Reading, Thinking, & Domesticity #5

Sometimes it's helpful having your birthday at the end of the year. It acts like a 'pause and reflect' moment before heading into a new year. On my birthday in December, my husband gave me a card with a list of things that happened in 2018:

*  Our third child got married
*  Our second grandchild (a boy this time) was born
*  Our first grandchild turned 1 & we started looking after her one day a week
*  One of our sons completed his plumbing apprenticeship
*  Another son had a major job change
*  Moozle, our youngest, became a teenager & had her Grade 7 Cello exam which she passed with honours
*  We did some home renovations and slept on camp mattresses on a tiled floor for 10 weeks. I ended up with a compressed nerve in my neck and had to have a few weeks of physio.
*  Moozle and I did a 1,600 km (1000 mile) round road trip together

He didn't write it on the card but this happened just before Christmas:

*  After having worked as a contractor for over two years with a company they decided to put my husband 'officially in the system.' This required a police check.
Said police check came back and he was called into the HR office and told to leave immediately as the police check showed a list of serious criminal offences dating back about 7 years, including time spent in prison.
My husband asked for details, said he'd never been to court (except to serve on a jury!) let alone prison, but they refused to give him any information.
He was told he could only appeal via the third party company who conducted the police check. This company sent him emails, which he didn't get because the company he works for locked him out of their system.
Eventually he received a copy of the report and it showed he was working at his present employment while supposedly serving a prison term! Mmmm. Knee jerk reaction from HR who didn't bother reading the report properly.
Ten days later, with no pay during that time, after much to-ing and fro-ing with his employer and the third party who had conducted the police check, he received word that he didn't have a criminal  record after all. No apology or acknowledgement from the third party that he had been falsely accused.

And, yes, he was compensated - well, his company paid him for the time he had off, humbly apologised etc. Most of his fellow workers were appalled and angry and a couple of them knew of others in similar circumstances & they weren't surprised.

This was a very interesting experience in light of our current climate here with the Government's latest Encryption Laws and privacy. We were privy to the details of another man's criminal record, and my husband was automatically deemed to be guilty and had no right to offer a defence to his employer.
It also made us realise how difficult it must be for anyone trying to find work after serving time in gaol.
Francis Schaeffer wrote these words in 1976 and I think they are relevant even more today:

'I believe the majority of the silent majority, young and old will sustain the loss of liberties without raising their voices as long as their own life-styles are not threatened. And since personal peace and affluence are so often the only values that count with the majority, politicians know that to be elected they must promise these things. Politics has largely become not a matter of ideals - increasingly men and women are not stirred by the values of liberty and truth - but of supplying a constituency with a frosting of personal peace and affluence. They know that voices will not be raised as long as people have these things, or at least an illusion of them.' 

World Watch List - a list of the 50 most dangerous countries for Christians. India has recently made it into the top ten on this list.

Children & dumbed down reading:

'50 years ago, parents read things to children that children could not read themselves, that were not directed primarily at the senses, and that contained deep formal and material lessons for the children...But it has never been a good thing to indulge the senses as an end in themselves. The senses have always tried to dominate the intellect and to distract us from what matters more.'

A Culture of Reading has some excellent reading suggestions.

An newspaper article I read last month:

Listening

Nicholas Clifford, Professor Emeritus at Middlebury Liberal Arts College in Vermont, USA, is a Librivox narrator I've listened to and I've enjoyed everything he's done. Fortunately, he has 79 solo recordings, many of them classics.  

The Vanishing Man by R. Austin Freeman (1862-1943) is an interesting mystery/crime novel with a focus on Ancient Egyptian artifacts and practices.

Many of Freeman's books feature the medical/legal forensic investigator, Dr John Thorndyke.  The Vanishing Man was published in 1911 and was also published as The Eye of Osiris.

My ongoing Hexie Quilt project that's taking me forever. Making progress, though.

Sisters

Handicrafts with Children: Reversible Bunting

We've hosted birthday parties, engagements, baby showers, and other events at our place and a bit of decoration using fabric bunting has helped to pretty things up, especially out of doors. Below is a section of our verandah the girls decorated when we held my daughter's baby shower here last year.

Our second daughter, Zana, is getting married in September. It's an outdoor wedding and she asked her younger sister to make her some bunting to help decorate the venue. Zana chose a tone on tone white fabric & gave us 5 metres (about 5½ yards) of material which was sufficient for 150 double triangles with some fabric left over (about half a metre).
We used the bunting we had to make a diamond-shaped cardboard template.

Moozle traced around the diamond-shaped template and then cut the shapes out. The diamond fabric was then folded in half, wrong sides together, and ironed.

Width of triangle at the top when folded in half - 16 cm (6​ 1/4 in)

Sides - 22 cm (about 8½ in)

Each triangle was sewn with a 1.5cm (½ in) seam across the top - the seam allowance can be adjusted depending on the thickness of the cord you use:

Using a safety pin, cord was threaded through the seam allowance of each triangle

A small stitch sewn on each triangle can help to keep it in place but we left them unstitched so they can be moved apart or brought closer together. 

This is an ideal way to use up scraps of fabric, as you can see from the top photo where this was done. I like the scrappy look, but I think the white will look lovely in a garden setting for a wedding.

Handicrafts: colourful coasters

What You Need:

3 sheets of thin cork (packs of 15 available from Riot craft stores)
Thick white paper (such as a page from an art journal - not printer paper as it's too thin)
Glue (stick glue is fine)
A black waterproof marker
Matte/Gloss Mod Podge (I think we ordered ours from here. Expensive but goes a long way)
Paint brush for Mod Podge
Waterproof stamp pads

What You Do:

• Stick the 3 pieces of cork on top of each other (the cork from Riot has peel-off adhesive backing) 

• Put a circular object on the cork and trace around it, and then do the same on a piece of paper (Both circles should be the same size)   

• Cut out the circle on the cardboard and paper

• Glue the paper to the cork

•  Using a waterproof marker, draw or stencil a pattern onto the paper, then leave till fully dry.

Cover the paper with Mod Podge (waterproofs & seals), and leave to dry.

Rub stamp pads onto the paper to add colour

Do another 1-2 coats of Mod Podge & let dry thoroughly before use

We use these stamp pads for all sorts of projects:

Mod Podge is also avaiable at Spotlight here in Australia

Moozle hunting up craft supplies...

Reading, Thinking & Domesticity #1

My plan is to have a regular post that will include a variety of domestically related ideas and practical matters plus things that I've read that don't make it into a more formal 'book review,' such as articles, current affairs and anything else that I think is interesting.

'Domesticity' - Latin,  domesticus, from domus, a house (home)
The word 'domesticate' means to accustom to live near the habitation of man; to tame. 'Domestication' is the act of taming or reclaiming wild animals. Sometimes it feels like that in family life. We're taming and reclaiming lives, including our own.

Liturgy has been a word that has resonated with many of us over the past few years. The dictionary definition is:

  A form or formulary according to which public religious worship, especially Christian worship,

 is conducted.

I emphasised the word public above as it is an important point, especially in light of the article below. Are we seeking authentic community & commitment, or self-expression and aesthetic experience? 

‘The desire for liturgical forms of worship that are structured, ancient and formal, steeped in Scripture and Church Fathers, is commendable if the desire is for that liturgy to shape community life together, rather than being a new form of aesthetic and preference for a consumer-driven culture.But if all this is is a reflection of the "hipster magpie" making serendipitous finds in the vintage store alongside the 78 records then it's highly suspect. Taking a piece from this era, an object from that era, and blending it all together to form one's own "authentic experience", completely divorced from the values and frame of the cultures and eras from which these things are taken, simply means that yet again style has indeed trumped substance.In other words, as Jamie Smith points out, the point of all liturgy is to embed  itself as practice in our communal lives.  But if the practice of our individual lives is to be a private consumer then, ironically, a return to liturgy can mask such a practice with the appearance of worship.’


A couple of new authors I read in 2017 were:

Dorothy B. Hughes who wrote The Expendable Man in 1963. Published by Persephone Books, this is a suspenseful story that starts with a solitary man, a young doctor, driving through the desert towns of the American Southwest, as he returns to his hometown for a wedding. From the beginning there is an undercurrent of unease that builds up as the story progresses. It is a time of racial unrest, where an innocent decision taken by the wrong person in an atmosphere of prejudice, may have disastrous consequences.
A great story with a romantic thread that despite its lack of character development kept me spellbound till the end.

There was a picture in a gold frame hung on the mottled gray of the wallpaper. It was of a country cottage, smothered with roses, banked in green, shaded by leafy trees with a brook at their feet. In spite of what this man was, in spite of what he had done, the pathos of that picture smote Hugh. That it was there, a home, an old home far from this desert wasteland. That misshapen old relic was once a country child, was once a boy with dreams, once a student with aspirations, once a Doctor of Medicine. The poignant cry rose silently in him: What can happen to a man? Why? 


I’ve read books in the spy/espionage genre by John Buchan and Helen MacInnes and thoroughly enjoyed them but this was my first foray into the darker world of subterfuge where things don’t end well. I was prepared for a dismal ending with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré (also published in 1963) but I was interested in reading something a bit different, and le Carré's book is set during the Cold War, an era that has always intrigued me. However, this was such a good story that I tended to reflect not on the ending, which was inevitably tragic, but upon the clever plot, the twists and all the little hints I missed while I was reading.

John le Carré’s was a British security agent who left his life of espionage to write full-time after the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The book thrust the author into the spotlight when it was published in 1963. Written over the course of six weeks, le Carré had flown from Bonn to Berlin as soon as the work on the Berlin Wall began and looked on in disgust and terror. His observations of the ‘perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad,’ coupled with his deeply unhappy professional and private life, resulted in this chilly, disturbing tale of Alec Leamas, the spy who wanted to end his life of espionage, to ‘come in from the cold.’
Burnt out and cynical, Leamas agrees to one last assignment before he leaves his life of spying. Unwittingly he is used by British Security to secure the position of a British double agent (a man Leamus hates and believes to be the enemy) and to his dismay, ends up in East Germany. There he finds that the young woman, the one who had begun to awaken his humanity, has been caught up in the machinations of both sides because of her association with him.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a bleak look into the ruthless game of espionage with its accompanying lies, fears and treachery but it also has a few swift moments of beauty:

He knew then what it was that Liz had given him; the thing that he would have to go back and find if he ever got home to England: it was the caring about little things - the faith in ordinary life; the simplicity that made you break up a bit of bread into a paper bag, walk down to the beach and throw it to the gulls. It was this respect for triviality which he had never been allowed to possess...

Inspiring Reads from 2017 


One of the best books I read last year was Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng. In fact it's one of the most inspiring books I've ever read and I wholeheartedly recommend it!!

Exceptional books for those aged about 12 or 13 years and older were The Forgotten Daughter and The Small Woman.

Domestics

I've been cooking regular family meals for close on thirty years and in the last twenty years, I've had to cook in bulk for my growing family. Cooking en masse doesn't lend itself  to gourmet creations - at least not in my case. I have a few dishes that are standard, mostly because they are popular and don't require too much work to produce. Every now & again - actually, very rarely, I come across a new recipe that makes it into my hit list. This was one I found late last year, although I've changed the herbs around a bit to accomodate the eaters here: Herby Green Roast Chicken
The author of the website is a diabetic so the meals are low carb but she has a whole range of options which work well for families plus a free ebook. I'm trying out a few of the dishes in the ebook and this is one that I liked but everyone else was turned off by the green colour: broccoli sandwich bread.

Something I've done this year is to use cauliflower in place of white sauce when making lasagne. I just use a packet of frozen cauliflower, steam it, and them put it in the blender with a few dollops of ricotta cheese & a little seasoning. It thickens up very well and makes a good, healthy substitute.

I've always been good at beefing up mince, pardon the pun - I grate a huge amount of zucchini and mix it up in the mince as I cook it. Sometimes I add a grated carrot or two as well, but the zucchini alone is great. I add some burrito seasoning with some hot water and let it all simmer for a while. If I need to extend it even more I'll add a tin of kidney beans and some tomato puree or passata sauce. Great with salad, burritos & grated cheese.

We're in the middle of summer here and we're reasonably close to a number of beaches and my sons often head off to one of them on the weekend or after work if it's been really hot. A couple of the beaches are known for their strong rips. I read this article today about rip tides that occurred on a Sydney beach eighty years ago. This was a more unusual event, but rips kill many more people every year in Australia than shark attacks but they don't get anywhere near the same attention & warnings.

Many people think it’s just tourists and poor swimmers who get caught in rips currents. In fact, it’s young men aged 15-39 years who are most likely to die in rips. Rips are the number one hazard on Australian beaches.

Patchwork

I really like the look of triangles in patchwork and recently found an easier method of sewing them.
So now I'm experimenting with all my blue fabric scraps...

These are only two ways but there are oodles of options, as we keep finding out...

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under His wings, yea, so gently sustaineth!
Hast thou not seen how thy desires e’er have been
Granted in what He ordaineth? 

Beauty, Wonder, Keeping, Remembering...

A new find on our nature walk:

Cassinia denticulata

Beauty & Wonder...first time Uncle & Aunty

Anatomy & Physiology

Architecture

 


Old Man Banksia Tree

Nature Notebook

Outside work 

A Latin lesson 

First rose of the season

Physics experiments

The Wonder Book of Chemistry by Jean Henri Fabre - Experiments with the Breath

The Grammar of Poetry - we've been looking at metaphors. This page has fifteen Biblical metaphors.


A drawing narration from a chapter of The Once & Future King - Morgan le Fay's Castle Chariot which was made of food:

'It rose from its lake of milk in a mystic light of its own - in a greasy, buttery glow...'

Handiwork

Moozle continues with scrapbooking, stamping and cardmaking. She made a photo album for her older sister's baby but I forgot to get a photo - she gets ideas from Jennifer McGuire Ink & Sweet Bio Design. Today she made a whole stack of various cards - birthday, Christmas, Get Well etc and yesterday she made this desk calendar:

Picture Study

Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) is the artist we're currently studying. I didn't know anything about him and would have overlooked his work completely but I saw he was on the Ambleside Online artist's rotation and so decided to have a look at his work. A German Romantic artist, his work is atmospheric and moody, and we're enjoying spending some time studying his lovely art. We're doing some of the pictures AO recommends and adding in others we like:

 Wanderer Above the Mist, 1817-1818

 Cross in the Mountains, (detail) 1808

The Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810

On Board a Sailing Ship, 1819

Woman at the Window, 1822

Chalk Cliffs on Rugen, 1818-19

Morning, 1820-21

Linking up at Keeping Company

Weekly Review

We've just finished an exam week but as our scanner is defunct I'm not able to post any examples at present.
Instead, here are some places of interest and other links I hope you will find useful.

The High Quality Global University which costs next to nothing. Very interesting...our eldest daughter is nearly 28 years old and has just finished paying off her HECs debt from her degree. When my husband went through university in the 1980's, the universities in Australia had no tuition costs. It's a very different situation for our children now so we were very interested to read this article.

Their website is here.

Enjoying this audio:

David Clarke also narrates some other great books. See his page at Librivox.
There are some books that really need a British narrator (or someone who can make themselves sound British) - Sherlock Holmes is one of these, of course.
Ruth Golding is another British narrator and she has a list of other Librivox narrators she recommends on her blog.

I enjoyed listening to this Podcast during the week. Folksongs have always been a part of my life, growing up and afterwards. Some good thoughts here:

Moozle has been paper crafting and making Christmas presents (and much mess...)
This is a video she's used, one of the 'Sweet Bio Design' series on YouTube that she enjoys. It's in Italian but has English subtitles:





This is another she used for ideas...mostly for the actual box and then added her own decorations.





I've started putting together a page with all of the Australian/Asia Pacific living books we've used. It will take a little while but it's here in its beginning stages: Towards an Australian Charlotte Mason Curriculum.



Linking up at Weekly Wrap-up

A Fortnight's Review

It's the 'official' school holidays here, not that we follow them, but we tend to end up changing our usual schedule because we don't have our regular weekly activities. Last week Moozle and I taught a group of ten children how to weave using a hula hoop as a loom in kid's holiday programme our church runs twice a year. Benj volunteered as one of the leaders and helped to run games & activities. At other times he's been rostered on First Aid as he has his Senior First Aid Certificate.

The ten children in our workshop were aged around 6 to 10 years of age; about equal numbers of boys and girls. None of them had ever done anything like this and had no idea what they were in for. One little boy wasn't impressed at first. The workshop he volunteered for was cancelled so he got put into ours. "I can't do this...this is boring!" Not a great start, but I kept telling him he'd actually enjoy it once he got the hang of it. The workshop was about an hour and a half long and Moozle & I had already put the warp on the looms (and spent a couple of days cutting up old t-shirts...) so we just had to teach them how to weave. About 10 minutes before the end of the class I told them we'd have to start looking at finishing the weaving and getting it off the looms. The kids didn't want to stop - including the reluctant boy! They kept saying, "Just one more colour..." so their weaving would be bigger. I took some photos once they got the hang of it and they were all thrilled with their finished work.

There are oodles of links on Pinterest and tutorials on youtube on how to weave on a hula hoop.
Update: a video link is here (they use a fancier sort of hula hoop in this one but we just had the normal cheap version) & here.
 

Our Reading

Benj:

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - I wrote about this book here.
He's also continuing with The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer which I finished recently.

Moozle:  

The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin - this is a well-written mystery story that Moozle really enjoyed. A good puzzle with twists that keeps you guessing until the end. A Newbery Medal winner, 1979.

Me:

Stalin: Russia's Man of Steel by Albert Marrin. A good biography for ages 13 years and up. Some thoughts on it here.

A Decline in Prophets by Sulari Gentill - this is the second book in this murder series. I wrote about the first one here.
Set in Australia during the 1930's, this book picks up in pace from the first one, as I predicted, and launches almost immediately into the action. The very likeable main characters from the first book turn up again and find themselves caught up in a crime scene on board a cruise ship. Again, the author weaves crime and mystery with historical events and some notable people of the time and creates a very interesting and unusual story. A great way to learn about some not so well known parts of Australia's history.

Other bits & pieces:


I've been using Singapore Maths for a few years now with Moozle and while I think it's very good at showing the 'why' behind some of the maths, I don't think it's a thorough as some of the maths I've used with her older siblings. I was going through some books I'd packed away and found some unused "Key to..." workbooks so I started using them plus I'm going back to an A Beka text I used in the past as it covers things like clocks!! Most of the clocks at our place are digital and I was shocked recently when I realised that she had difficulty telling the time on a normal clock. She'll still do Singapore until we've finished the books I've already bought and then we may shift to Saxon for high school.

My husband and I have very different tastes in movies but we watched this together and both thought it was very good. Set at the time of the building of the Berlin Wall, it is based on real events and  raises some thoughtful questions regarding moral codes and law. See History vs Hollywood for more details.

Linking up at Weekly Wrap-up