Browsing Archives for Life

I was looking over some old posts and I ran across this photo. I took it when we happened upon the sculpture of Bob Doris. Three boys happily smiling for the camera and then there’s old Mister Furrowed Brow in the background.  There’s always someone with a furrowed brow in my family, although I willingly confess that it is usually me.

If you can think of a caption for this photo, leave it in the comments. You can enter more than once, but try not to enter so often that you become an prickly irritant in the eyeball of the internet.  I would hate to have to furrow my brow at you.  I may see if Dear Charles can help judge too as he is far less prone to brow furrowing than I.  Hopefully we’ll hear from Dear Charles with the very first installment of ‘Dear Charles’ by the end of the day.  He has his letters ready to go, but his room is not quite ready.  We are waiting for the paint to dry.

Oh!

The PRIZE!!!

The winner of this caption contest will receive a Jane Austen coffee mug!

I found these mugs because an alert reader alerted me to them.

Thanks Kathleen!

I am afraid that once I arrived at the Etsy site that creates these mugs,  I sort of lost my head and purchased several other items as well.

What is one to do when one stumbles upon mugs, clothing and note cards bearing hand written Jane Austen quotes!?!

Much too hard to resist!

So if you have a caption – leave it in the comments and win a Jane Austen mug.

I’ll pick a winner and if I can get a hold of Dear Charles, I’ll try to coerce him into picking a winner too.

Contest ends Sunday night.

Packing for a canoe trip down the Current River,

Rechelle

I just read this article fom the BBC.  The French parliament is poised to debate making it illegal to wear a niqab or a burka in public places.  Both Spain and Belgium have already passed similar laws.  The penalty for the proposed ban will be 150 euros for women who are caught wearing a full burka in public and 30,000 euros and one year in jail for men who force a woman to wear a burka in public.  I have to admit that my heart jumps for joy at the idea of outlawing burkas.  Although I am positive that there are many women who ‘freely’ choose to wear the burka – I am not sure that anything that is done to please a tyrannical deity is really done freely.  Still – let’s say that there are women who would choose to wear a burka even if they weren’t Muslim.  Let’s say that there are women who would prefer to be clad in a garment that swamps them in fabric from the top of their head to the floor, leaving only a thick netting around their eyes and nose, while they are out and about shopping for groceries and picking up the dry cleaning and taking the kids to the park…. yeah… it’s just not very likely is it.

Personally I think the term ‘religious freedom’ is an oxymoron.  You’re not really free if you are operating under the idea of either pleasing or appeasing some deity.  Which I guess is where the term ‘free thinkers’ came from.  See how quick I am?  See how fast I can piece things together?

So what do you think?  Burka or no burka?  Should a country outlaw religious garb?  Where does this end?  Will they make the pope take off that silly hat too?  What about nuns?  Their costumes are not unlike a burka, yet no one really goes around saying that nuns are oppressed.  Are nuns oppressed?  What if they make Michelle Duggar put on a pair of pants?  Will she then go to hell?  Why do the women always have to wear the dresses in conservative religion?  How come the men never wear the dresses?  Jesus wore a dress.  At least in every picture I have ever seen of him he is wearing a dress.  It is not a very good dress.  It’s not a very well cut or fitted or even remotely flattering dress… but it’s STILL A DRESS!  All the disciples, the prophets, the kings, the second kings, Noah, Adam, David, Joseph, Abraham, ALL OF THEM WORE DRESSES!

Attention Michelle Duggar’s Husband (Mister Michelle Duggar?) – If you really love God, you need to put on a dress!

But back to that burka thing.

I want the burka gone.  I want it eradicated from the face of the earth.  I never want to see another woman stuck inside of one of those things for as long as I live.  It’s just so messed up.  It should be gone.

Yay France and Spain and Belgium!  Good job!  Make the burka go away.  Make it so.

Well – I guess you know what I think about France’s proposed burka law.  What do you think?

He is sort of like a wind up toy you know.

He has that sort of ‘take me to your leader’ quality.

Sometimes, when he is being particularly lively or unusually irreverent, or out of nowhere responds visibly to someone’s cry of pain (or cracks the thinnest of smiles at one of my jokes) I ask him if he’s had a new chip embedded in his head.  Much of the time I am positive that he is either a cybertron or an outright alien.  But in this photo I am really just cranking an old fashioned ice cream maker located just under his uh… his uh… his ‘hind quarters’.  The whole story is over at Farmhouse and Garden.  Do I really have to embed a link?  Can you not just move the mouse over the icon up there on the header and click that?  Would it kill you?  Just click on the ugly rose photo up there.  You can do it!  Yes You Can!

In the new blog, I will never have to write these ‘further clicking type’ paragraphs again.  So that at least is something!

Three posts in one day.  Weird.

Saw this at Unreasonable Faith and could not resist posting it here too.  Steve Carrel as an Islamic zealot.  TOO FUNNY!

First you have to measure the depth of the water in cubits.

So you know how big to make your ark.

And then you assemble a large vessel using a great amount of gopher wood.

This is Shem…

Ham…

And Japeth.

(Japeth always was the thinker…)

And this is Caanan.

You know the one…

The grandson that grandpa Noah cursed when Caanan’s dad Ham saw Noah naked in his tent after an all night bender in the vineyard.

Because this demonstrates God’s mercy, justice, love and his divine and omnipotent insanity.

Finally the time came to see if the ark was seaworthy…

The sons of Noah gathered some inner-tubes.

They hoisted the ark out to the water…

Deeper…

Deeper…

Deeper…

Even deeper…

Yes… deeper.

The Country Doctor removed the inner-tubes.

For some reason he seems to think that this vessel is going to float on it’s own.

He really must be a man of astounding faith.

And then God shut the door.

So the Country Doctor decided to scrap the ark project and build a dock instead.

“If we are going to drown for our faithless iniquity, ” he said, “we might as well fry up a nice mess of fish caught from this here dock which we shall fashion with our own hands, in our own likeness, before we go.”

This is a weight.

One of the Country Doctor’s patients made this weight just for this ark project.

Which is now a dock project.

Because an ark is supposed to float, but a dock is not.

At least not this dock.  NO, no no… not THIS dock!

For some reason that I can’t really understand, the CD hates floating docks.  He hates them passionately.  He regards floating docks with the same disdain that I reserve for store bought salad dressing, Folgers coffee and Pioneer Woman.  Which explains why his dock looks like an ark… well… it looks more like an ark than a dock…because he designed it to stick into the bottom of the pond.  So that it won’t float.  There will be no floating with this dock.  None.  None at all.  Don’t even say the words ‘floating dock’ in front of him.  He will react like you just poured hot acid on his inner thigh. And yes… this dock seems to be missing the actual ‘dock part’ but that is only because… because… I have no idea why.  I guess he intended to build the ‘dock part’ later.

The trouble is that his dock did float.  He didn’t think that it would, but it did.  It was designed to be the extreme opposite of a floating dock , but it is a floating dock anyway.  Evidently wood floats.  Even really heavy, creosote soaked wood floats.  Who knew?

And since floating docks are the CD’s worst nightmare, this was not a good moment.

Fortunately, the Country Doctor had a solution.  He had a scrap metal weight.

He thought he would use the weight to sink the poles into the bottom of the pond and hold the dock in place during floods.

Instead, he is going to use it to keep the dock from floating.

They took the weight out to the dock on a hastily assembled mini-ark.

Drew got a little nervous.

He was worried that his dad was going to drown putting that weight on the dock.

I told him that his dad could just let go if he got into trouble, but Drew didn’t buy it.

He is one of little faith.

The CD and Calder attempted to attach the weight to a bolt that was sticking out of one of the poles.

They worked at if for ten minutes.

And then they dropped the weight.

And it rapidly slid to the bottom of the pond.

Never to be seen again.

I guess the boys are going to have to hold that dock in place for… like… probably… forever.

The Country Doctor kept trying to salvage his dock.

For one hundred years he labored.

But it was all for naught.

It began to rain.

It rained for forty days and forty nights.

His faithless family abandoned him for higher ground.

The promise of a rainbow was not enough for them.

It left them feeling empty… and hollow… and in need of a hot cup of tea.

“What’s a stupid rainbow when we could be playing COD on the X-box?” they said.

The next day the CD began to draw up plans for a new dock design.

This one will ALSO absolutely NOT FLOAT.

He may not have the gift of prophecy, nor speak with the tongues of angels, but once he sets his mind to something.

There ain’t no changing it.

We are in the midst of a very quiet holiday weekend.  In year’s past, the Country Doctor has organized and been one of the primary forces behind our local Fourth of July parade.  It is a really nice parade and our family spent most of the three or four past Fourth of Julys setting up main street, manning entrances and exits, and cleaning things up when it was over.  This year my husband decided to hand the reigns over to someone else and so we are staring down a very quiet Fourth.  Which seems kind of weird and kind of pathetic and sort of lazy and very non-spastic for us – especially for the Country Doctor.  It’s such a listless weekend (comparatively speaking) that maybe we should just go ahead and move into the nursing home or get ourselves hooked up to a respirator and have nourishment pumped directly into our veins.  As hoisting that spoon all the way up to our pie holes seems a bit daunting right now.

We are at loose ends.

How does one celebrate the Fourth without cleaning all the trash off of Main street?

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In other news…

I spent a night at a fireworks stand with Jack and Ethan. We were on guard duty, protecting the fireworks from any bandits and robbers that might come sneaking under the tent flaps in the middle of the night. The stand is a fundraiser for Ethan’s choir. Much to our dismay, no one broke in during our night of surveillance. So all I got is a poor photo or our sleeping arrangements and this accompanying lame paragraph.

However!

There has been plenty of baseball going on.

Turns out that my son Drew did break his thumb.  I had to take him to an orthopedic surgeon in Topeka because the break was in his growth plate.  The surgeon came into the exam room, introduced himself, looked at Drew’s thumb and then said, “The good Lord knew what he was doing when he made our hands, as they break all the time, but they generally heal without any problems.”

I just nodded and smiled at him, but of course a million questions about this surgeon’s deity were beginning to form in my mind.

The surgeon went on to further explain “Now a leg or an arm is a different thing.  If a kid breaks his leg and the break is in the growth plate, the leg can grow real funny.  It can grow out to the side or be shorter than the other leg.  It’s a pretty bad deal.  But when it comes to the hand, it usually heals very nicely.”

“Well that’s a relief!” I so badly wanted to say.  “It sure is a good thing that Drew broke his thumb and not his leg as this god of yours seems to be somewhat limited in foresight and insight as well as imagination and the old improperly healed sideways leg would make it pretty hard for Drew to run the bases!”

But I didn’t say that…

Because this surgeon was making a cast for my son.

Which is probably not the best time to ridicule a person’s beliefs.

GOOD NEWS!

We thought Drew’s broken thumb would mean the end of his baseball season.

But that has not been the case.

Once he figured out that he could fit a glove over his cast…

And wrap his hand around a bat.

He just kept right on playing.

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In other… other... news…

I went to the Manhattan (Kansas) farmer’s market today and took some very exciting produce photos.  You may not think that the words ‘exciting’ and ‘produce photos’ should be in the same sentence, but you would be wrong.

Okay…

Maybe you would be right.

It just depends on what your definition of ‘exciting’ is.

You can see these (exciting or not) photos at Farmhouse and Garden.

I would post them here, but I didn’t want to over excite anyone without fair warning.

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In Summary…

Our town does have a really nice Fourth of July experience.

There’s a carnival…

That can honestly be a little too exciting…

A parade, and  a fabulous fireworks show.

It’s the ultimate in small town America celebrations.

Hmmmmmmmmm.

Perhaps next year we should invite some people over to share it with us?

It would give us an excuse to shut down the respirators for a day or two.

Potato Salad and Homemade Ice Cream!

Rechelle

Thanks for the link Emily.

A few strange thoughts that have been clinking around in my mind lately.  Things that I have heard or read recently that have become lodged in my nebulous nebulum.  So with the aid of good old Google, I looked them up to find out more about them…

STRANGE STICKING THOUGHT #1

The androgynous mind is the most brilliant mind.

I read this somewhere… in a book I think… and it just got stuck in my head.  I can’t remember what I was reading or where I was or what I was wearing or if I had a snack or beverage at the time.  I just remember this particular phrase.  I don’t know why exactly it stood out to me.  But I looked it up and here is what I found…

1.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the first writer to state that the great mind is androgynous.

2.  Virginia Woolf took this idea and ran with it applying this idea to her own writing and to other great writers.  Woolf believed that Jane Austen and Shakespeare had the rare and wonderful, perfectly androgynous mind, while Charlotte Bronte, declared the better writer by Woolf, did not climb to the lofty heights of attaining an androgynous mind.  To read a brief and interesting essay on this topic – click here.

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A few Virginia Woolf Quotes…

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.

To read more about this author with whom I am almost entirely unfamiliar - click here.
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I think I can grasp the idea of an androgynous mind and I would guess that in this contemporary era, where the lines between masculine and feminine grow more and more smudged, that the androgynous mind is not quite as rare as it may have been in the days of Coleridge and Woolf.  And yet, has anyone attained the brilliance of Jane Austen?

Hmmmmmmm.

I think not.

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STRANGE STICKING THOUGHT #2

When the population of boys in a given country reaches a certain level, countries tend to go to war.

Again, I don’t remember what I was reading when I came across this idea, but as the mother of four sons I tend towards paranoia whenever the idea of war comes up.  I have four sons on the cusp of draft-ability (need I say more?). It turns out that there isn’t much of a historical precedent for  a link between large male populations and war, but here is a fascinating article on the problems of countries (like China) with a preference for male children who have self selected a population with too few girls that may result in violence in the near future.

STRANGE STICKING THOUGHT #3

Testosterone is the chemical that allows us to be skeptical.

I read an article like the one linked above a while back and it made me wonder if my ability to finally reject the faith of my childhood has anything to do with an increase in testosterone in my brain. I found this article which seems to lead to that very conclusion.  As women age they have more testosterone.  Testosterone makes a person more skeptical.  Therefore testosterone may have played a vital role in causing me to become an atheist!  What is going to happen to Michelle Duggar if on or around her fortieth fifth birthday, she receives a mighty surge of testosterone to her brain? I doubt that she would become an atheist as her brain is far too addled to think that clearly, but she might go as far to participate in the apostasy of PUTTING ON A PAIR OF PANTS!

STRANGE STICKING THOUGHT #4

Red heads feel less pain.

I don’t know where I heard this one, but I had to find out if there was anything to it.  According to this article, it is actually red headed women who feel less pain.  I know, I know, it’s one of those things you think is a myth, but it turns out, it’s true.  Also red heads are about to become extinct. Well… in a manner of speaking they are…

STRANGE STICKING THOUGHT #5

Richard Dawkins invented a word – ‘meme’.  Did you know that?  Did you know that it rhymes with ‘cream’ and not ‘Fifi’?  Because I thought it rhymed with ‘Fifi’.  Here’s a weird story for you…

The CD and I were sitting around. I had the laptop as usual.  He had the paper as usual.  When we were both reading.  We frequently end up discussing words that appear in whatever it is we are reading.  The CD looked up and said, “Do you know what a meme is?

“Not really.” I said, “Why don’t I look it up?”

So I googled it and discovered that the word was coined by Dawkins, which is bizarre because Richard Dawkins is kind of a central part of my life right now.  You know the God shaped hole that formed when I became an atheist?  Yeah.  Well Dawkins kind of sits in that spot now.   Along with a lot of other people and resources and books and YouTube videos…but for a new atheist, Dawkins is kind of a central figure.  He’s kind of like the Jesus figure… or maybe he’s more like the apostle Paul, except Paul was an asshole, so Dawkins can’t be like him.  But he is sort of like an evangelist, except no one goes to hell in his version of reality.  So I was like – omg!  Dawkins invented this word!  It’s like a sign or something!  But then I remembered that atheists don’t believe in signs, but still… it seemed like maybe it was one.

So the CD and I read the definition of meme and we discussed it at length and I still don’t really understand what a meme is.  I mean, I grasp it on a certain level and it really just seems like a fancy word for trend or fad.  But I guess it is far more reaching than that.  And somehow it replicates like a gene?  So it is comparable to blah, blah, blah… yeah – I don’t really get it.  Here is a spot to start if you want to really understand what a meme is.  And here is a list of examples. If you are truly able to comprehend exactly what this word means, you must have a brilliant androgynous mind.

Here’s the quote from Dawkin’s book The Selfish Gene that birthed the term – meme.

“We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.”

Tuna Fish Sandwiches,

Rechelle