Tricotomania and more

The fridge guy got here before 2. The fan was gone. It blows cold air from the freezer (where the compressor is) down to the fridge. At first he thought that might be expensive but the part was less than $30. Of course it wasn’t in his truck but he got it and came back half an hour later and fixed it. While the freezer was empty I gave it a much needed wipe down.

I took the peaches back and they apologized, game me some money back and one basket. They would have just replaced them with fresh baskets but I don’t have time to can them and I think we probably have enough. Apparently they hadn’t had time to check them yesterday until late and discovered teh problem. They remade good baskets and yelled at their supplier. All good.

And I’m not needed to drive anyone to the retreat as long as I can get myself there. So now I can stop stressing and leave when I’m ready. I have a couple of books packed. I need to find some more knitting. Emergency supplies in case what I most feel like doing is relaxing by myself rather than doing any of the workshops. Optional sessions I’ll definitely opt into include the wine and cheese reception this evening. Sometimes there are advantages to being Anglican

While buddy was messing with the fridge, I decided to wipe the results of a bit of canning off the top of my stove. It looks much better. The floor is still sticky but I’ll fix that when I get back. I also started cutting the lawn/hay today. My front lawn has not been mowed all summer (on purpose) and now it is all falling over and going a bit golden. So I got the shears and started working on it. Slow going but quite satisfying. I bet my picky neighbours are pleased, too (though they aren’t so picky as to have ever said anything or phoned the council or anything; I don’t live in deepest darkest suburbia or anything).

Now,  I need to see if I can find Donner or at least warn one of my neighbours that I haven’t. Leave a note for the lodger to feed the cats in the morning (she’ll come home for breakfast but he might not think to look for her). And head off.

So now that the dishwasher’s all hooked up, I figured I could sail through the rest of my time here. A bit of work. A bit of reading. Some canning. …

Wednesday night I got a beer out of the fridge and it didn’t seem very cold. Hmmm. The freezer does seem cold. The lights come on in there. The beer isn’t cold. I adjusted the temperature dial to “colder” and drank cool beer.

Thursday morning I went to pour milk in my coffee and it was more the consistency of yogurt (I do have yogurt on my cereal so didn’t notice until I was ready for coffee). I drank my coffee black. I checked to see if the beer was cold. It wasn’t. I phoned the repair folks. A guy is coming today sometime between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. So I got up early so I could be out of the shower by 8. Of course because I wasn’t in the shower, he hasn’t turned up yet.

I went to the market yesterday to buy some peaches. They had a deal on and I ended up with 6 baskets for $15. They looked fine. Apparently their supplier had brought twice as many as they’d ordered. Last night I started working on canning peaches. The second layer of every damn basket was moldy and lots of the top layer ones had bruises. I did four 500 ml jars of sliced peaches and went to bed. (I also cut my finger with the knife.) I am mad enough to want to go down there and complain. But I can’t leave the house because the fridge guy…

This is all very frustrating but life isn’t all bad. I had coffee with a friend yesterday. And lunch with another friend the day before. Both are people I don’t know that well but we want to get to know each other better. My work is chugging along. I’m going off to the Women’s Retreat my church runs later today (we’re supposed to meet at 3, but I guess my departure time depends on the fridge guy). I’ve never been to a retreat before. And I’m still ambivalent about the whole church thing. So I’m feeling a bit weird about it. I know some of the women going and like them. And our new minister seems nice and it’ll be good to get to know her a bit better.

But I also have some low-level anxiety about the fact that I’m ignoring the roma tomatoes. I think I need to do something with them today. But right now I am going to go drink my coffee (black) and read my book on the porch.

Both my daughter and Meg saw fit to award me this. Although, as Meg notes, I’m not keen on memes, I am happy to accept their praise of this blog. Thank you very much.

I think most of those that I would award it to are already on someone else’s list. There are lots of brilliant blogs out there. To keep my sidebar a bit less cluttered, those I read are listed in pages. So in case you haven’t found those blogrolls, I’ll link them here: homeschooling blogs & knitting blogs are listed separately (though I know a lot of folks do both).  I note that I haven’t updated either list lately. Apologies for broken links and the like.

Found while tidying. Cut out of a newspaper, heaven knows when.

It is in our idelness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virgina Woolf

It went well. I made her tuna sandwiches and packed sliced cucumbers, peppers and carrots. 2 apples. 2 large bottles of water. All were consumed except the apples. And it turns out peanut butter will be okay and one of the counsellors has a nasty anaphylactic fish allergy. So she’s getting the rest of the tuna tomorrow (and will take the necessary precautions, which is presumably what happened today) and then she get peanut butter. Oy vey.

Actually that is kind of funny (weird, not haha) because it did occur to me the other day that not only did the nut thing not happen when we were kids, but my cousin (9 years older) had a nasty fish allergy and I bet no one instituted blanket bans on tuna for that. Ironic.

So it was hot and sunny today. She came home sweaty, tired and happy. I convinced her to have a shower which helped. She is voluntarily going to bed a bit earlier. I think this is going to be fun but tiring. For those who asked, the camp is here in town (Ottawa) and run by Salamander Theatre. It has a good reputation. We plan to attend their company’s performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at some point (maybe next week). And we will attend the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival production of As You Like it on Friday with the camp. I do have a plan to make a family trip to Stratford in the fall, though.

Mat had an MA defense today (examining; he is long past having to defend one himself) so he biked in with Tigger and then went on to work. So I was alone. I put the dried strawberries in a jar and sliced the remains of the 4L basket and put them in the dryer. Then I went for a brisk 20 minute walk (I have a route around the neighbourhood). Then I dealt with gooseberries. We had picked about 2kg last night and frozen them on cookie sheets. I bagged those up and then went and picked another 2.3 kg, washed and laid them out on cookie sheets. I found a garden glove with leather palm (only one; but I only needed it for the hand holding the branches) but should have gone and put a long sleeved shirt on. My forearm looks like I’ve been in a fight with a cat. All of that came from 1 bush. And there are still berries on it. We pick them green. Mat is English and likes them tart for gooseberry fool. But there was one red one that I ate while picking and they are really nice ripe. So I’m trying to convince him to leave what is there to ripen and eat fresh. The blackcurrants also need picking. That’ll be a job for tomorrow morning.

Then I emptied some of the kitchen cabinets. Tomorrow the destruction begins. We’re finishing the kitchen reno we started a few years ago. And this phase can be done in two stages so we’ll do the less disruptive stage first (the bit not involving the sink; though it will mean disconnecting the dishwasher). We’ll cut the counter at the new end point and rip out everything to the left. Paint the wall; rip up vinyl flooring. Move the fridge to it’s new position. I’m wondering if we need to move some electrical outlets, too. Then build some cupboards. One over the fridge. A bottom and top unit next to the fridge and then a full height pull-out pantry unit next to that.

Of course we are also going out to the garden annex on Wednesday to weed and pick potatoes (and whatever else needs picking) and I want to stop and pick some strawberries on the way back. But hopefully stage one can be done by the end of the week. Then we have to contemplate plumbing.

Tigger starts Shakespeare camp on Monday. The letter came today with all the details and I realize that one of the things I do not miss about school is packing lunches. My kid eats peanut butter sandwiches almost every day. But no nuts in packed lunches. Bring lots of food; we’ll be active. No nuts. Tigger doesn’t like raisins or other dried fruit. Ack. She and her dad have gone to the grocery store to find supplies.

I’m sure it will be fun. She is really looking forward to it. And it’s a great learning experience, too. But we’ll have to get up and out of the house in the morning and pack lunches. Ick.  I should console myself that it is only for 3 weeks.

In other news, she’s going to her first gig tonight. Friends have tickets to BluesFest and Feist is playing tonight. Free if you are 10 and under (she won’t be 11 for another 12 days; yes, she’s counting). So she’s going with them and sleeping over. We’ll pick her up in the morning on our way to Frontenac Park for a 3 hour walk with other friends. I’m suspecting she’ll sleep in the car. She has been told that there will be no whining on the walk.

July seems to be shaping up nicely. Lots of sun. Not to much humidity. Yesterday morning was very wet but it cleared up in the afternoon. Lets hope it stays like this.

Ron’s comment reminded me that I really should post the full photo. I had Tigger stand in front of the bush for scale. It is a pretty impressive bush.

I decided that I had too much stuff in the sidebar for a 2 column theme and went browsing around looking for something new. If you’ve dropped by at all in the last 12 hours you’ve probably seen a couple of changes. Took me a while to work out how to get my own photo in the header. I looked in my iPhoto library for something that would crop to that shape nicely but the first thing seemed inappropriate to the season (ice; I’ll maybe change it in 6 months time).

I think I’ve settled on this for now. I like the font colours. I like the lilacs (a photo taken yesterday at the Fletcher Wildlife Garden). And I like that there are two sidebars so you don’t have to scroll down forever to find things. I also really like those 3 drop downs at the top so I don’t have to have the pages, categories and archives in the sidebar.

Now I just need to be on the lookout for photo-ops that would make good headers. And maybe figure out how to use the wide-angle option on the new camera.

This is one of those holidays that we consider a “Hallmark Holiday” and ignore. But as I was driving somewhere yesterday I caught the tail end of an interview on the CBC about how Mother’s Day actually originated from women peace activists. InterPares, a non-profit organization working for justice and peace, has produced a little video:

Or visit their Take Back the Day page.

Now I have another history topic to follow up: Anna Jarvis, and Julia Ward Howe…

Although no longer an academic, I still work in the sector so I subscribe to the Chronicle of Higher Education. They have some blogs now and one of them has a very interesting proposal for a college. Part II lays out the curriculum in detail. I think it makes sense without Part I, but you might like that, too. Here’s the overarching idea. She is imagining her “perfect college”:

The school would combine the ideas of my cynically rational, somewhat hard-hearted husband, with the lofty ideals I hold about what makes a human being “educated” and what makes knowledge worth pursuing. My husband and I agreed that every college graduate should know enough about numbers to understand a Wall Street Journal discussion about subprime mortgages (and to negotiate with a lender); enough about writing to produce an essay using correct grammar, punctuation, spelling, paragraph development, and rational argumentation; and possess enough reading comprehension to read an essay tackling important ideas and containing big words.

To all of this I added the requirement that our graduates should live with a sense of obligation — if not zeal — to contribute to what is best and most beautiful in the world. In fact, Fendrich University’s “mission statement” (were it to be forced to come up with one by an accrediting organization) would begin, “Fendrich University aims to educate students to become literate, numerate, and thoughtful citizens.”

The discussion in the comments is particularly interesting. Remember, most of the readers are college professors so their take is based on their experience of the students they teach. As I look at that curriculum, I think it would be a good basis for planning your homeschool high-school.