the empirical and the moral is not the same as the difference between fact and fiction. There are plenty of moral statements, such as ‘certain members of the Royal Family are ofish individuals of philistine tastes and remarkably low intelligence’, which are not fictional — not only because they are true, but because they belong to the real world rather than to poems and novels.

There are, of course, poetic examples, as well.

This is not the kind of book I would give to my child to read. Or at least not until she is solidly advanced in high-school level English. However, I have found it very helpful in my quest to figure out what the goal of high-school English might be. What kind of thinking do I want to nurture in my daughter? And how could studying poetry help with that?

It is also helpful in making me more comfortable with poetry in general. A useful skill since Freya seems to be a poet (among other things) and it would be nice to be able to appreciate that in more than a purely parental pride kind of way. She thinks the title of the book is nuts, btw. Who needs to be taught that?

Well, I do need to be taught how to read a poem. And I’m sure others do, too. And this book helped me enormously.

BTW, there is a Search Inside feature for this book on Amazon. The table of contents gives a good sense of what is covered and there is a substantial chunk of Chapter 1 available.

I’ve been really really busy lately and haven’t had time to blog. Today, I’m really just checking in so you don’t think I’ve fallen off the edge of the earth or anything.

So last week was so complicated that I couldn’t even think about anything but what I had to do. That made it less stressful and everything did work out just fine.

I had a booth in the trade fair bit of a big academic conference.  It was 7.5 days. Standing up. OMG that it brutal. I can’t believe how tired I was just from standing all day. But other folks I know who’ve done trade fairs confirmed that I am not a wimp, it really is tiring. It took me a couple of days to work out which shoes were the most comfortable but once I got that figured out the aching feet (and hips and whatnot) were almost bearable.

It went well, I think. I met interesting people. And learned a lot that will help me deliver a better service to my clients. But it’ll take a couple of months to see if the financial benefit of doing it outweighs the cost.

Freya had rehearsals every day culminating in 4 performances of Great Expectations last weekend. She and I did a dry run of the trip to the performance venue (where most of the rehearsals took place, too) the week before. And we got her a cell phone. She did really well, getting herself there most days. Someone was always available to pick her up. Even I won’t require an 11 year old to take the bus alone after dark.

During the days she either helped her dad with packing, painting the new house, or gardening. A couple of days she played with friends. Thanks lots to the other moms in my little homeschool co-op. I think we owe a couple of people some good food.

Mat was in charge of the move and it all seems to have gone pretty smoothly. Freya and I stayed with friends Thursday and Friday night and we all came back to our new place after her last performance on Saturday.

The cats moved on Wednesday to avoid the movers packing and moving. They seem to be settling in well. We let them out on Sunday and left the door ajar so they could go back and forth.  They cautiously explored the gardens near the house and then I left them to get on with it. A bit later, Blitzen came in with a chipmunk in his mouth which he proceeded to drop. It was still alive and eager to get out of there. I used a tablecloth to catch it and take it to the door where it made it’s escape.

The downstairs is mostly unpacked and organized. We need an extra shelf for the armoire and have lost some of the shelf supports. It was originally purchased as a wardrobe for F. but will be used in the dining room for dishes, with table linens in the drawers. So some of the dishes are just stacked on top. We also need to put another coat of paint on some of the walls before setting up a bookshelf.

The men came today to connect the stove to our new propane tank. So we can now cook indoors. Mat was barbecuing in a rainstorm on Sunday.

The upstairs unpacking is being held up by an inability to locate the hardware needed to reassemble Freya’s bed. We want to use the loft bed which has been in pieces in the basement for a couple of years. The screws seem to have completely disappeared. And a few screws from her more recent bed seem to have gone missing, too. That one is from IKEA so Mat is going to drop in there today to get replacements.

We also need to get fittings for the inside of the wardrobes so that things can be unpacked properly. The new office, homeschool room, craft room is going to be a challenge. Right now I am working on a camping table. And a temporary bed has been set up for Freya in here. But we got the internet working this morning!

Freya has been busily working as my admin assistant today, entering contact information I collected on paper into the program I use for that sort of thing. She and Mat have gone into town to run some errands and go to choir practice.

The weather is all wrong. The sort of summer weather I left England to get away from. Though apparently England has some great weather. I’d like to trade back please! We had a fire in the woodstove today and everything.

I should stop complaining though. We are all happy to be here. F. got up and went for a bike ride the other morning and seems very excited to have so much outdoors to play in. Once we get unpacked and figure out a routine, I think it will be great. She’s already talking about setting up a desk in the hay loft for writing.

That’s all for now. Hopefully, I’ll get back to more regular blogging soon.