Quote #2

In the wake of speaking out at the Waldorf lecture, I was very sick.  Already on that Friday evening I knew I was about to be ill.  On Sunday I could hardly get out of bed.  Ethan got out From My Experience by Louis Bromfield, and read me parts he knew I needed to hear.  Louis Bromfield was a kindred spirit.  (the end of this quote irresistably brings to mind the way, when cornered, the lecturer threw out "It's the Etheric!" as an answer, i.e. something you are not "evolved" enough to sense):

"If at times in this book the tone of writing appears to be unduly controversial I attribute this to long contact with many of the closed minds and the unimaginative mentalities with which agriculture, like any other science, is afflicted.  The writer is by nature an amiable and kindly person, very gregarious and fond of people and of conversation, of argument and even of controversy, and the exploration of other minds where there is anything to explore.  But he has had some startling experiences with the closed mind which will not accept what it sees and knows but takes refuge sometimes in wild and fantastic speculation and sometimes feeble diversions to find reasons to deny or discredit a fact that may prove unwelcome or embarassing."

He also writes out so perfectly my recent sentiments about Anthroposophy:


"One of the great errors of our time, and one which has brought us in our time much misery, is the attribution of an overweening and disproportionate importance to man and his mind.  Man himself, as a physical machine, as a mechanistic functional and living organism, is indeed marvelous as is every part of the universe; but his ego and self-importance, in our time, are given a distorted, decadent, and tragi-comic importance.

"Man is merely a part of the universe, and not a very great part, which happens to be fortunate principally in having evolved such traits and powers as consciousness, reflection, logic and thought.  The wise and happy man is the one who finds himself in adjustment to this truth, who never needs, in moments of disillusionment and despair, to cut himself down to size because it has never occured to him, in the beginning or at any time, to inflate his own importance whether through ignorance, morbidity, egotism or undergoing psychoanalysis (which is merely another name for one of the age-old manifestations of brooding impotence and frustration of the incomplete man).

"It is only later in life, in the midst of what is still a somewhat turbulent and certainly a varied existence, that any full understanding and satisfaction of this sense of belonging, of being a small and relatively unimportant part of something vast but infinitely friendly, has come to me.  It is only now that I have come to understand that from earliest childhood, this passion to belong, to lose one's self in the whole pattern of life, was the strong and overwhelming force that unconsciously has directed every thought, every act, every motive of my existance."

One thing that I very strongly recognize (and understand) about strict life philosophies or religions is that people are brought to them by the same deep longing that Bromfield describes - the desire to belong, to have a place here, to do what is right.  The questions around this have been things that for me, too, have directed my entire existance.  In many instances I have been drawn towards something that looks beautiful, but always turns out to be a lovely illusion of rightness disguising an ugly, petrified dogma.

It was this that inspired me to be vegan when I was a teenager.  It was this that led me to spent several very unhappy years in a psycotic attachment parenting mom's group.  It was what brought me to choose Waldorf-style education for my children, and to look deeper into Anthroposophy.  I wanted to belong somewhere.  I wanted to be around other people who were comfortable with me, who I felt in common with.

Turning 30 was a big mix-up for me.  I felt like at this point, I should have accomplished something.  I desperately tried to think back on my life and find something I had done that had lasting meaning, and couldn't come up with anything.  In fact, in looking back, I find I have never properly fit in any where.  Not in my family, not in public school, not in groups of friends, not at work, not at the crunchy, Waldorf-inspired preschool, not with the local "cool" crowd, and certainly not in that mom's group.  Not even with the vegans, who tend to be notorious weirdos, because it made me sick to deny myself animal foods and eat soy.  I did realize that a lot of this was because I have a natural intolerance for pretentiousness and bullshit, and for some reason I insist on making myself unpopular by not keeping my mouth shut, but it didn't make me feel any better.  Bottom line:  I don't fit in.  I don't belong here.

I spent a lot of time considering this world where I don't fit in, don't belong.  The more I considered other people, the more I was glad to NOT fit in.  There were some insights - a friend of  mine married (and divorced) a Hare Krishna man who tried to control her life.  She suddenly had to be strict vegetarian, although this was obviously not good for her health.  But she was suddenly surrounded by people who liked her simply for joining them in their belief system.  They did not really like or care about her.  Many of them no longer speak to her, because she isn't "one of them" anymore.  Seeing this made some things clear to me.  I saw myself in that situation.  Over and over again.  And I never learned from it.

I realized why strict, domineering religions are so popular.  They give you a very clear, extremely rigid format to live your life within, and promise that you will be "good"  if you follow directions and will be rewarded at the end.  With Anthroposophy, you become "evolved."  You don't have to think, just follow the rules.  You will know what's right because someone will tell you it is.  There is no scary uncertainty of trying to figure things out yourself and eventually finding that you have changed your mind.  And to top it all, there's a whole community of other people who will like you simply because you are seen as being similar to them!

So far I have yet to see anyone who has really actually benefited from this, and I certainly have seen the negative effects, not just from people who are spiritually crippled by the judgments of their fellow church members, but also in social groups.  Usually the parts of the religion/belief system that do have benefits are not the nasty, punishing, dogmatic ones, but the lovely illusion that the belief system flags on the outside to get people to join.  We do know what's right, if we would only follow our hearts, and veer away from the damaging things.  But that's the catch - it's usually all or none with this kind of thing.


Clearly, there is no sense in turning to other people for this sense of belonging. Real meaning is found here, in reality, in nature, in taking up our small part in this huge, beautiful universe.  In response, I turn to the earth.  It's high time I got my garden in this fall.

"In writing this book I have thought many times of Margaret Fuller's grandiloquent assertion, "I accept the Universe," and of Carlyle's quick response, "Gad, she'd better!"  There are no short-cuts, economic or medical or scientific, where laws of the universe are involved.  One works with Nature, whether in terms of soil or of human character, or one is destroyed....It would be well for man to contemplate daily the principal fact of his brief existence - the fact of his colossal physical insignificance.

The Tower

Mrs. Gophy, our neighbor Gopher Tortoise, had a little one hatch out this year.  Last year there were three, this year there was only one that we saw.  Newborn tortoises are so unbelievably small!  Clothilde named it Sandy before it crawled away.

An interesting thing happened to me last week.  It all started Thursday evening when I was doing a tarot reading for myself.  I was trying to tempt Clothilde back to bed.  Usually the spread of delicate cards and my focus and concentration gets her radar beeping like crazy, even mid-romp with the big kids.  This time I actually did a whole reading, and got to spend some time afterwards thinking about it.

It was one of the worst readings I'd ever drawn.  Nearly every card was upside-down, except the center card, which was Queen of Cups (a card about creativity).  As I considered the Tower card, I thought (unwisely) that it must not have been a good reading.  The Tower card is a card about complete and sudden change, usually shocking or traumatic.  "What could possibly go wrong?" I wondered.  The next day was going to be a good day.  An out-of-town friend was coming to visit, and we were going together to a lecture on Waldorf education.  It sounded wonderful.

My friend and I drove together to the lecture.  There was a husband-and-wife team to be the speakers that night, and my friend knew them quite well.  She thought they were super cool, and was eager for me to meet them.

The lecture began boring enough with the husband lecturing that we actually live in a static universe, contrary to what most scientists have come up with (Rudolf Steiner says so).  There was a strong critique of what he called the "Mechanistic View," or that our minds are simply a reactive force, reacting the world through biochemistry. Then the wife spoke about the importance of handwork.  Then the husband took over again.  The first part had been a warm-up.  Now he launched himself blissfully into a diatribe about Anthroposophy.  He began talking about how plants are different from us because they are not intelligent at all, and therefore are less evolved.

My hand instantly went up.  "That's not true!" I said.  Heads turned.  I have just been reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's book Plant Intelligence.  The speaker was floored.  He couldn't belive he was being contradicted at his own lecture.  I quickly gave a brief statement that plants have been found, by modern science no less, to behave extremely intelligently.  They perform complex mathematic calculations on a regular basis.  They create infinite combinations of chemistry.  Even slime molds can complete mazes, which is a basic measure of intelligence.  Their roots contain the exact same neural pathways as our brains.  In fact, I argued, plants DO even have free will (or the ability to choose), because a plant being munched on by a predator will send off volitile compounds that alert the surrounding plants, who then make a concious choice from an array of different choices about their own chemical response.  Sounds pretty intelligent to me.  I didn't even get to mention anything about viruses or bacteria, which are still out-smarting us.

The response was that no, all of that is just reactionary.  They are simply bits of dead matter chemically reacting to the enviornment.  "Then what's the difference with us!" was my exasperated reply.

"The Etheric!" was the enthusiastic answer.  "Plants have no spirit."

"That's not what Stephen Harrod Buhner says!" I told everyone.  "You should read his work about the subject."

At this point, a woman turned to me and said pointedly, "We aren't here to listen to what that person or you have to say.  We're here to learn about what Rudolf Steiner said!"

A man in the back said, "I'm about ready to issue a gag order!"  (yes, he really said those words).

I retired to the parking lot for the rest of the lecture.  I went in afterwards to pick my friend up.  She still wanted to introduce me to the speakers.  The man appeared to hate my guts, but he tried to shake my hand and tell me how wrong I was.  I told him it was new stuff.  Rudolf Steiner lived a long time ago, and there have been advances since then.  Then he liked me even less, because if that part of his lecture was wrong, then everything that came from it was, too.  I went ahead and told him he should read Buhner.  I told him that Steiner said in Knowledge of Higher Worlds that you should practice being flexible and that it's healthy to listen to something you don't agree with.  He gave a vicious, forced sort of smile at that and went off to talk to someone who could stroke his ego. My friend was very upset, and really thought I should have kept quiet.  I don't think she is my friend anymore now.

 Yesterday I tried to think why I liked Waldorf stuff to begin with, and I realized I never have.  I like the artistic approach to things.  I think the handwork is cool, but I have always found Anthroposophy to be very wrong.  It was not even exclusively a mental response.  I realized I have always had a deep down, gut-sense that it is not right.  While some interesting things are brought up by Steiner, there are always many other, much clearer and deeper sources of the same information.

People say that the philosophy and the education do not overlap, but this is not at all true.  The Zoology block in the 4th grade Christopherous curriculum was abhorrent.  There was nothing real about it, and children are to come away with the idea that humans are a tri-partite being who is evolutionarily superior to any other creature on earth.  This is not how evolution works.  This is just NOT true.  And the fact is, many of their ideas just do not work out to be real.  Like the way they base human beginnings on Adam and Eve.  Right after I heard that lecture I picked up Elaine Morgan's Descent of Woman and was blown away, not only with the information, but just how ridiculous Anthroposophy is.

Likewise, their view of plants is entirely dependant on a heiarchial version of evolution, a view point that Darwin expressly argued against.  They have a similar (and very offensive) view of human beings, with the idea that black people are more primitive and less evolved than white people.  All these things are not only completely false, they are also a deep misinterpretation of how evolution actually works.

The problem is - if they update or change their information, then that means Rudolf Steiner was WRONG.  (doom doom da-doom!)  If he is wrong there, then people start to question the dogma.  After nearly every lecture I've gone to, I have spoken briefly with the speakers and asked them if they have read such-and-such popular material on the same subject they were lecturing about.  No one has heard of anything.  This surprised and confused me until I realized they exclusively study Rudolf Steiner.  I think this accounds for a lot of the problem of their extraordinary ignorance.  One of the speakers, a very imminent person in the Waldorf society, lumped together ALL native cultures of North and South America into one extremely wrong stereotype.  It would seem that Rudolf Steiner proclaimed that any cultures that did not have a direct influence on the evolution of European culture are not worth learning about at all.

And the truth is that I came to Waldorf, not because it really spoke to me, but because I needed a guide for home school after Clothilde was born.  So many people I know think it's really cool.  I thought I should think it's cool, too.  At least I tried to learn enough about it to make a decision - and that has only just now happened for me.  When we just started out, I didn't have the mental space with a tiny new baby to create a home school, so I turned to the Christopherous curriculum.  I'd heard such good things about it.  We've used it for years now.  In second grade, I was still just getting familiar with it.  In third grade, I tried harder to really stick by the curriculum and philosophy.  By the end of Mirin's fourth grade, I realized that even with both of our best efforts, something wasn't working.  He is still not reading well, and struggles to write. 

This opened my mind some.  I realized that the whole-word reading method was just not working for us.  I've started using Khan academy to catch us up on math.  We've begun taking an entirely different reading approach that any good Waldorf teacher would freak out about, but actually makes a lot of practical sense and seems to be working very well.

All of this was so much the Tower card, it makes me laugh.  All pretense and illusion stripped away.  A totally new take.  Not being able to go back to what it was like before, even if you want to.  Thank you, Tower card!  I feel so freed.

 Any philosphy/religion in which the speakers (or High Priests, if you will) are chosen, not because of their intelligent, independant ideas, but rather on how well they have ingested and memorized the dogma should ALWAYS be questioned!

Mabon/Michaelmas

This week is Michaelmas, the equinox, the start of autumn.

It's still hot, but not like some years.  In the evenings, the wind sweeps over the east hill at the farm, and blows cool.  It blows colored, dying leaves down, too, and twists the yellowing bramble bushes.

Some years we really celebrated this holy time, sometimes in the Waldorf way, with hand-sewn felt dragons and little dragon breads with raisin eyes, stories of St. George and the dragon, and songs about it.

This year we didn't really celebrate....but we did, in a way.  We went to our friend Karen's farm.  Three years ago, her husband was tragically killed in a car accident.  They had a working farm, and although many people helped out, she had three large hogs that were just ready for the freezer that she has not been able to do anything with all this time.

The hogs were very wild, and difficult to approach, and knowing how much work it was going to be, she had a hard time asking people to come help with it.  Finally she let us.  We met our friend PJ there, and another friend Miranda, who has two daughters.  Another friend of Karen's, Michael, also helped.

The pigs were big, and old, and we knew it would be lots of work.  PJ and Michael had set up a trap in their paddock, hoping it would at least catch one of them, and make everything so much easier and calmer.  But these pigs were too wild or too smart, and they absolutely refused to go in.  That made things complicated.

Miranda, Karen and I stayed with the children and waited for the pigs to be felled.  PJ, Michael and Ethan went in to get them.  It seemed to take a long, long time, but finally we heard a shot.  Then many more shots followed.  Michael was the first to get back.  He said the pigs were so old and hardened his bullets couldn't stun them.  We had a simliar experience a while ago, so Ethan hadn't even bothered with the .22, and just brought the .30-40 Krag.  It was a good thing, too.

Understandably, the pigs got very angry when they were in the pen trying to get them.  They were charging fiercely.  PJ was almost bowled over by a wounded sow, who simply bruised her leg when she jumped clear, staining her jeans with blood.  Ethan was charged by the massive barrow with enormous tusks, but felled it point-blank as it was charging at him.  It landed on his foot.

Once all three were killed, the work began.  The children mostly played blissfully around.  Karen's pond was brimming with all the rain we've gotten, and the children found a boat and polled around in the shallows.  Karen said they looked like children in a storybook.  They played in PJ's hammock.  They played in the dirt, made fires to cook some tenderloin on.  They loved it, and we worked.  It was SO MUCH work.  I am so exhausted - we are all so exhausted.  Dragging a 400+lb animal onto a trailer.  Dragging the huge sow out of the brushy trees.  Then hanging them, skinning them, pulling the organs out, cutting the meat.  We barely got that done, and only some wrapped up and in the freezer before we had to rush home and do the chores in the dark.

Matilda was NOT pleased.  I had made her wait, so she made me wait while she grazed all the way down the brain-cage to the milking shed.  I didn't mind - she was so slow I milked all the goats first.  And all the goats except Firefly decided to develop a haunting fear of the milking stand that night.  May had to be half tempted with barley/half dragged in, and was a real pain.

There was still so much to be done, we went back the next day, picking up PJ and Miranda's two daughters (at the chorusing request of our children) for moral support.  I couldn't believe how much more work there still was.  We bagged up organs, chopped sausage meat.  I was plugging away at the sausage meat for a long time - it seemed like forever, and everyone kept piling more scraps into the cooler.  It felt never-ending.  The children were tired, and squabbled, although not as much as I expected.

Ethan had a stroke of inspiration on an alternative fairytale to Rumplestiltskin, called "Grumplestiltskin."  It's where you have an impossible, never-ending task to accomplish, and Grumplestiltskin shows up - but instead of doing the work for you in exchange for your first born child (an easy bargain, Ethan added, especially if the first born is being extremely surly that morning), Grumplestiltskin instead whines for ridiculous things that he could easily do himself.


But it was done at last, and everything cleaned and scrubbed and taken back to Karen's house.  We set off with just enough time to do the chores in the dark again.  I had to milk May by the gate, because it was impossible to convince her that there were no predators lurking by the shadowy milking shed.  Night Hawk managed to make himself a nuisance, too.  He has been in disgrace since he shocked Mirin in the crotch last week, leaning his head through the electric fence.

We will be taking the rest of the week very easy.  Today we did very minimal lessons, and the kids spent a lot of time drawing on the road with sidewalk chalk.   There will be no cute dragon breads, or complicated hand sewing, or art projects, or dragon songs.  The harvesting of the three pigs will have to do for our observance - and rather poignantly, too.  In ancient British lore Mabon, whose name was the old name for Michaelmas, was the only one who could steal the magical razor, scissors, and comb from between the ears of a monstrous boar who ravaged the countryside.

Fall begins with Leaves

I used to laugh sarcastically when anyone mentioned September being autumn here in Florida.  It always seemed to me that we never quite had anything but autumn, starting in November, and ending in February.  Some years there are a few weeks of actual "winter" in January, but autumn certainly didn't start in September.  I remember my first grade teacher - dear Ms. Frisco, the one with the long, red fake nails who jabbed you in the shoulder with them if you annoyed her for some reason...it was easy to annoy her....she told us that the months that ended with -ber were cold, like brrrr!  Even then, I knew she was wrong.  Autumn here doesn't begin with cold.  It begins with leaves, and a different quality of air.  The high, long, feathery clouds that come before storm fronts strew the sky, pushing back the big, billowy summer-storm clouds that have faces on all their corners.


The garden is as tall and intimidating as ever.  We are using chickens to push it back some.  The yuca is enormous.  I pulled some last week.  It wasn't at it's full massive-root-glory yet, but it was very tender and delicious.  We're mired in pumpkins at the moment, but the wild sumac berries and roselle make wonderful sour drinks to help along our monotonous meals.


My fall greens are still just little nubs.  I needed to plant things two weeks ago, but didn't have time, or energy, or it was pouring on me.  I can't remember which now.  But the last few days have been dry, blessedly dry, amazingly dry.  I never would have believed dryness feels so nice and free.  I've been working like a horse, inside and out.


I'm longing for fall greens.  It's amazing how having a garden can make you long for things.  I never longed for squash, or yearned for collard greens the way I do now.  I nearly broke down and bought some inferior store-bought kale, but was detered by the terrible condition of the vegetables.  It looked like someone had hit them with a flame-weeder.  I know I am spoiled, but this was really bad.  So I am having to be content with just longing right now, and meanwhile sipping some sumac-berry-ade and honey-fermented roselle soda.

Perfect Gardening Days

Ferocious squash vine

Saddleback caterpillar on the old hammock

I've been having writer's block.  Everything seems so rainy and boring - hardly worth writing about.  I get my kids fed, and chores done, and then I escape into a Diana Wynn Jones book.  I am in the middle of The Dark Lord of Derkholm, my favorite book ever.

This weekend I worked hard in the garden.  Yesterday, mostly.  It was a perfect day for it.  My perfect gardening days are not what most people would think of as good gardening days.  Not the clear, blue sky days.  I like drippy, miserable days where the sun doesn't dare show itself, but there's no lightening.  It was like that yesterday, cool and wet and not sunny.  Perfect.  I got another bed built, and am re-thinking my garden arrangement.  There are some really serious weeds out there, I'm not sure I can cope with them without the frost on my side.  And there's some awful plant out there giving everyone itchy rashes.

A month ago Mirin, Rose and my dad all wandered around in the garden looking for passion fruits.  Mirin was unwise enough to be completely without clothing.  On the drive home, they started itching.  Mirin had itchy red patches all over his body - in some very uncomfortable and undignified places.  Rose had the most awful-looking rash over most of her face, including the tip of her nose.  My dad got some on his arm.

Not really thinking about how paranoid people are these days about that sort of thing post-vaccine industry-led-measels panic (and, naturally, assuming it was poison ivy  - there were no other symptoms) I met a friend at the library the next day.  Rose's cheeks looked like a diseased child out of a medical text, but she was well in every other way.  Everyone moved away from her at the library, and it really freaked my friend out.  I had to write her a long email describing our lack of other symptoms, and how only people who went crashing through the garden had gotten it, right afterwards. 

After working in that same part of the garden, I now have three big itchy red blotches on my arm and leg, and Ethan got some, too.  He wasn't wearing a shirt, and has it on his belly and back.  No fun.  It was keeping me up last night.  So I will have to do a poison ivy hunt now.  It's probably gone rife in there among the yucca.  As if the blackberries and sand spurs weren't enough!

Rain, Rain, Rain

A gorgeous Imperial moth that was in the barn

Really the only one word sums up the past few days - sopping.  Buckets of rain.  Three inches in one afternoon (in the space of a couple of hours).  That was the day I felt like I was walking through a sprinkler.  The afternoon sun was still shining, like a bright pearly dot through the clouds, making all the yellows and greens jump out at you.  These rain storms have not had much lightening, thank goodness.  It's really the lightening I don't like.  I don't mind the flickering heat lightening, or the thunder.  It's the violent, earth-crashing lightening.  There have been trees out at the farm that have been hit.  Mirin found a fine glass tube made from a lightening strike on the last grazing line.  I always hide in the sweaty, suffocating truck when that kind of lightening is out.  Ethan just laughs at me, and keeps doing his chores.

We started back with homeschool this week.  Today was better.  Yesterday was hard.  Everyone had a tantrum at me yesterday, but Mirin had the most. Apparently anything more rigorous than summer vacation makes him flip out.  I am not terribly sympathetic, especially as his first day "back-to-school" involved sleeping in until ten, playing with toys in the morning, and only two and a half hours of focus (all review), and a painful math-practice of carrying and borrowing that involved three whole problems.  (There were supposed to be more - we only got through three before he became insensible).  It seems so wimpy, but he doesn't have any perspective on it at all.

Changes in the Air

May got half of a poke bush stuck on her head!

In-town it is still very hot and muggy, with clouds of mosquitoes.  But at the farm there are hints of fall.  It's still hot, and it's still humid, but there's something about the air.  The smells are different, and in the eveinings cool breezes sweep across the pastures.

My kids are desperate for Christmas.  Somehow August always makes me feel that way, too.  More because of longing for changing weather than for presents and holiday madness.  A few days ago they clamored to bake gingerbread cookies (we did), and yesterday Rose brought in a sprig of Azalea as tiny Christmas tree.

Yesterday I was surprised at how cool it was in the evening.  Huge, billowy clouds came over the Eastern horizon - the kind with lumpy faces.  They loomed over the field where I was moving the goat fence like floating lamps, flickering inside and out with lightening.  One of them appeared to overtake the almost-full moon and swallow it up.  Later, when we were driving away and it was dark, the moon escaped again, lighting up the whole edge with silver. 

 There are changes in the air.

Early Morning Sun and South Florida

On Saturday Ethan went out to do the chores very early so we could drive to South Florida to visit Ethan's Grandmother for her birthday (she's 97 this year!).
It's amazing how different it looks out there in the morning.  We are usually there in the evening for the late afternoon/sunset.  The shadows, light, and wildlife are totally different in the morning.  I almost don't recognize the place when we are out there early.

Being around Tampa was interesting.  You drive through a stretch of beautiful, marshy farmland on the way there, which abruptly gives way to the most twisted indulgence of human materialism - the stucco/OSB suburbs.

In a way, it is it's own little hell.  It reminds me of some places in California.  Everyone has either a massive, fancy car or a tiny, expensive fancy car.  I people-watched while we were driving.  It's amazing to see how ugly, mean and aggressive everyone looked.  A beefy, bloated-looking man glaring over the steering wheel of an elegant black SUV.  A hunched, decrepit-looking young man in his 20's slamming the door of a blue Corvette.  A long-nosed, cherry red sports car that you would expect to see being driven by a blond trophy girlfriend with fake breasts actually contained a bitchy-looking old hag with well-developed jowls.  She was probably that trophy girlfriend like 40 years ago.

As soon as you get to the begining of the 'burbs, you can tell business is flagging a little.  It appeared that they had rounded up the few homeless people who were hanging around the highway exit with "Will Work For Food" signs and had them dancing around in funny hats with "NEW HOMES" signs for a Happy Meal.

Ethan couldn't help joking, "Oh yes, we decided to buy this house because there was a scruffy fat man in a funny hat waving a sign in front of it!"

It made me feel sarcastic and bitter to drive past the neighborhoods named after nature.  Pine Woods, was one.  Boot Ranch.  Ooo...that one's kind of country-sounding.  So unique.  Fern Meadows.  Oak Forest, with the word LUXURY written in curly font on the sign.  You look, and all the oaks were cut down.  It's just a CAFO of cheeply-made houses as far as the eye can see, baking in the hot sun, each one a little island of toxic chemistry, paste-board, and climate-control.  There's a fancy-looking fountain and a one-brick-wide brick wall they slapped up along the drive in, to make it look distinguished.  There's a sense of trying to re-create the landed gentry of Europe, except fast and cheap.


Ethan's uncle lives in one such little neighborhood. When you get out of the car, all you can smell is chlorine off-gasing from all the private pools.  It's like the trenches.  The lawns are small and non-functional.  You are supposed to spend all your time inside if you are not driving your fancy car around.  The whole neighborhood exudes self-centeredness, a "look how rich I am" opulence, and an attitude of if-you're-not-this-way-too-you-don't-count-as-a-human.  But it's all fake.  The houses are all stucco and the 1/4 inch wide brick facade on the outside, and chinese drywall and OSB on the inside.  There's no way they'll last even 50 years, and the next really good hurricane down there will either sweep them away into a pile of rubble or humidify the glue in the OSB so much all the houses will melt like an ugly illusion.

It's a relief to drive away from it all, back to the marshy pastures and the countryside.  I couldn't help thinking then about Jean-Paul Sartre's work, No Exit.  The whole place is almost a metaphor for the parting shot:

"Hell is other people."

Quote 1

Not much to say today, but I wanted to share a short quote from Louis Bromfield's The Farm, which I think is especially poignant for these times.

(Published in 1932, it is too bad that this is largely a forgotten book.  Incidentally, Ethan picked up this book at a Starbucks while he was travelling for work.  He was amazed to find it there on their book shelf, and asked if he could buy it.  The guy at the counter's reply was, "Yes, the bookshelf does have real books."  He was confused about Ethan wanting to buy it, and told him he could just have it.  There was a feeling of rescuing it from them when he brought it home.)

"Out of the beliefs and teachings of Hamilton had come the decay he had seen slowly paralyzing the government during his lifetime.  He had seen a republic, a democracy, come to be run as a business, an affair of shopkeepers and money-changers, who paid out money upon which they expected returns in laws and tarrifs and land grants.  He had come to see American citizens look upon such bargains calmly and without indignation, protest, or complaint.

For him, the bitterest evidence of defeat - the fact that the citizen, the man in the street, so long as he was prosperous, no longer cherished a sense of duty, of honor, of decency.  What puzzled him most were the men who somehow in the midst of unscrupulousness assumed a cloak of honor, men of character and wit and ability, who found virtue and credit in sharp dealing.  it was not that they were hypocrites, but that, yielding, they came to believe that bargaining and compromise and bad faith were simply a part of the new system and the new political philosophy and must be accepted as such, for the general good, but most of all for the good of business.  

He could not understand that sly admiration which citizens had for men like Judge Wyck, a man known to be corrupt and criminal, because he had been clever enough to make a fortune and escape prison at the same time.  He could not understand placing the holy affair of the government upon the level of business, nor could he understand those men who exalted material success as a God."

Better

I've been feeling better this week.  The weather is slightly drier and cooler (whew!).  This time of year down here is like February for everyone up north - you don't go out much, and when you do the weather drives you back inside after a little while.  At least I don't also have to shovel snow, I guess, just slap mosquitoes and no-see-ums.

Our friends who are moving just sold their house and are on their way to packing up....how often does another homeschooling family live just around the corner and also have three children about the same ages?  We'll miss them alot.  Mirin and Rose will really miss them.  It's so nice (and unusual these days) to have friends you can walk or bike over to visit, without your mom having to be involved arranging a "play-date".

  Ms. Penny's house next to us is empty and for sale, too.  Her family put it on the market as soon as she was out, but I have heard that she is very happy in her new old person home, so it ended well.  Her family are the sort that calls code enforcement on the neighbors, so I spent all last week razing the yard with clippers and a borrowed mower (not enough elbow-room for scythe).  It's hideous, but legal.  Funny how you can't have overgrown grass, but it's fine if it looks like a wasteland.  We just love wastelands, monocultures, and sterile enviornments devoid of all life.  That's the ideal we are constantly working towards, aren't we?  Perhaps we should stop to consider this....

But this is becoming just as uncheerful as ever!  A funny thing happened with Matilda the other day.  A chicken from the coop circulating the garden got out because the wire is rusting and breaking and needs replaced.  It was extremely wet and bedraggled from having been out in a rainstorm that afternoon.  It happened to run into the milking area when I tried to catch it, and immediately began picking up spilled barley.  It was doing good work, so I left it while I milked the goats and set everything up for Matilda.

Matilda came down, and freaked out about the chicken.  She charged in and tried to trample it.

If I were the chicken, I would take that as a very strong hint to go very far away, but it didn't seem to take it that way at all.  If anything, this seemed to encouraged the stupid thing.  It disappeared briefly into the Spanish needle bushes, but as soon as Matilda was clipped in and I had started milking, it came out and started staggaring around, pecking at grasshoppers and things.

Matilda went hysterical.  She was terrified of the thing.  I was flung back, milking pail in hand, yelling for Ethan, while she stamped and kicked at it.  This flustered the chicken, and it ran back and forth under all her feet, which was probably the worst possible thing it could have done, except maybe fly at her face.  Ethan came over and chased it out again, and got it back into the garden where it promptly began scratching up the new fall garden beds.

The Truth

I was just looking through the blog archives for a specific picture, and realized what a crummy job I've been doing writing here.  I'm sorry, for myself and for whoever is even trying to read here.

The truth is, I hate being on the computer.  It wastes my time and leaves me feeling icky.

The truth is, I feel angry and depressed lately.  It's not my personal life.  It's things happening in the larger world that affect my personal life.  I hate the way the world is spiraling into a corporate dictatorship, and the general populace is so pathetically compliant, so easily tricked, so foolish and brainless and impressed with liars in white expert coats.

The truth is, I miss all my friends who have moved/are moving away this year.  Three different families.  Two more are seriously contemplating moving out-of-state.  It's sad and lonely.  I have learned to be picky with who I am friends with - they are hard to replace.

The truth is, I was overwhelmed with planning home school around three children, and the fall/winter garden.  Doing something that requires intense focus, thinking, and organization around a two-year-old is incredibly frustrating.

The truth is, I am having a hard time getting back into my life after being gone....things are feeling stagnant, and at the same time like they must change.  An awful feeling.

The truth is, I haven't really been very present in my family life, or farm life - physically I'm here, but my mind is elsewhere, thinking of other things - things that interest me, things that frighten me, things that make me angry.  I've been unanchored.  My hands have been idle from knitting and creating (my last knitting project feels interminable and discouraging - it was another attempt at tiny yarn, tiny needles, and throw in an uncertain pattern of my own design....disaster.)


I will try to do a little better here - especially when we start home school again in September.

(Oh, and the picture -  it's a reminder to myself.  Things might seem shitty, but that's what makes the garden so lovely and fruitful)

In the Jungle

This is a picture of the garden.  I know, I can't see it either.  It's a massive jungle of weedy plants, with some yuca poking bravely out.  The roselle is there, too, somewhere.  I've been working on my fall/winter garden now, fighting the jungly chaos with scythe, wheelbarrow, and pitchfork.  I have four of the usual beds - they just look like hay on the ground at the moment.  This weekend I will be starting seeds.

Most of the garden is so hopelessly overgrown, I know that without a bushhog there's just no getting through it.  The problem is that the rabbits hide in the weeds and will eat all my fall garden if it isn't knocked back some.  You would think they would eat the weedy stuff, but no.  They prefer my garden.  If there are no weeds, they can't get across because a big, old owl comes out of the forest and hunts around the garden every night.

I had an idea - that the goats would LOVE to be put in the garden to eat down the weeds.  It's all stuff they like and eat through the fence anyway.  Bidens, tall grasses, a wild sunflower, wild melons.  The only problem was if they got out and ate what was left of the garden.  The roselle is just about to bloom, and I know from experience how they like to strip it to bare sticks.

Now that the weeds are well over my head, I realized I don't care so much about the five roselle plants.  I would like to be able to get to the table where I started my seeds this spring and move it to a more accessable spot, and not have to machete my way to the site of the fall garden.  On Tuesday I moved their electric fence over, setting it up around the most impenetrable part of the garden.  The goats watched me with trepidation from where they were waiting around the milking paddock.  I kept saying to them, "Just wait, I've got a treat for you."  I thought they would explode in when I opened the gate - after all, they are always leaning through the fence to nibble stuff in the garden and get in whenever they get the chance to wreak havoc.

To my surprise, they were not at all sure about the whole being-allowed-in-the-garden thing.  Only May, the bravest and bossiest now that Nougat has found a new home, poked her head in.  She sniffed around while the other goats went around the open gate and nibbled through the fence.  I had to coax and shoo them in.  Once in, they crowded around the gate and looked pleading.  "Go eat!" I told them.  They wandered slowly in and got lost in the greenery.

Next day when I went out, I was greeted by the saddest, most pathetic sounding bleats.  I had obviously cruelly abandoned them in the jungle.  They looked particularly fat, but they were not happy.  It's just not the same when they're allowed.  When I tried to put them back after milking, they took off running as fast as they could towards where they had been stationed before, by way of a strong hint.  I was heartless and made them go back in the garden where they disappeared among the towering weeds again, bleating pathetically.  I guess I still just do not understand goats, even after all these years with them.  Perhaps no one can really understand goats!

Rain and Wild Pumpkins

This is one of our wild pumpkins the pigs planted.  They are all different shapes, but this one looks like a pure Seminole pumpkin to me.  Other ones have longer necks, and you can tell they are also something else...trombocino?  Tahitian melon?

It's growing, loving all the rain we're getting.  The past week has been an immersion in different types of rain.  Mostly it has been one kind of rain - biblical rain.  The kind that lasts for forty days and forty nights.  The pastures are thriving.  I'm not sure I've experienced storms this way before at any other time in my life.  There's something very intimate about being stuck outside in the weather - you see the inside of the storm, the guts and bones and filmy membranes.

These storms have been intense.  Intense rain, intense wind, intense lightening and thunder.  I've never been exposed to it so much before.  Yes, it usually rains alot in the summer - and we often get drenched.  These storms seem more ferocious than usual.

When you're out there, the rain, the storm closes everything.  It's just you in a small, small, wild world.  The birds are hiding, the animals are hiding, the butterflies and flies are hiding.  The ants are hiding, and you think, what the hell am I doing out here? But the darkness is closing in all around, every moment the earth tilts farther away from the light, and there are things that must be done, even as the world shines yellow-green in the weird pearly storm-light, you have to keep going.

You have to keep going, swimming ahead through the silver, thrumming curtain of rain, between the trees flickering and flashing, the lightening cracking across the whole sky, searching the earth....looking for you?  The thunder rolls around and around, the dripping leaves tremble on the trees, you tremble, even the sodden, squooshy earth quakes.  It's very dramatic.  You feel alone with the world, fighting your way through, streaming wet.

Little Pumpkins

We hardly got any pumpkins from the neglected garden this year.  The squash vine borers really got them badly while I was away.  After last year's harvest of over 40 pumpkins, I am disappointed.  I like pumpkin - it is wonderful baked, in soups, or sliced up with radishes and pickled.  Even pumpkin on the stove top with garlic, olive oil and tomato sauce is very good.  Everyone else says they are glad there are hardly any pumpkins.  Ethan says he is still sick of pumpkin.

I had to roast these now, as none of them are very good keepers.  One of the Table Queen acorn squashes was incredibly sweet and tasted like some kind of dessert with chestnuts.  It was delicious.  Definitely more of them in my garden next year.  The good news is that some wild Seminole pumpkins seem to be taking over up by the pigs.  From feeding the pigs vegetable scraps, a little garden grew up there.  About five or six big vines, and there was even a cherry tomato.  So far we've got four medium-sized pumpkins from those vines.  They look like Tahitian Melon/Seminole pumpkin crosses.  I'm definitely saving seed from them.  Any pumpkin that can self-sow and bear fruit without any care is a keeper.

I has been very, very wet, and most days end in being soaked to the skin.  Yesterday was cool even, down to 77 F when we were out doing the chores.  We got so much done, even though it was raining lightly.  The fall garden is being built.  I hope it keeps up, because I have plans for it, you know.  Big plans.

 Otherwise I've been doing a lot of reading lately.  It has been awhile since I really read a lot - I was busy with other everyday things.  I've really enjoyed the studying I've been doing for next year's home school.  The cultures and stories are all fantastic (India, Ancient Persia, Babylon, Egypt), but my recent favorite has been Count Like an Egyptian:  A Hands-on Guide to Ancient Math.

It's a great blend of culture, history and easily explained mathematics that offer a totally different perspective on basic arithmetic, fractions, decimals, and number patterns.  It's a text book written in a very nice, easy-to-read style, and even though I am really no good at math, I am able to grasp it, and it has even been helping me fill in the gaps in my math education.  It takes me a long time to study over the ideas.  Someone who was good at math would probably already be done with this book, but I have to mull things over.  The one chapter about place value I had to read about ten times before I understood it - and then I learned something incredible about decimals that I had never realized before and was never explained to me.

 I missed a lot about decimals and fractions.  I moved to a new school in 5th grade, and also tested into the Gifted program the same year.  At my old school, on the poor side of town in the normal program, my class hadn't done anything harder than long division.  Fights and violence often interrupted the classes.  It was normal for there to be a fight once a day either during or after lunch.  The first day at my new school, I wondered who would get in the first daily fight.  To my surprise, there never was a fight, not once all year.  And that wasn't the only thing that was different.

All of a sudden I was in a class that was reviewing multiplying and dividing fractions and working with decimals.  No one stopped to ask if I had ever done this math before.  So I just sat quietly in class and failed (I was extremely shy).  I had no idea what the teachers were talking about, but because they talked about it as a review, I just felt like I ought to know it already.  My parents felt the same way.  They thought that if I was smart I would just somehow catch up with the class and be able to work with math notations that had never been explained to me, and if not I was dumb and deserved to fail.  It turned out I was dumb, and I failed.  I had always thought I was smart until 5th grade. 

So it's really nice to be able to catch up on things now.  I have to, for homeschool.  Once you get into Algebra in middle school, you don't have a chance to go back and catch up on some of the very basic things like that.  I know that sounds very worrisome, since we are home schooling, but Ethan was always good at math, so he can always step in and explain things where I can't.

There's something about the Egyptian math...it gets in your head.  You start seeing things a different way.  I read Ethan some sections to see what he thought about it, and he complained of having dreams of Egyptian math.  That happened to me last night, too.  After a floundering dream that didn't work out the way I hoped it would, I found myself dreaming about multiplying numbers by two-thirds in Egyptian notation. 

Creepy Guy Antics

Last week, before we knew Ethan would be sent out-of-town for work, we had separated Flora and her calf (who ended up being called Ninja - he was always hiding somewhere.  More than once we thought he was lost).  The other cows were right on the other side of the fence for a few days, so Flora didn't mind being separated (and besides, her grass was nicer and she didn't have to share).  But Explorer minded.  You could tell it bothered him that she was on the other side of the fence.  He spent a lot of time at the fence-line if she was near there grazing.

I was walking up to get the goats one day when they were like that.  Flora was intently cropping grass.  Explorer was just hanging around, watching her with his "Hey, baby, notice me" eyes.  Flora ignored him and turned and walked towards me.  As she went Explorer stared intently at her butt while she walked away.  Maybe someone was going into heat, but I realized he was staring at all the cows' butts with the same "creepy guy stare" you would expect at the downtown plaza!  It's amazing how many testosterone-driven creepy guy antics you see with the bucks and bulls.

Passionfruit Farming

"We got here at the perfect time," Ethan said when we arrived to do the chores.  "We missed most of the rain."

It then proceeded to pour for hours.  I've never seen the paths become ankle-deep creeks with tiny rapids before.  It felt like we got four inches in an hour, but it was more like an inch and a half.  Very wet.  The goats were miserable and shivering, and wouldn't follow me at first to come down and be milked.  Rain paralyzes them under the trees like that (I don't blame them), but Matilda didn't seem to mind.  The wet steamed off her back while I was milking her.  The goats all took a REALLY long time to finish their milking ration.  No one wanted (understandably) to leave the shelter of the milking shed and get under the dripping trees again.

I discarded my shoes and went around barefoot - they are useless when it rains like that, because they just slip off my feet.  There's a risk of being stepped on by the cows with bare feet, so I was extra careful around them.  I need to get a new pair of boots.  I stopped wearing mud boots when I was pregnant with Clothilde, because they made my feet hurt so much.  Ethan's boots took on several cupfuls of water while we were out there.  I didn't even bother getting out in the rain to wet the udder rags - I just hung them on the fence, where they soaked themselves.  Luckily I had the presence of mind the other day to put a towel, a spare dress, and a waterproof blanket into the car.  The children just left their clothes in the truck and played naked in the rain the whole time.  When I finished milking, I found them lounging on the hay in the barn with the blanket.  We ended up nice and dry on the drive home.  Ethan made use of the towel, but he always forgets spare clothes somehow.

Day before yesterday, when it was NOT raining, I found dozens of ripe passionfruits in the garden.  You have to wait until they fall off the vines, so it involved a lot of blackberry scratches and ploughing through fire ant-ridden weeds.  I ate a few before alerting the others of my find, to make up for the hardship.  They are so good!!!  Even though I found a basket full, none of them made it home.  There were suggestions of converting the whole 40 acres to a passionfruit orchard.

Years ago I had transplanted some small vines around the orchard that never did very well.  I thought they ought to do well, since they are a wild plant, but apparently I can even kill wild-adapted plants.  This year, to our delight, they began coming up all on their own in the garden beds.  Instead of weeding them out, Ethan trellised them.  While they certainly needed more weed control around them, they loved the compost beds, and the vines are covered in fruit.

Another Goodbye

We said goodbye to Stripey and Nougat this weekend.  It was sad - Nougat was the first baby goat born on our farm, and Stripey was there from the beginning.  We got Stripey right after we got Ellie, our first goat, because she was so lonely.

Last year Nougat had a really bad case of mastitis.  Her udder is very poorly attatched, and one side was dragging on the ground even before Twilight Sparkle was born.  She would not let me milk her or treat the infection - she just kicked the crap out of me and it ended up ruining her udder.  She shouldn't be bred again, and now that we have our little buck Night Hawk, we had to find a new home for her.  And she was really mean, too.  I was always worried about her hurting my children.  Recently she put a hole in one of Mirin's t-shirts with her horns.  She pushed Rose around when Rose was trying to feed the goats peanut hay as a treat.  She hurt Clothilde's arm through the fence from knocking her with her horns.  She was the queen and had a big attitude.  They are going to live with a lady who has several acres of brush for them to eat, so I know they will be happy.  For now we dropped them off with our friend Denise (who we got Night Hawk from.  She used to be our post lady!).

 Catching them was tough.  Stripey doesn't like us very much (he was never very friendly).  We got Stripey first, because we knew he would be impossible to catch if he saw Nougat go in the dog kennel in the back of the truck.  Ethan heaved him into the back of the truck while I worked the gate and door of the kennel.  Night Hawk managed to get tangled in the fence and be a huge pain in the process.  Nougat was easy to catch (she is very friendly - to grown-ups), but getting her up on the truck bed was very hard.  She had to be got up in stages (she's a rather curvy lady these days).  Of course Stripey got out when we were trying to put her in.  He dodged around us and leaped off the back of the truck.  Ethan football tackled him, and he gave an unhappy bleat.  We finally stuffed them both it.  Even though it was a very large kennel with plenty of room for both of them, Nougat hogged more than half of it (that's just the way she is.  I know some people like that, too).

The children had all been left with my in-laws, so the drive to Denise's house was very quiet.  There was no one screaming and there were pauses in the conversation.  It's always kind of surprising when that happens.

When we got to Denise's place, we found that she wasn't home.  She said she might have to make a run into town, so we parked in the shade and waited.  All her dogs came over and barked fiercely at us (we also got our Pyrenees herd guard dog, Belle, from her).  After awhile they got used to us and we wandered back to see how the piglets we had traded for Night Hawk were doing.  At first a few of the ugliest goats (the LaManchas - I can't help thinking they look like they have a birth defect with no ears like that) came forward.  One was very friendly and kept trying to eat my toes!  The Nubians came out after - Night Hawk's mama was there.  She was very friendly and insisted I scratch her back.  His sister came over and nuzzled my knee.  All kinds of weird little chickens ran out of a shed.  There was a big rooster with no tail scratching alongside a bitchy-looking hen with ruffled feathers.  She gave him a big peck on his butt and he jumped and squawked.

More and more goats came out of hiding places.  A big dumb-looking goat was standing halfway out of a children's playhouse.  A fainting goat with two little twin kids (black with one white spot each) was there.  She made a big fuss when the dogs ran by.  A Dexter calf was there, moping around, and even a small cracker calf with a mean expression on his face popped out of somewhere.  Ethan tried to scratch his back, but he wasn't friendly at all.

As Ethan described it, it was like a cross between Noah's Ark and a clown car.  More and more animals showed up.  Denise showed up, too.  She had picked up a new piglet from her neighbor, so Ethan helped unload it.

We asked her about the cracker calf, and she told us a funny story.  She said he had just been weaned off his bottle, but he still liked to go around and suck on things, even the "male parts" of her new dog, Baxter.  The problem was, Baxter liked it.  He would go over to the calf and lift his leg up.

There was a little goat hanging around the cracker calf.  Denise said the goat had somehow bonded with the calf, and they were always together.  Even if it was raining, the goat would be out in the field in the rain with the calf, not under the trees with the other goats (the cows don't mind the rain).

We unloaded our goats into a little pen next to the buck run.  There were some Jersey cows and four bucks in the adjacent paddock.  Night Hawk's daddy was there.  I was pointing out how pretty he was, but as soon as Ethan looked the buck started doing his gross peeing-on-himself thing and we had to advert our eyes.  Bucks are just like that.  There was an ugly little fainting goat buck with the grossest, dingy-white beard that was yellow at the ends from pee.  As soon as Nougat and Stripey were unloaded, all the bucks came over and stuck their tongues out at them (it's a buck dominance thing).  We said goodbye (it was about to rain) and left to do the rest of our chores (and get soaking wet).

The goat herd seems so small now!  When I went to milk them yesterday, I kept looking behind me, feeling like some had gotten left behind.  May is vying for queenship now.  She's been very aggressive to everyone, but surprisingly little April has given her the most trouble.

Surviving

I've been feeling very quiet lately.  And there hasn't been much time to write.  Ethan was out of town last week, we had all the chores to do ourselves for a couple of days.  But home school planning is mostly complete, there's one garden bed built for fall, and we all survived - except Mirin got rolled up in the truck window by Clothilde.  He was okay, mostly just angry.  Perhaps a good lesson not to hang his body out of the window while the truck is on.

We have wasps living in the gate to the orchard.  Rose and I both were stung by them, just walking by the gate after it was open.  They stung us in the same places - ankle, and leg.  The strange thing was that it made our legs cramp up.  I think it was mud-daubber wasps, and they paralyze spiders so I wonder if their sting has neurotoxic chemicals in it.  I'm glad I wasn't a spider.

I've been trying to keep my kids busy this summer.  Last summer I ignored them and hoped they would play creatively.  I think they would have if my parents didn't live next door.  Instead they went and bothered my mom and had big tantrums and fought with each other.  They were very bored, and their way of doing something about it was to stir up all kinds of trouble at my mom's house.  It was a hard summer.  This year we are going out to the libraries (it's too hot and awful at the parks).  It seems to have helped, mostly, although we had a big scene in the parking lot last week......it was extra embarrassing because a dad with two young boys had just parked in front of us and gotten out of the car.  They stopped to watch the unfolding drama.

1.  "Hold onto Clothilde while I unlock the car," I say, unlocking the car.  I am ignored, and as soon as the doors are unlocked, the big kids pile into the car.

2.  I heave the books into the car and run after Clothilde.  I manage to catch her by one arm just in time as she makes a mad, desperate dash towards danger.  Mirin hits the automatic lock button while I am gone.

3.  I tap on the window and ask Mirin to hit the Unlock button.  He ignores me.  Rose unlocks the back door for me.  Gratefully, I reach for the handle.  Mirin hits the lock button before I manage, and I am locked out again.

4.  Clothilde starts jumping and dangling from where I am holding her arm, trying to slither away again.  I tap on the glass and ask that the doors are unlocked.  Rose reaches over and unlocks the door again.  Mirin locks it with a smirk on his face.

5.  "Fine, make everything really hard!" I say, and fumble with my keys in one hand.  I find the right one and unlock the front door.  I reach for the back door handle....Mirin hits "lock" again.  He looks immensely pleased with himself.

6.  Rose comes to my rescue, and unlocks the door and holds it unlocked.  Mirin hits lock as I try to open the door, pinching her finger.  I fumble with my keys again.

7.  Rose hauls off and whacks Mirin in the face.  There is horrible screaming that can be clearly heard outside of the car with all the doors and windows closed.

8.  I finally find the right key, and unlock the doors.  Mirin sobbing dramatically.  I say, "Rosie, no hitting!" and bundle Clothidle into her seat.  Dad with two boys hurridly guides them away.  He gives me a sympathetic smile and wave of parental solidarity over one shoulder.

9.  Mirin howls as I drive through the parking lot.  I try to be diplomatically sympathetic, but that obviously isn't sympathetic enough.  It quickly becomes Kid Thunderdome in the back seat, and I just try to ignore them and drive safely.

10.  We arrive at home with everyone screaming.  Ethan is home from his trip!  Children pile of of car, complaining about everyone else.

Calves Are Out

The calves are out on the line we call the "goat wedge."  I think we wanted to have the goats there on a more permanent basis a few years ago.  I guess we should call it the "calf wedge" now.  They are extremely happy to be off of hay at last.  We were trying to train them to being moved with cross-fences, but they just busted them all down and are eating on the whole line, the bad things.  I am trying to tame them by bringing a little peanut hay every day and standing around while they eat it.  Everyone except Sappho is fairly friendly.  Even Lichen will try to eat out of my hand.  Nutty is like a huge, over-enthusiastic dog when I come over.  He only thinks about his stomach.  How unfortunate that he will never be a milk cow!  And the girls are so stand-offish and flighty,

April is still getting her head stuck in the fence every day.  Every damn day.  But then again, how are we humans so different?  Don't we also make poor decisions every day that have obvious negative consequences?

This past week has been so busy.  My hands never did not have something before them that needed immediate attention.  Laundy, butter, skimming cream, washing jars, pickling, cooking, pulling big kids apart from fighting, catching Clothilde on her tricycle before she gets runover, laundry again.  Busy, busy, busy.  And on top of that was our homeschool evaluation.  It went very well, even though Mirin forgot all the math we've ever done.  But I doubt the regular-schooled kids could really remember exactly what they did beginning of last school year if you asked them in the middle of summer vacation.

I am really loving the reading that has come from planning 5th grade.  Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, India and Babylon.  The Egyptian math book I got is incredible.  I can't believe they don't teach it in regular schools!  Multiplying and dividing by doubling and halving.  You don't have to know all the times tables up to 10 or 12.  Just adding.  It's faster, easier, and makes more practical sense.  It's a different way of looking at how the numbers work together. 

I am finally learning something about Zoroastrianism.  It's life-changing.  Where was this my whole life?  It had such an influence on the major religions of the world.  Why do they always talk so much about Greece in history class, and only barely mention the Mesopotamians who had such a large impact on the Greeks? If you don't come out of school with the idea that white people, especially Americans, were the greatest humans on earth, then you must not have been paying attention.  I love how my 9th grade "World History" class was primarily about Europe and the US!  (The poor teacher's aid in that class even had a lesson centered around the idea that cucumbers originated in England!  They did not.  They are from India, but she didn't believe me at all when I raised my hand,  and of course the other students just thought I was stupid for disagreeing with the teacher).  At least I can broaden my deprived education a bit this way, even if Mirin won't remember it for the next home school evaluation (I think he will actually like it a lot).

All week I've wanted to write here, but there was just no time left in the day.  I am now worrying about the winter garden.  I know I can finish planning homeschool (I hope) by the time we're supposed to start home schooling again, but I'm not sure about the fall garden.  I had another big, ambitious garden plan drawn up in the spring when the weather was fine, but now I am feeling daunted by the 90 degree weather and lightening storms.  I'm not sure how I will do them both. 

Right now I am working on home school during times when I don't really have time - outside being bitten by mosquitoes and watching Clothilde ride too far away on the pink tricycle (curse the thing!), at the library while my kids play the stupid games on the computers there (they aren't interested in the books - we have books at home.  They just like the screens because they aren't allowed to play on screens at home.  At least it's cool in the library and there aren't mosquitoes - usually).  In between milking the goats.  Yes, I read and write things down in between milking the goats, while they are still eating their milking ration.  I give them a little extra than they need, and they are certainly getting fat, so maybe I should cut back.  But I need the time.  There's just not enough time!

Stuck

I have been writing less, mostly because I have discovered that sitting by a computer makes me feel awful.  I feel bad for all the people who spend many hours a day in front of these machines.

April has been getting her head stuck in the fence almost daily (twice one day).  Her horns have grown, and now they are the perfect shape for getting stuck.  The first time it happened, Twilight Sparkle got really excited because April is her major rival, and started thrashing her, shoving her with her horns, and even goring her belly.  I was milking, but ran over to rescue April and found that she would not cooperate with me enough to allow her head to be pushed back to get her horns through, so eventually I gave up and left her there, at the mercy of Twilight Sparkle.

Another time, it was Nougat who was thrashing her.  I did interfere then, because Nougat is a dangerous goat (she put a hole in Mirin's t-shirt with one of her horns!  We are looking into finding another home for her - she is friendly to adults, but not to children).  I still could not get her horns out, so I threw peanut hay over the fence to distract the other goats and give her a chance to get free, which she eventually did.  Two seconds later she was bleating her head off - she was stuck again, and again refused to cooperate.  I was done milking and brought the rest of the goats back to the pasture.  I started milking Matilda and tried to ignore the pathetic bleating.  Ethan heard and ran over to rescue her.

"April's stuck!" he said as he charged to the rescue.  "Didn't you hear her?"

"I know, I know," I said over my shoulder, trying to avoid Matilda smacking me in the face with her tail, "It's the second time today.  I'm hoping she'll figure it out this time."

She didn't.

It's the grass on the other side of the fence.  It's too tempting and delicious.  SO much better than the grass in the fence.