First of all – I much prefer the hand written invite as it is far more personal.

Second – Remember to include the crucial details like the date!

Third – It helps to draw the eye to the date with fabulous illustrations.

Don’t forget time and place!  Try to be as particular as you can, but if you can’t be super particular, you might want to add in some more awesome illustrations.  This will help to distract your guests from their frustrations.

Instruct your guests as to what they should contribute.

Don’t be afraid to be specific.

You may even have to get a little snippy about it, but don’t worry – it will only make the party better.

I like to give my guests options.  Not a lot of options, but enough to make them feel a teensy bit empowered.

Always include a map.

Always!

Cross out any bad maps that you may have drawn by accident.

I struggle with RSVP’s because I hate to obligate people with my party invites and let’s face it – an RSVP does have a certain Nazi like obligation to it.  So I like to give people an out.  I tell them that it is perfectly okay to NOT RSVP, but if they don’t, they may not get any food.  This puts us all on the same page.

This is the hand drawn map that I slaved over for this invite, but I tried to make it look like I just threw it together!  Because that helps people to relax!

Always include a key with your maps.

Because what hell is map without key?

Help your guests with pronunciation.

That way when they stop and ask for directions, they won’t sound like idiots.

Promise to be smart for them!

Be specific in your directions!  This will help your guests to arrive in time to help weed the pepper patch.

How exactly could you resist an invitation such as this?

But remember  – there will aways be people who are threatened by your genius.

But you’re friendly so go ahead and invite them anyway!

It’s just not that hard to give them a faulty map.

I spotted these shoes in a catalog the other day.

And even though the price was ludicrous, I decided that I must have them.

Yes.

I must.

I must have them and I will wear them to…

I will wear them when I…

I will wear them when I am at the…

And that is when I decided to go back to college.

So that I have somewhere to wear these shoes.

Because I just don’t see myself wearing these while I am working the cash register at the garden center.

Nor could I find a good enough reason to wear them while chauffeuring the kids, shopping for groceries, or watching movies on Netflix.

I also don’t think they would be very good gardening shoes.

I guess I could get a different job instead of going back to school. One that might require the occasional uppity ensemble that would go with a pair of bright red wedges, but that seems like a lot of hassle and commitment just for a pair of shoes. Plus, I really like my job.

So college it is.

I’ve been thinking about going back for a while anyway.  But with the urgent need to purchase these shoes pressing down on me, it feels kind of like an emergency now.  I am not sure what I would study, but I have long wanted to do some exhaustive research on the topic of whether Jane Austen was possibly an atheist.  I know she was a vicar’s daughter, but could not that very fact only serve to point her more in the direction of atheism?  And when you add in her rapier wit, her ability to slice through the bullshit of her time and the way she made fun of everything and everybody in her books, you could regard her at the very least as an extreme skeptic. I see no evidence for a devout faith in her books, but I do see a profound desire in her writing for people to treat each other well.

It would be easier to consider Jane an atheist if she had been able to read Darwin’s Origin of Species.  So I decided to find out if that was even a remote possibility and quickly sketched out a time-line to see if their paths could possibly have intersected.

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Charles Darwin/ Jane Austen (and other literary figures) timeline…

1809 – Charles Darwin is born

1811 – Jane Austen publishes Sense and Sensibility.

1813 – Pride and Prejudice published

1814 – Mansfield Park published

1816 – Charlotte Bronte is born and that same year Jane writes Emma

1817 – Jane Austen dies – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion published posthumously.

We pause momentarily here wishing Jane had lived to write a hundred more books…

1822 – Louis Pasteur is born

1830 – Emily Dickinson is born

1832 – Louisa May Alcott is born.

1838 – Best sellers this year are Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist both by Dickens

1847 – Charlotte Bronte writes Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte writes Wuthering Heights

1850 – Nathaniel Hawthorne writes The Scarlett Letter

1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe writes Uncle Tom’s Cabin

1856 – Neanderthal Skull is found near Dusseldorf Germany and five pro slavers are murdered by John Brown in my own neck of the woods – Pottawatomie Creek.

1859 – Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species is published.

From this time-line one can see that Darwin would have had no influence over Jane, and yet Jane had considerable influence over Darwin.  She was one of his favorite authors.  Which brings me back to the idea of Jane having the kind of mind that could have doubted the existence of God, in the midst of a religious family, even without the overwhelming scientific evidence that Darwin would eventually provide (that being that the world could easily have created itself without the intervention of a deity.)  If a mind like Jane’s was appealing to Darwin, it is interesting to consider what Jane’s reaction to Darwin might have been.  I’d like to imagine the two of them exchanging letters, though I dare say that Jane’s letters would have been a lot more fun to read than those of Darwin.

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A few Jane Austen Quotes that point towards her general attitude of skepticism…

A woman, especially, if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be

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Now, what was this blog about?

Oh yes!

Shoes!

I guess I don’t really need to go to college to find out if Jane was an atheist.  I can do my own research on the internet and Google is far less expensive than a Master’s Degree.   Although it doesn’t really give me an opportunity to wear a pair of fabulous red wedges does it?

You never know what you are going to experience on a river deep in the Ozarks of Missouri. Wild boar, rabid coons, wild-eyed hillbillies, and then there’s the times when a guy gets his face smashed in by a mad man on a canoe and wobbles into your picnic spot with a bleeding head.

We had stopped for lunch on a sandy island in the middle of the river and the man in the photo and two of his friends pulled up beside us in their canoes. The guy with the bleeding face said he had just been attacked by a man ‘for no good reason.’

His friends were strangely quiet about the attack.

We weren’t sure what exactly ‘no good reason’ meant so we kept our distance from Mr. Smashed Face and his entourage making quiet clucking sounds of sympathy as we quickly herded the kids to the other side of the island.

The guy was clearly in distress. He held his bleeding face in his hands. His friends waited patiently beside him until he pulled himself back together and then they all took off together in their canoes down the river.  We never saw him again.

When we reached the end of our trip, there were half a dozen rangers lined up on shore. Evidently, Mr. Smashed Face had reported the crime and the rangers were waiting for the head basher to show up. There were rumors flying around about a severely unbalanced man out there… somewhere… on the Current River… who randomly bashes people in the head ‘for no good reason’.  Scenes from the movie Deliverance flashed through my mind. I was glad we were done for the day.

Strangely, the strange times were not yet over.

When we got back to camp there was a different guy in a pick up truck who kept circling the campground with a confederate flag flying proudly behind him. Eventually, the rangers asked Mr. Confederate Flag to stop his parade, which was a relief, because I don’t know what kind of person circles a campground with a confederate flag flying unless they are looking for trouble.

Turns out that Mr. Confederate Flag was not a Missourian. He was from further south and we were to eventually learn that one of his  buddies was from Illinois as he stopped by our campground to give us an update on how the rangers were treating (or mistreating) Mr. Confederate Flag.  We asked him why his friend was parading the flag in the first place. The Illinoisan said that his friend was a soldier and he didn’t really know why he was doing it. Then he made sure to remind us that ‘Illinois is where the union was born.” We just nodded our heads and let the silence fall between us. He eventually wandered down the road to his own camp probably stopping at each site on his way to give everyone else an update too.

The rest of the trip was without incident and I have some photos up under ‘snapshot’ on the header, but the confederate flag incident made me wonder what people think about that particular symbol.  To me it is an emblem of slavery and war and general backwards thinking. But to other people it means something entirely different.  What does the confederate flag mean to you?  And in the spirit of the river weekend when the following type of question was asked by they boys several times – who do you think would win in a fight?  Mr. Smashed Face or Mr. Confederate Flag?

We floated the Current River in Missouri this past weekend and I am still recovering. And when I’m not recovering I am getting stung three times by a wasp while trying to water my garden. And when I am not getting stung, I am running kids all over hell’s half acre. And when I am not running kids all over hell’s half acre I am staring helplessly at my filthy house and seventeen tons of wet, muddy river laundry. I don’t know if I will ever get to sit down and play with my new blog. Dang it!

Hopefully I will get the results up for the Jane Austen mug giveaway by this evening. Late this evening. So late that it will be more like tomorrow evening or possibly the evening after that. I laughed all the way through the entries the first time I read them which was a nice distraction from the present chaos.

Off to find yet another distraction,

Rechelle

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.