Two Good Linky Things

1. I made Mark Sisson's brisket, and it was better than everything. Better than sex, better than peppermint bark, better than the two-hours-after-Crossfit high, better than Jane Austen. Just on the basis of this brisket, Mark is now my third favorite person after Aaron and Livy.

2. Here's a link to Ansley's YouTube, where she posted a video of me that you should all see. If you want to sum me right up, this video is it.

10 Good Things from this Past Weekend

1. Objectivist weddings rock. I love how the ceremonies are all about the couple's values. And with my favorite traditional things, like gorgeous wedding dresses and lots of dancing!

2. Amy and Adam Mossoff are super fun. Who knew they were such good dancers? And that we would talk about sci-fi and fantasy books all through dinner? (One bad thing is that now I want them to live in Atlanta, and they don't!)

3. After a little more than two months without a cigarette, I had two puffs of one, and it nearly killed me. It was truly a horrible, not-fun experience. And that will make it easy not to smoke in the future.

4. I drank alcohol! How fun is that?!

5. I got all dressed up once and kinda dressed up once, and I looked super pretty and Whole30 skinny. (Another bad thing: I wore panty hose. That's how much I like you, Travis and Colleen.)

6. I read a poem at the wedding, and I didn't get the hiccups. Check out: EBB's Sonnet 21

7. Aaron (good, sweet Aaron) drove me to Taco Cabana after the post-reception drinking and bought me the most wonderful late night tacos in the world.

8. Jenn and Brendan, saints that they are, let Livy spend the night after the wedding, so I slept in a little and had a hot shower before anyone needed me to do anything for them.

9. At midnight, we all toasted Jenn's 40th birthday, which we are going to celebrate soon with a visit to the Shakespeare Tavern.

10. It's Thanksgiving break! I may have to work a lot on papers, but I don't have to go to class. So it's sort of a vacation!!

A Really Good Day

Livy and I had an awesome day today, and I just wanted to write about how great it was. Our schedule has returned to my usual in-school schedule. I go to school and work Monday-Thursday, and I get Livy Thursday night and keep her until Monday morning. So, I had been missing her all week long.

So Friday morning, I got up before her and spent some time on the computer chillin' on Facebook and Twitter and the Blogosphere. Then, I cuddled Aaron awake. (I am trying to get him on my new early schedule, so I dare not let him sleep in.) When I was reasonably sure he wouldn't roll over and fall asleep again, I went in and cuddled Livy awake too.

With all this cuddling taken care of, I took a shower. When I got out of my hot, pleasant shower, Livy was getting ready. We decided we would go to the Tellus Science Museum (which we love and have a membership to and go to all the time). Usually, Livy wants to stay home and do quiet restful alone kind of things, like books and movies and video games. But today she was up for adventure, so yay!

At the museum, we watched a movie about how the earth was formed and how life evolved on it and half a movie about Saturn (cause it was dead boring and we walked out). We looked at the fossil gallery with lots of different dinosaurs, huge mammals (mammoths and such), flying and swimming reptiles, and about 4 million trilobites. Livy got to dig for fossils in their kid's area, and we brought home a fossilized shark tooth.

We spent a little time in the rock and mineral gallery, mostly looking at what kinds of mineral were in the products we use. We saw the spots on the world map where earthquakes happened today and yesterday, and we looked at igneous vs. metamorphic vs. sedimentary rocks. Livy got to pan for tiny minerals, and we brought home a small bag of rock samples.

We looked at a replica of Orville and Wilbur Wright's plane and read all about them and their first flight. (We talked about Kitty Hawk and the Outer Banks in honor of you, Jenn.) Livy did many hands-on science activities like breaking light into a rainbow using a prism, changing the amplitude and frequency of sound waves in a tube with sand, and moving metal from one place to another with an electromagnet she could turn on and off.

We've been to the museum a million times and done all of these things before, but something about today was just special. We had missed each other, but we miss each other often. It was just one of those glorious days when the two of us click - we want to do the same thing in the same way and do it together.

A quote from Anne of Avonlea sums it right up:

"'After all,' Anne had said to Marilla once, 'I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.'"

3 Good Things That Happened While I Was On My Blog-cation

So I've been away a while. I've posted podcasts, and I've linked to other people. But I haven't written anything in a while. I'm feeling like I might want to again, but it's kind of intimidating to think of starting back. It's like not speaking to a friend for a while, and when you finally get together again, there is just too much day to day that has passed by and you aren't in each other's grooves anymore. To try to get back into your groove, I thought I would tell you three good things that happened while I was on my break.

1. I went to decoration. I want to blog about it, but just to give you a preview, my mom wasn't there, and that was really different. But it went well.

2. My daughter found a new playmate in our neighborhood. A little girl from next door finally wandered over and jumped on our trampoline with Livy. It's so nice that she has a friend to play with here, as we were feeling isolated and all alone before. It's also funny that the girl, K, speaks very little English and Livy speaks zero Spanish, and yet they talk to each other non-stop. They just don't seem to care that they don't understand the other one. :)

3. The classes I am teaching are over, and I am now officially a lady of leisure! So, as soon as Livy's homeschool co-op classes are over (the last ones are this week), we only have something to do on ONE day of the week (soccer on Thursdays). This means that we can do whatever we want every other day: Zoo, Botanical Gardens, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Children's Museum, Stone Mountain, our favorite parks, movies, and random, spontaneous road trips! And the best thing yet is that Aaron is cutting back to half time in the middle of May, so he can go on adventures with us too! We are hoping to go to the Huntsville Rocket Center soon and to the airplane museum that Aaron loved so much before.

So expect some blogging soon about decoration, about a big ass food allergy mistake I made (just in time for Food Allergy Awareness Week, and about what I have been reading.

Three Good Things for this Weekend

1. Shea Levy, Alyssa Smudzin, and Miranda Barzey are just as super cool in person as online. I've had yucky experiences before when I connected with someone through email, and then found that when we met, there was no personal chemistry. I am so happy that, in this case, real life met online life without an awful matter/anti-matter annihillation.

2. My rereading of E.M. Forster has really begun. Howards End was the beginning, but it's not really a binge until you go to the second book. I started A Room with a View today. Ah, Mr. Emerson, who "is not tactful; yet, have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time -- beautiful?"

3. The seeds, seed potatoes, and onion sets that I am planting for my spring garden arrived in the mail today. Monday, I will prepare my container garden on the deck (for lettuce, spinach, arugula, herbs, and grape tomatoes -- the things I harvest daily) and my in-the-yard garden (for my regular tomatoes, onions, potatoes, green beans, and peppers). Now it really feels like spring. Some of thse things won't get planted until it's warmer, but the spinach, arugula, lettuce, onions, and peppers can go in the soil on Monday!

Three Good Things (post dessicated thyroid and iodine edition)

1. This morning I woke up and immediately got energetically down to business. I did several tasks that were on my to-do list right away.

2. I am feeling ambitious about my reading again. I feel like reading more that just pulpy novels. I am back to work on my American history book series (Joy Hakim's History of US), put Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography on reserve at the library, and started Moll Flanders and Howards End. I'm even feeling like doing some extra research for my book club on the sensibility debate of the late 18th century and on Romanticism in Sense and Sensibility.

3. I had energy to burn today, so I worked out. I am horribly out of shape, but my body felt so GOOD to be exercising again.

Good Things About Being Iced In

1. Aaron can't make his super long commute, so he hangs out in bed with me all morning.



2. the old Sherlock Holmes episodes with Jeremy Brett



3. leftover duck and sauce for breakfast

Hahahahaha, get it? Sauce? A drunk duck? Hahahaha!

Three Good Things

1. Livy is back! She was gone for 11 days to visit family with her dad for Christmas. The break was awesome, as couple time minus work and children usually is, but I missed her so much, especially the last few days. It is such a pleasure to have her back in the house with me. Partly cause I love her company, and partly (and maybe other parents will understand the neurotic biological impulses that come with passing on your DNA) because I never feel right or complete or like she is totally safe unless she is with me (though her father is certainly able to protect her, better than me probably).

2. Peppermint bark and homemade turkey stock. Not eaten together, but on the same day. Yum.

3. Getting back to our routine. Livy and I have been doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, cooking (thus, turkey stock), and generally getting the house back in its non-holiday order. It's a pleasure to return to the daily chores after such a long break.

Three Good Things

1. 3 days of uninterrupted Aaron-y goodness. Usually he works until well after I am asleep, so I see precious little of him. And then I went on my trip. So I was in serious Aaron deficit. But today is the third day of spending all day with him. Activities: hiking, visiting friends, watching Dollhouse, reading next to each other, and others you might be able to imagine but shouldn't if we happen to be related.

2. Seeing best friends again. The visit really did involve a bit too much wine (all the children were asleep, so we were in the clear), a lot of loud and dramatic statements (mostly from me), quite a bit of gossip, and Cake (the band, though the food would have been nice too).

3. Having time that stretches before me as yet unfilled (this is both a good things and a terrifying one). No school this semester, only teaching one class again, so what will I do? Here's the list I thought of while taking a bath (another good thing): More weekday time with Livy (including homeschool coop which I don't usually get to do), get back to my French, Spanish, and Greek, read hard books again (when I am in school, all my free reading has to be lighter, but no longer, tonight I will start Moll Flanders), exercise more (I really need to make myself lift weights), learn to make reduction sauces like Richard Nikoley, and actually keep the house clean and meals cooked (that kind of fell by the way side during the weeks before finals).

Good Things and a Sonnet or Two

I haven't been posting much cause school is in it's final month of intensity. Instead I've been reading Aristotle like a fiend and working on a paper on Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." But I thought I'd post some good things, just to be posting. Plus, last night's Yaron Brook lecture put me in a stellar mood.

1. Meeting up with some new Objectivist friends before the lecture and discovering we have lots in common. Makes me feel all excited and giddy.

2. Discovering a poet who is new to me (Charlotte Smith) and who is relatively unknown, but rocks!

3. Holding hands with Aaron at the lecture and realizing that I have such a major value right beside me, just as excited as I am about capitalism, just as determined to be rational and happy, and all in love with me! Then, we continued a great conversation all the way home and for an hour or so after we got home, one that I couldn't have with any old boy, and it made me so glad to have found someone who shares my values AND compliments my personality.

In honor of my discovery of Charlotte Smith, I give you the first two sonnets in the collection called Elegiac Sonnets:

SONNET I.

THE partial Muse, has from my earliest hours,
Smil'd on the rugged path I'm doom'd to tread,
And still with sportive hand has snatch'd wild flowers,
To weave fantastic garlands for my head:
But far, far happier is the lot of those
Who never learn'd her dear delusive art;
Which, while it decks the head with many a rose,
Reserves the thorn, to fester in the heart.
For still she bids soft Pity's melting eye
Stream o'er the ills she knows not to remove,
Points every pang, and deepens every sigh
Of mourning friendship or unhappy love.
Ah! then, how dear the Muse's favours cost,
If those paint sorrow best--who feel it most!

SONNET II.

Written at the close of Spring.

THE garlands fade that Spring so lately wove,
Each simple flower, which she had nursed in dew,
Anemonies, that spangled every grove,
The primrose wan, and hare-bell mildly blue.
No more shall violets linger in the dell,
Or purple orchis variegate the plain,
Till Spring again shall call forth every bell,
And dress with humid hands her wreaths again.--
Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair,
Are the fond visions of thy early day,
Till tyrant passion and corrosive care
Bid all thy fairy colours fade away!
Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;
Ah! why has happiness--no second spring?

Good things

Okay, so I will get on this bandwagon. It's a fun and inspiring kind of bandwagon, and so I want to ride with all the cool kids.

Good things for today:

1. a really good poem praising compost and the growing of cucumbers: The Task by William Cowper (that's not all it is about)

2. adding chocolate to my raw milk

3. seeing statues from the Baptistry at Florence up close