I’ve been hit hard by a combination of seasonal allergies and being sick this week.
TLG has been teaching himself to sing, OLC has been practicing writing and a little Spanish, and StrongBaby has reached the dancing-on-the-coffee-table stage of babyhood.
I’ve been reading off and on; just finished Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed. I [...]
…my children are much more interested in being read to.
I’ve also been doing some sewing off and on: two tablecloth skirts done, two to go. More than a year ago I was given a better sewing machine than my crotchety old one, and I finally took the time to figure out how to [...]
…and everything is going my way.” That is what keeps going through my head every time I see another commentary on Rosen’s misstep into deep Mommy Wars doo-doo. (It is a paraphrased line from an upbeat song that was…um…not originally about babies.)
I’ve been tweaking household routines since we moved, and it has occurred [...]
I came across this Pioneer Press article, about “managed instruction” in St. Paul schools, which nicely highlights many of the main points of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America (managed instruction basically means teaching straight from a script; St. Paul is trying to even out teaching levels across a huge school district):
“There was a sense [...]
I have been doing far too much lately; trying to slow down this week. We are up to our ears in turkey already, because we cooked a huge turkey for a church dinner last weekend, made turkey stock from the remnants, and brought home some of the leftovers.
The BEEP coalition roundly won [...]
…at least in physics: The U.S. produces at least two physics Ph.D’s for every physics Ph.D-level job. There are no recruiters beating down my door offering me shiny cars and ponies to come and think for them. Once upon a time, I wasted many precious hours trying to get various large companies [...]
BEEP is a helpful acronym that has been provided for the upcoming local school board election, to identify the candidates to vote for in order to vote the bums off the school board.
There has been a huge local controversy for more than a year. The demographics of the suburb, as it ages out of [...]
I don’t visit the main news sites much, usually I get news second-hand, by reading commentaries on it. Generally the news gets a neat left or right spin, depending on the commentator. With the Occupy Wall Street protests, though, the commentary has been all over the map, from derision to half-agreement to outright [...]
This article, “Gloom Grips Consumers, and It May Be Home Prices”, on Yahoo Finance made me laugh over and over, in a “WHERE ON EARTH has this writer BEEN the LAST THREE YEARS?!?! Or even the last three weeks?!” sort of way. Stuck in HopeyChangeyLand, I guess.
The United States has a confidence problem: [...]
A while back, I picked up Studs Terkel’s Hard Times at a library book sale. I wondered then if anyone else realized what it was, since it has a certain relevance to our own time. It is a collection of reminiscences about the Great Depression, gathered in the 70’s, and is well worth [...]