Zatera Ul

In some ways, summer is harder than winter for me. The days are longer, the prairie sun is too fiercely bright to be outside much, and MFH’s home-from-work time runs late and too close to bedtimes to take an evening walk usually. I start to slow down when the temperature rises above 70 degrees. Last week when it was around ninety I was hardly moving at all.

Today I did get out for a walk. I went to the thrift store and looked at all the shiny statusy things that I had absolutely no interest in buying. They had some size 11 shoes, but too narrow–where am I supposed to put the outer half of each foot?! They even had one pair of “12W” shoes; placed with the men’s shoes because of course no woman would be caught dead with feet that large. Worse, the 12W shoes were only a cruel imitation of a wide width shoe. As in: If that was a wide shoe, then a 12N in their sizing couldn’t have run more than two inches wide…ruler feet. I’m definitely going to have to just make myself some shoes.

My city recently was commended as one of the most livable cities in the U.S., partly for all the walking and biking trails. I found that part ironic because almost no one actually walks for the sake of walking here. Most of the trail use is for Exercise, capital E most definitely intended. A few people go out to walk their dogs. Rarely someone can be seen with a stroller. Very awful rarely, a poorer or younger person will walk to work. Just walking is very gauche around here; everyone drives everywhere. Except us, and we don’t actually walk all that often. So all the nice trails and crosswalks and underpasses and bridges see rather light use.

I also don’t consider a town centered around a big mall (as the surrogate downtown), and a definite lack of antique and surplus stores to be particularly livable. And where are the detached starter homes??

I did notice, last week when I went to pick up the farm share during rush hour, that all the traffic was going from the suburbs into the city; people living in southern Minneapolis driving home from their workplaces in the outer suburbs. Very little traffic going in the other direction.

I’ve been making some definite progress on my fiddle kit lately, and it’s been fun. I’m almost ready to glue the neck on, which is one of the more finicky tasks. My physics machine shop classes paid off; I got the neck to fit into the mortise very nicely. Someday I need to learn how to sharpen chisels properly…I ended up using my detail knife and my “crooked knife” to cut the whole mortise for the neck.

…is how long it now takes TLG to climb up onto the changing table. Yes, we do have climbers around here.

[The previous post mentioned some of the external factors for parenthood being difficult, but there are plenty of difficulties inherent in the job under even ideal conditions.]

MFH is working another long, long, long day.

Ninety degree heat, with at least ninety percent humidity. I think alligators are going to start crawling up out of the Minnesota swamps.

Two children getting over being sick, and cranky with the heat.

A large dose of artificial colors all around from the two pounds–I am not exaggerating for comedic effect—of candy that OLC picked up from the parade last weekend.

TLG broke a glass, and got a small cut on his foot. He removed his Band-Aid after ten seconds.

Three-quarters of the water that I’ve given him to drink today has ended up spilled on the floor.

He can climb over the baby gate now and get into MFH’s stuff, unless I close the door, which makes that whole side of the apartment dark and dismal. We need to start making Dutch doors.

He also climbed up onto the changing table and got into the diaper pail.

He can also pull chairs away from the dining room table enough to climb onto it and get into the pieces of my fiddle kit that I am working on. I am at the most difficult part of the assembly process: fitting the neck to the body.

His sister got into a roll of film, and pulled most of the film out. I hope there weren’t any pictures on it, or MFH will cry.

…here by Glenn Reynolds about the current high social costs of being a parent, half from safety nazis and half from a child-intolerant culture. I spend a good ten or fifteen minutes a week just buckling children into car seats, and that’s just for weekly shopping and to go to church. My parents just threw us in the back of the Chevette and we could loll around as we pleased.

Then there’s the demands that children be constantly supervised and controlled. That’s one reason for my 161-hour work week. One time I had a couple of hours to myself, entirely free, and I was amazed how nice I was afterward; such a caring, patient, nurturing mother. Lately I’ve been lucky to be able to sit for more than two minutes at a time, except while nursing.

Glenn left out, though, the increased demands on mothers during pregnancy. Eating and exercising exactly right, cutting out the booze and cigarettes and caffeine and tuna fish entirely, worrying through endless prenatal testing. The fussing and fretting doesn’t end during labor, either, and the current caesarean rate of about 32-33% is a significant weight on parentdom.

Feminism, too, has made parenting harder in many ways.

Prediction Fourteen: All the gloom and doom I predicted in Predictions One through Thirteen will not be the whole story.

It’s relatively easy to see what the forces of evil are up to. Not always easy, though, to see what God is doing. There will be at least a remnant preserved, but who will be in it? And what should the Christian non-remnant be doing until they are wiped out? In any case, I’m a firm believer in praying for enemies, and I expect to see some of them in heaven.

I reread The Allure of Hope, by Jan Meyers. This is how I summed it up to MFH: “Our suffering from unmet desires should draw us closer to God.” We were meant for Eden, and that’s not where we are right now; it is not evil to desire good things.

…here has completely forgotten that as a creditor, she can submit nasty reports to the credit reporting agencies, and consign her over-the-top deadbeats to years and years of renting from Bad Landlords.

And if she hadn’t pissed off so many of the commenters by insulting renters in general, perhaps someone would have pointed this out to her earlier. When she said (in the comments) that anyone who fulfills their lease and moves out after one year is not a Good Renter, that did it for me.

We did our first farm share pickup this week, and had a wonderful salad for dinner last night.

MFH’s strategy was to prepare for the heavy influx of spring greens by eating lots of salads over the last couple of months. My strategy was to not eat salads at all for the last couple of months, so I wouldn’t be sick of salad when the farm share stuff started coming. We both still think we’re right.

This year we went with this CSA. We went to their Blessing of the Farms and Fields, they have a small farm, the soil is quite sandy but they have obviously been working hard to build it up. Last I heard, they still had some shares available.

Prediction Thirteen: Within my lifetime, there will be severe restrictions placed on homeschooling, from the federal government.

This partly relates to Sallie’s two recent posts about education here and here. There’s an agenda afoot to discredit homeschoolers, and it’s easy to guess who is behind it.

I emphasize that the regulations will come from the federal level, the better to avoid grass-roots resistance.

Updated to add: It’s only because of hard-fought grass-roots efforts at the state level that homeschooling is where it is today. Also, while the agenda-driven media will only present homeschooling in the worst possible light, there is all the more need to present the positive side of homeschooling in the alternative media.

OLC now has a bedroom of her own, with a little loft.

My storage loft I narrowed and put behind the couch in the living room. (My inspiration was an apartment-style loft that I saw in a book, it was one big room with the bedroom and bathroom housed in little cabins at each end.) Then I walled the loft in, so now I have about 20 square feet of space all to myself, plus fabric/craft storage on the level above. Going without a personal space for a week was difficult. Twenty square feet is enough, I just need room to sit and think and have some of my special things around me.

I figure that this is the seventh configuration that I’ve put the loft into. I originally built it before I was married, cost was about $100 for the lumber and hardware. I did all the cutting and drilling with hand tools. Previously I had flipped it and added a level and widened it.

Moving all these things around was a tremendous amount of work, now most of the big things are done and I only have an endless list of little things to do.