Milton at 400

Jonathan Rosen in The New Yorker (June 2, 2008) on “The enduring relevance of John Milton” [links mine]:
This year is the four-hundredth anniversary of Milton’s birth, and there are a host of Milton books to mark the occasion: the Modern Library has brought out “The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose,” edited by William Kerrigan, John [...]

We’re a hard-boiled bunch

Laura was looking over my shoulder this morning as I was tapping away about elites and suddenly started humming. I couldn’t quite place the song, so I asked her to sing the words, which had come to her little pointy head so quickly because she knows the movie so well and also just read [...]

Census time

I was reading through the June 2008 issue of Harrowsmith Country Life magazine from the library last night when I happened on an article about on the Canadian FrogWatch program (page 12).  Since the sound of the frogs around our house, especially with the slough across the road, has been deafening some days (at times [...]

Eggheads unite, or, Democracy for Dummies

I’m an egghead, I’m an egghead,
I’m an egghead happily.
And I’d rather be an egghead
Than a bonehead G.O.P.
Sung to the tune of “Oh My Darling Clementine” in 1956 by supporters of Adlai Stevenson

I’ve been watching former Wal-Mart director and self-styled woman of the people Hillary Clinton, who with her husband earns approximately $16 million [...]

Poetry Friday: PennSound

My Poetry Friday offering today isn’t one written poem but many audio poems. I had a comment earlier today from Durga at original remixed with this lovely gift:
Do you know about PennSound?
…I think you will love it – there are over 1500 individual poems – all in mp3 format – the site is dedicated [...]

Notifications II: What’s the Matter?

From Amazon.ca this time, one of their “Because you bought ABC, we thought you might be interested to know that XYZ is out now” announcements.
What I bought initially was

The Periodic Table: Elements with Style! created (and illustrated) by (Simon) Basher, and written by Adrian Dingle. I reviewed it for the Cybils bloggers’ children’s book [...]

Notifications I

For anyone who’s interested in such things, I’ve had some email notifications recently.
First up, from LibriVox, because I signed up for the announcement, news that The Fairy-Land of Science by Arabella Buckley, originally published in 1879, is now available as a free audiobook. I’m planning to use this in addition to the book, which [...]

Done like dinner

I’m happy to announce that as of this morning at 11 am, we are officially done with volume 3 of Story of the World by Susan Wise Bauer, “Early Modern Times”. It’s taken us two years, dozens of rabbit trails, and probably hundreds of supplemental books. 1850, here we come!

Canada needs Mike Ford

I’ve written before (here, here, and here) about how much our family enjoys and learns from Mike Ford’s first Canadian history CD, “Canada Needs You, Volume 1”. Mike, who used to play with Moxy Früvous, is one of the few people in this country nowadays doing his darndest to make Canadian history popular and [...]

Worth reading

Prof. Sherry Turkle’s article, “A Passion for Objects: How science is fueled by an attachment to things”, from the May 30, 2008, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
I’m not a Chronicle subscriber, but I do get the weekly Review Newsletter, which gives me a few days to read articles before they get disappeared.
From Prof. [...]

Notes

Just home, very, very early this morning from the provincial music festival, I was relaxing with some online blog reading and at Read Roger read that Roger Sutton of The Horn Book is “immensely enjoying Tricia Tunstall’s Note by Note: A Celebration of the Piano Lesson published last month by Simon & Schuster. Roger [...]

Two great posts on home schooling

Two of my favorite bloggers have written some excellent posts on the subject this week.
Cami at Full Circle gives us a peek into their family’s home school, in the post A Solitary Plant: How We Homeschool: how the study of one particular plant, in this case mullein, took her family from their nature journals and [...]

Victoria Day

Here’s a bit of a repeat from a couple of years ago, mainly because I don’t have the time or creativity to come up with something different about the late great Queen on her big day in the Dominion.
Today is Victoria Day, which in Canada means that this is the long weekend known as the [...]

Time for a Sunday Garden Stroll

Last year Cloudscome at a wrung sponge featured a Sunday Garden Tour all through the summer, and the good news is that the garden tour is back for this new growing season,
Last summer I posted about my garden on Sundays, sharing photos and inviting everyone to send me links to your posts of photos of [...]

Poetry Friday

The leaves have finally come out on the trees in these past few days, and now it looks like Spring around here. On Monday, you could see a light green haze in certain stands of trees, on Tuesday the haze spread to most of the trees, and by Thursday real leaves, actual leaves, were starting [...]

The newest Farm School pupil

is already very intelligent and well-trained. In fact, probably not much more that I can teach her.
Meet Lady, who is not quite three years old, and who came to live with us last night,

While the kids and I still tear up thinking of our late, much loved Heidi, there was definitely room in our [...]

Books for little geeks

Or rather, books from geeks, GeekDads to be specific.
Today Michael Harrison at GeekDad has a post about Laura’s new b00kn3rd.com blog [it took me a while to figure out that "book nerd" is in there, but then I'm still woozy from my breakfast of waffles, whipped cream, and strawberries] and her post on rare children’s [...]

What we’ve been up to

Building a new open-front pole shed.
Tom and his helper, his father, and the boys (Laura is otherwise engaged, halter-breaking Benny) have done this bit in the past week. Daniel especially likes what I think of as the “high wire” work. I’ll stay down on the ground with my camera, and the [...]

Happy Mother’s Day

from all the mamas and their offspring at Farm School!
Callie the calico cat and some of her kittens,

Laura’s 4H cow-calf pair, Bunny and Benny,

Oreo the Speckle Park calf,

Poetry Friday: Mushrooms

It’s still Friday around here, for another two hours and 50 minutes, so technically I’m not late. It’s been a busy week, with swim club starting (requiring us to be in town four afternoons a week), an art lesson (we had just about forgotten what the art teacher looked like), and a make-up singing [...]