Phew. This weekend we finally got our asses in gear (that’s the expression, right?) and started to clear more of the to-be-vegetable patch to the side of the house. Yesterday we cut down whatever overgrown chrismas trees needed removing, mostly using a bowsaw (I really enjoy using a bowsaw; a friend lent us an electric …
Category Archives: books (grownups’)
Chile’s Quit Now Challenge: How Did I Do?
I pledged, on 6 June, not to buy any more books for myself or Amie, and no more toys for Amie. With the exception of two books I bought for 75 c from the library – so for charity really, right? – I did not wander. I waited until to report on it because I …
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The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver
Driftwood Every year, once a year, I need to return to that long poem by Mary Oliver, The Leaf and the Cloud (published in 2000). It is a poem like life, with everything in it, only magnified and condensed. I can’t say much about it, only that it reverberates deeply with me, and comforts me, …
Chile’s Quit Now Challenge
I discovered Chile’s Quit Now Challenge (see the logo to the sidebar: it’s the clearest, most uncluttered, Peak Oil logo I’ve come across). I devoted some deep thinking about what I would give up… Cigarettes? Diet Coke? McDonalds? Never did that / haven’t done that in half a decade. Paper towels? TV? Airco? Plastic bags? …
Dinosaurs are Extinct: Death, Mourning and Our Children
I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini. I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read …
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The Puffin Zine (part 2)
Some more pages from my 2004 zine The Puffin! Pages 9 and 10 make me laugh. I like the second last drawing (page 11) best of all. I still remember that meal in detail: how the food tasted, what we talked about, the atmosphere in the kitchen, even at the end of what kind of …
The Moonlight Chronicles
I got my first Moonlight Chronicle way back in 2004. I loved it and subscribed to a couple of future issues. I got so hooked on that great feeling of opening the mailbox and seeing that small but thick envelope nestled there, with one or other MC stamp and Dan’s crazy handwriting on it. So …
Sick Child and More Reading
Amie is ill again. She has “upper respiratory problems”. One child sniffs > Amie gets a cold. Our trip to the Science Museum was fun, but by the evening I could see that we had brought home more than a bunch of good memories. Yesterday she spent the day glued to me. She slept until …
My 2004 Zine The Puffin (part 1)
Years ago, in 2004, I put together a (literally) small “zine” called The Puffin. It was a zine for family and friends, inspired by Dan Price’s awesome Moonlight Chronicles and Danny Gregory’s Everyday Matters blog (before he became so insanely popular). I just happened upon the original .jpg version of The Puffin – I no …
Letting Her Pour Her Own Tea
DH is a Montessori preschool alumnus and I have always liked the Montessori approach, not knowing very much about it. When it was time to sign Amie up for a preschool, I started reading up on it, because we wanted her to go a Montessori preschool (She didn’t get in because of a stupid breakdown …