The Blueberry Years - Book 28

I enjoyed this book and at the same time I have to admit the author's writing style did not appeal to me.  What interested me is his actual recounting of how he and his wife started a blueberry farm in the hills of Floyd County, Virginia and ran it for 10 years.  I liked reading about the actual planning, problem-solving and work that went into it.  A lot of work.  And I loved the sections sprinkled through the book called Blue Interludes, which would recount interesting facts about blueberries!  I bet you didn't think they were that interesting but actually they are!  I liked the even sometimes a bit silly interludes that talked about blueberries in songs, poems, movies and literature.  I kept waiting for him to mention Madam Blueberry of Veggie Tale fame, but I guess Bob, Larry and gang are not on the author's radar.  Maybe if he wasn't so hostile to homeschooling Christians he'd have learned about her.  But he bites his tongue because they have lots of children to feed and they come to pick his berries.  He and his wife have decided not to have children because the human population is ruining the earth.  He gets offended because one asks if he is going to have children.  (Believe me, Mr. Minick there are plenty of folks out there who say offensive things about having children.  Just ask any mom of three or more children who happen to take them shopping.)  He's judging them even as he gets irritated with them for possibly judging him.  He's a pretty judge-y person, I thought.  That was just one small episode, but there are number of those kind of interactions he recounts throughout the book.

But also I simply thought his writing style was overly flowery and emotional.   I kept thinking, please stop trying so hard to be deep!  I even looked up reviews on Amazon and lots of people talk about his gorgeous prose and his poetic language.  I guess it just might have been me then.  It just seemed strained most of the time.

After talking about blueberries and the earth and farming in deliberately ecstatic religious terms, he and his wife decide they really only want to be hobby farmers, so they sell it to some oddball guy from New York who doesn't know a thing about farming and move to a beautiful spot where they only plant 25 berry plants (I think that was the number) instead of 1000.

I am making the author sound worse than he really was.  It was an interesting book, but I have read other farming/back to the land books that I've enjoyed more.

For more books go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

And here is rich but sad Madame Blueberry:

New Breakfast Menu

Yesterday in the car we were brainstorming about how to get the kids to eat breakfast.  This is an ongoing problem.  They aren't hungry early but then they just don't eat until early or even late afternoon and all they want is junk.  And usually they've waited until the very last minute before we have to head out somewhere and suddenly they are ravenous and craving something.  Usually fries.  It is such a bad habit.  It messes with their ability to concentrate and their moods.  S is into looking at vegetarian and vegan stuff so he got into the brainstorming. We just got B's consent (she had her earphones plugged in so we just shouted to get her attention, told her our plans and she said yeah, whatever and went back to listening to her music). LOL  Hey, I counted it as collaboration.

So the new menu plan looks like this:

Sunday:  eat out after Mass
Monday:  S wants this breakfast sandwich he had up in Boston from a vegetarian restaurant.  Some of kind of roll, bagel or bread, with sharp white cheddar, fake bacon and avocado.  B's would be with real bacon.
Tuesday:  fancy eggs day omelets, doctored up scrambled eggs, fried egg sandwiches, maybe even vegetarian eggs benedict.  We put S in charge of breakfast on Tuesdays.
Wednesday:  some kind of sweet/quick bread:  pumpkin, banana, cornbread, etc with nut butter
Thursday:  breakfast sandwich again (this are so S can eat in the car on the way to his classes on M & Th)
Friday:  something oaty - oatmeal, granola, whatever - S never cared for oatmeal though but since vegetarians/vegans live off the stuff, he's wanting to try it again.  So we will experiment with what is the most appealing for him.  B like oatmeal.
Saturday:  bagels from bagel bakery - our usual Saturday thing

To my fellow pro-lifers

I understand the desperation people are feeling.  I understand why they want to cling to Trump's promises, but guys, this man is a bad, bad man.  It is dangerous for the pro-life movement to align itself with such a reprobate.  It will do as much damage in its own way as having Hillary for 4 years in terms of the pro-life movement.  We will never be able to take the high road again.  This will follow us forever.  This man is unfit to be president.  He doesn't understand anything he needs to in order to run a country.  Especially a country as important as the U.S.  He is a megalomaniac and con artist.  He is unstable.  He is dangerous.

Empty promises.  Remember those words from the baptism rite?  Do you reject Satan and all his empty promises?  It is better to stick to our principles and be persecuted (what is more Christlike than being persecuted?) than to cling to lies to protect ourselves.  We have to be brave and our vision has to be clear and realistic.

I feel like the pro-life movement is selling its soul.  Don't make this Faustian bargain!

Camping in a Tree House

Well, I went camping for the first time in 28 years (and only my second time ever).  I loved it!

I slept against the wall under the window.

First of all we weren't tent camping but staying in a cabin built up into the trees.  There was no electricity.  The cabin consisted of a porch and one room with wide bunks on the bottom and narrow bunks up top.  The bunks were so roomy.  All five girls from B's AHG troop (that were on the trip) slept on one side and I and another leader slept on the other.  The third leader slept on the top bunk over us.  Three of four walls had big screened windows.  And the door to the cabin was so sweet with a rather noisy latch (hard to go outside without disturbing those sleeping.)  The bathrooms were through the woods and down a hill, but not too far to travel.

Our sweet (but noisy) cabin door.

There was grill outside the cabin and a fire pit.  I learned to use a camp stove and cooked chili Saturday night and made coffee Sunday morning on it.  I feel like a hero!  The reason why I enjoyed it though was that the weather was great.  I hate hot weather and while it was warm on Friday, it wasn't too hot and Saturday was the perfect temperature.  At night it got downright cold, but I love chilly fall weather.

My phone died almost immediately, alas, the charger in my car is very temperamental and decided it didn't want to do its job.  So I only got the two pictures above for the whole weekend.

Friday night we did some star gazing.  Constellations confuse me.  I never know what I am looking at but we did see a falling star!

We tried to go hiking on the Appalachian Trial just a few minutes from camp but one of the girls twisted her ankle before we even got started.  No swelling but she had tears in her eyes and was limping.  The other girls were fine with that, well, except they didn't want their friend hurting, but they were ok with no hike.  I was a tad disappointed myself.  We did some badge work, namely learning different lashing techniques.  We even had a competition to see who could make something useful from sticks and string.  B. was on one team and they made something to hang a pot over the fire pit, which was quite ingenuous.  The girls on my team made a little tripod table to hold a cell phone by your sleeping bag.  I wish I had a photo of both of them.  It made me admire how clever humankind is.  First to create rope and then to develop all this different techniques for building stuff with it.

Being all girls we did some arts and crafts as well.  Our fearless leader, Mary, brought T-shirts, sharpies and rubbing alcohol.  We all drew designs on the shirts and the dripped alcohol on the drawings making the colors bleed out.  It looked kind of tie-dye-ish.

Saturday as we walked around we saw all these people who looked like they were going to a Renaissance Festival.  Turns out there was a wedding just across the narrow road which had a Renaissance faerie theme.  Apparently most of the bridal party was staying in the camp.  One of the tree houses does look a like a hobbit house, so it was the perfect place.  We could hear music from the wedding until almost 10 at night.  They played good music.  The girls made a big fire and we made s'mores and then they sat around telling riddles and jokes.  B played her ukulele and they all sang.   It was really sweet and peaceful.  I had brought along a nice chaise lounge and read from my kindle.

We might go back next year and just make it a regular fall weekend thing for the girls.  It is only about an hour and 20 minutes away.  It was so pretty.  Next time though I will bring an air mattress because sleeping on a wood platform ain't the easiest thing to do.

Honestly I got home feeling exhilarated.  I know it was the weather.  If it had been hot and muggy, I would have been half-dead, but cooler weather just energizes me.  Plus the mosquitoes and other nasty critters weren't bad at all.  We did have a couple of wasps that liked our picnic table but we lit a citronella candle that seemed to solve that problem. I loved being outdoors all the time.

Father Aidan Nichols

In my theology class we are reading the MOST WONDERFUL book by Aidan Nichols.  I had never heard of him before but apparently he is a well respected intellectual force in Catholicism right now.  His writing is amazing; pure pleasure to read.  He makes deeply hard to understand ideas easily accessible.  I always love that in a writer since I need so much help!

Here's a link to a video of Father Aidan giving a talk.

Bureaucracy Makes you Stupid

Holy crap.  What incompetence!  858 immigrants that were supposed to be deported for national security/fraud reasons accidentally got granted citizenship rights.

You can't make this stuff up!

Blandings Castle - Book 27

Blandings Castle is a collection of humorous short stories by P.G. Wodehouse.  It is only loosely tied to the Psmith books.  In fact Psmith never appears (to my disappointment).  We do have quite a bit of Lord Emsworth in the beginning of the book but then the stories move to Hollywood in the Twenties.
All the stories are funny.  They go from being subtly witty to hysterically absurd and then back again.  I think P. G. Wodehouse was cracking himself up as he wrote these.  There is a theme running through most of them and that is that women like a strong man who isn't afraid.  The men are usually in love with some rather kooky pretty girl and in some way they need to prove that they are not fearful milquetoasts.  Which is a problem because in their hearts, they are fearful milquetoasts.

Another charming, light read.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.