On the very last day of the old year, about an hour before they closed shop for their New Year’s Eve, DH and I walked into the Volkswagen dealership and bought a brand new VW Jetta wagon. It was a surprise to myself as well, since we are thorough second-handers. The idea had been to …
Author Archives: kaat
Creaking Cold
It’s been a while since I blogged. The reasons were house guests over the holidays with whom we gladly dug in like hermits, eating wonderful home-cooked meals, playing board games with the kids when we could locate them, and reading books by the fire. Also, we watched Sharknado 2: The Second One together. It’s a …
I’m Cashing In!
It’s two years old but there’s no expiration date on it.
Junco
The juncos have arrived from up north. This morning we were all still in bed when there was a loud rap against our bedroom window pane. I jumped out of bed, knowing it was a bird that had just collided with the glass. I looked out and there, among the flock of juncos grazing in …
No Sharks in the Water
I dropped off the homeschool letter at the Superintendent’s office. They’ve been very supportive, and almost everything I asked for – if Amie can keep coming to school for out-of-hours and even in-hour classes, if she can keep using the online platforms for math and typing, etc. – they’ve given us. So now it was …
We’re Going to Homeschool
We decided – Amie, DH and I – to homeschool Amie for the coming semester and probably also fifth grade. We love the school she is going to at present. It’s a smallish (ca. 400 kids) neighborhood K-5 school where kindness really matters, where the teachers are deeply caring and the staff a charm. Amie …
Sun Motions
This is a cool tool. Put yourself on the north pole, or at, say, 74.8 degrees N latitude. Is this nature study? I’ve rediscovered Tim Morton’s books on ecology, among them Ecology without Nature and The Ecological Thought, where he introduces the concept of dark ecology as a means of expressing the “irony, ugliness, and …
Rotten Gifts
People have begun dropping off their rotten pumpkins! We have a couple of gigantic ones and quite a horde of little ones in the pile already. Wait… Someone couldn’t wait to enjoy the feast.
Mead Clearing
The mead I made in September has cleared a lot. This is the bottle (front) in September: It’s much lighter now. Here’s the bottle next to the year-old, wholly clarified mead: The bottom is a moonscape of dead yeast people and quaintly coalesced beeswax. But something else in the yeasts must make them consume and …
Hurt Chicken
A couple of days ago Amie and her friends ran inside in a panic: there’s blood, blood! I ran out with them and found a crazy chicken yard with screaming chickens and screaming children. Also a broad streak of blood on the roost. Imagine my relief when I found it was just one of the …