Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Latinists and Hellenists, Rejoice!

I just made a last minute purchase from The Teaching Company (The Great Courses), and I was emailed a link to course starter materials as a follow-up to my order. I was thrilled to see there was a link to the Perseus Digital Library.

I have seen similar sites, but this one is outstanding, and I just had to share.

Feeling oh so grateful for the Internet right about now.

Enjoy!

Date Denial

I can't believe it's already the end of August. Seriously? What? Unreal.

This entire summer has been a blur. I think it will forever go down in the annals of summer history as the summer Mother Nature went all mental on us. Between the hotter-than-hot heat waves, an earthquake that rattled us (read: "me") in more ways than one, and Hurricane Irene, I'm fairly confident that I'm about done. And yet I'm concurrently wishing a milder, less eventful version of it would continue. Indefinately. There were no vacations or day trips. My husband didn't have summer hours this year, something to which we always looked forward, providing him with every other Friday off. But hold it... Lest it be thought that I've been moping around, lamenting the lack of these things, the truth is that the summer flew by so quickly, that I barely noticed what we hadn't gotten around to doing i.e., until I wrote it out just now.

So what have we been doing? Um... Well, there's been some kung fu. We haven't been in as often as we would have liked, particularly due to my husband's "anti-summer" schedule. We attempted several outings on foot, all ending a few minutes later with the kids swooning from the heat, begging to re-enter the air conditioning. Lightweights, they are. And we've spent lots of time doing low-key stuff like watching videos, playing Scrabble and chess, and puttering around, from room to room, discovering stuff.

Acknowledging that it's already the end of summer however, really provides the incentive to just plan something "summery," and my husband must be feeling the same way now, as he's announced he'll be taking a few days off this week. We're so excited about that. We still don't know what we'll be doing, but it may or may not include a trip into Chinatown. The kids have been clamoring to return since Chinese New Year, and I admit that I've been looking forward to that as well. Of course, while they're looking forward to just sight-seeing and visiting some of the video stores (Asian films are a hot commodity at our house), I'm looking forward to buying some Chinese herbal stuff—tinctures and liniments. Boy, do I feel old! But when you are prone to eyesores like this:


And this:


…the desire to purchase liniments claiming to heal bruises faster becomes a matter of vanity, and a sincere desire to keep people from thinking my husband’s a batterer. He’s not. It’s all due to the kung fu, of course. Oh, and the pictures don’t even do these justice. No pain, no gain, right?

Off to have a cup of tea, and work on some more planning for school. That will be another post.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

What I Learned from my Dad

Lots of big feelings for the past few weeks, guys!

For starters, I had been beyond worried about a friend of mine. She has PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), and has been having constant health issues related to that. But then doctors found an especially large cyst that seemed out of the ordinary--a complex cyst. My worry settings are always set to autopilot, so I was all flustered, while she was the epitome of grace over the whole situation. Thankfully, her doctors ran some tests and don't believe that it's cancerous, because it's not "behaving like cancer." What a relief!

Then a dear friend lost her Dad to cancer. I'm a wreck whenever it comes to stuff like that, particularly because I'm flooded with memories of my own Dad's illness and death from cirrhosis way back in 1989. I was 16 at the time, so I'm fuzzy on many of the details, but I still remember his last moments as if they had just come to pass. So my Dad has been on my mind heavily for the past week. I can't believe it's been over twenty years since he's been gone.

Unlike my friend's Dad, my Dad didn't have a well-defined faith or spiritual home. He never went to church, and only showed interest in God when he was a few years into his illness. Towards the very end of his life, I'd find him reading bits of his Bible, and he seemed comforted by what he read in it. I was too oblivious at the time to understand where the change came from, even though it was a marked change and I knew that he was ill. I still hadn't realized, even after half a dozen or more hospitalizations, that things had gotten pretty serious with his illness. It never even occurred to me that he would die of cirrhosis. It wasn't like I had the Internet available at the time, providing ample opportunity to Google his diagnosis and worry myself to death over the possibilities. I do wish I had known how serious it all was. It would have forced me to pay more attention. I may have made it a point to focus more on the little things...conversations we had had, jokes he had told, and just quiet uneventful times spent together. Granted, I should have been doing that all along, but I was really oblivious about life at the time. I was a very selfish teen, preferring to spend time by myself or with friends, rather than with my family. My Dad didn't seem to mind, as when he was home, he spent most of his time on the couch, watching baseball. When I was younger, he hated it whenever my Mom would ask him to take me along with him to watch a live game. It was hilarious! Sometimes I think my Mom would just fling me on him unawares, so as to ruffle his feathers a bit. And he'd let me know just how annoyed he was, too, with a series of deep sighs and grunts. And yet just a few short years later, he went through a major change some time during the course of his illness. He all of a sudden seemed to want to be with me, and talk to me. But the irony is that right about the time he stopped minding having me around, I couldn't care less for staying home and bonding. It's like we just missed each other's window of opportunity.

My Dad's passing changed everything. My Dad's death, as awful as it was, helped to sort out my priorities. It forever altered my focus, and helped me put God and family first. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that guilt played a big part in this, too. I felt very guilty, and I still do. I feel guilty that I wasn't able to read his cues, and guilty that I was so detached from him. It's kind of an odd way to learn a lesson. It's not like I ever had a heart-to-heart with my Dad. But it was a lesson learned through his experience. He didn't have to tell me. He showed me through his actions and his experience, and I learned it too, albeit later than I should have. It's a lasting lesson as well, as I can't think of a single important thing I've decided, or on which I've deliberated, for or against, that wasn't done so in light of this experience. Before any big decision, I ask myself, "How will this help or hinder us as a family?" Oftentimes this means doing something with the kids, and for the kids, even when I don't want to, and trying to keep the sighs and grunts down to a minimum.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

While the Cats are Away

Enjoying a bit of alone time at the moment, and figured I may as well post something. I've been terrible at keeping up with this blog, particularly as it was my intention to update it regularly. I've come to the realization that I just have to do it. I've thought of a gazillion things I'd like to write about, but when I sit on those for too long, they sort of lose their luster. Those were postings for other days, and they're no longer calling to me, if that makes any sense.

Today my husband took the day off from work, which is always nice. But we didn't really plan on doing anything. I was content to just busy myself here at home, but he was eventually coerced into taking a trip to the local Korean market to satisfy his daughters' and their friend's appetite for some K-pop merchandise. My son tagged along as well, hoping that my husband would agree to taking him to another spot afterwards. I haven't been alone at home in like forever. It's nice.

On the agenda for the next few hours at least:

Have a quiet dinner.

Enjoy a cup of tea.

Cuddle up with a book. Preferably something not considered generally great in a literary sense, or listed on some great books list. Something not ancient or involved, not that I don't find enjoyment in those sometimes, but just not today. Just pure escapism is on the agenda tonight.

I can get used to this.

Monday, August 1, 2011

Shelf Reorganization

I spent most of yesterday sorting through our books, and reorganizing our shelves. That's easier said than done. Our kitchen book shelf has to house the most used stuff. Well, the kids' most used stuff anyway. My books had to be moved elsewhere for now.
Here is what we have on our top shelf. On the left is our new modern language for the year (Korean), followed by several Latin resources. What this shelf wasn't able to accommodate, were my Latin books (Henle, Wheelock's, and Lingua Latina), as well as our Galore Park Latin books.
I would just love to have everything kept together, but shelf space is lacking, instead of crack-a-lackin' at our house. I dream of built-in book cases. In. Every. Room.

Here we have Drew Campbell's Memory Work book. Love this resource! E has expressed interest in learning Spencerian script, so those penmanship manuals are on on this shelf as well.
We tried I.E.W. for the first time this past year, and while I feel just so-so about it, it has been a hit with E, so who am I to complain?

Next we have our Catechism books. I'm so excited about starting the Didache series with E this year! I'm still kicking myself for not having started her on them last year, but better late than never. S & F and still working their way through My Catholic Faith (gorgeous and faithful), and when we can fit it in, we're still s-l-o-w-l-y going through Memoria Press' Christian Studies guide, only we use the Douay-Rheims translation for the memory work and copywork selections.

And here are the rest of our Catholic books (at least the ones we'll be using this year), and some more of our writing resources. I'm excited to start S & F on Killgallon this year. For those of you unfamiliar with the Killgallon books, basically they teach children how to compose interesting sentences using modeling techniques. The goal is to reproduce the grammatical form, not the content, of the sentences being modeled. It's really neat! We'll take a lot of our copywork and dictation selections from it as well.
Lots of cool writing resources this year...including The Grammar of Poetry for my high schooler, and Imitation in Writing - Greek Myths for my younger two.

Next we have Science and Math.
It took forever to settle on Campbell's Exploring Life for biology this year, and while I still haven't received the student text (backordered), from what I can gather from the Teacher's Edition, it was a very good choice. Also on this shelf is Geometry: A Guided Inquiry. We'll be using the Math Without Borders CD along with it. I'm always grateful for the added help. Teacher resources are worth their weight in gold at our house. Oh, and the CD also contains all of the solutions! Score!

Hmmm...Forgot to capture the other side of the shelf. Those were all Singapore Math books, and there were a few Saxon Math books in there as well.

The bottom shelf is home to a few Art and Classical Studies books.
They're hard to see, but we've got Tanglewood Tales and A Wonder Book on here as well. Come to think of it, we've got a lot of Hawthorne on our shelves.

Some more Classical Studies titles and a few history books... E's history books are elsewhere. Again, not enough space to accommodate everything on the one shelf.

I won't even attempt to photograph all of our literature shelves. But here are a few...


And...

A few more eclectic selections...