I have 10 minutes to blog before my day officially begins. Excuse typos.I’m typing faster than my brain really can handle.

I made a new blog yesterday to deal with everything of a Mission:Simplification nature. It’s here: This house needs an enema.

It does.Really.

I got wordy last night on the subject of laundry on The Green Goddess’ Guide blog:
Suds your Duds the Earth Friendly way (don’t worry…I didn’t recommend doing anything too extreme like hauling your laundry down to the creek and beating it on rocks. Even I love my washing machine too much to recommend that)

and…

All about Homemade Laundry Detergent
recipe plus all the FAQs people have asked me over the years and the benefits of it all

Posthumouser wrote a great entry yesterday for me about Literary Beckys and Rebeccas.

My girls have a new blog where they’re recording their own views on the world and book reviews and such.Lilly chose the name The Root Children as their blog name (<–that’s the link,there) They’re still choosing their picks for The Newberry Reading Challenge and The Non-Fiction Five.
I need to choose my books for Southern Reading Challenge (btw, Maggie Reads is a great book blog.She’s a librarian who’s on a mission to make Mississippi read

I also need to get around to posting pics of :
- our nesting-materials for the birds project
-our homemade barometer
- some cute kids that happen to be my offspring
- my forsythia in bloom
-my lone daffodil

I need more hours in the day.That’s all there is to it.

It was about this time last year (May,to be exact) when my son formed one of many “bands” with a group of close, also musically-inclined friends.It seems like he’s always in some new band …just him and a bunch of friends who want to hang out and jam together. Last year,though, this one particular band of his actually got a gig, which meant they had to actually learn to play a few songs.

As lead singer, his task was to memorize lyrics. There were certain songs he had an easier time learning because they were already favorites and he knew them already. They decided to also cover the song “Shine” by Collective Soul.

From my diary entry from last year:

I know he doesn’t want to get rid of his rock star hair. Especially not until after their first paying “gig”. *rolls eyes* They’re being payed to play at some Harley…thing. $300. His voice was so hoarse the other night from practice. The other night, he was trying to learn “Shine” by Collective Soul and I swore that if I heard that song one.more.time. my head was gonna ’splode.

Over and over and over I had to listen to that song and although it drove me a little crazy,I admitted that there were worse songs in the world to have to listen to repeatedly. I like the song. It’s really a beautiful song that can be interpreted to be religious or not but whatever your spiritual feelings, it’s uplifting and has a feeling of promise.

Dylan came home from school today and the first thing he said to me was,”I was reading this article about the guy who shot those people in Virginia and guess what song he listened to over and over again and wrote the lyrics to on his wall?”

I had no idea.
He say down at my computer and turned my media player on and clicked on Collective Soul’s “Shine”.

I really was at a loss for words.My brain was too busy trying to digest the connection between that song and Cho Seung-hui and what he did at Virginia Tech last week. The song played as I went back to doing what I was doing around the kitchen and Dylan turned on his messenger to chat with friends but we were both listening to the song to make some sense of it.

When the song finished, Dylan said,”Weird,huh?”

It was a very eerie feeling and neither of us had much to add beyond that with words. Just “weird” was all we could muster.

It’s definitely weird….and sad…and oh-so-tragic.

I wouldn’t ever claim to understand the inner workings of a mass-murderer’s brain but I just can’t help but feel that Cho was trying so hard to find the right path and was begging someone to help him find the answers so he could save him from himself.Unfortunately, the answers and the help didn’t come.

“Teach me how to speak
Teach me how to share
Teach me where to go
Tell me will love be there (love be there)
Oh, heaven let your light shine down.”

I remember when the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai. I had never heard of her and I read a brief news article with the Nobel announcements that stated that she won “for planting trees”. I thought,”Huh. Who knew planting trees was a peace thing?”. I think I meant to find out more about what that was all about but never did.I knew what she had done but I hadn’t looked into the Trees to Peace connection.

Last week I was reading the Spring 2007 Nature Conservancy Magazine (courtesy of some wonderful library patron who left it on the magazine exchange shelf to share), I came across a brief one page article about Wangari and her Greenbelt Movement. I found Wangari’s story absolutely fascinating and was astounded by how much this woman overcame just to plant trees …. even being arrested imprisoned and beaten….and all of it was for the love of her country and it’s people.

So, I’ve decided I want to learn more about this incredible woman and therefore, here’s my new Non-Fiction Five:

1. Unbowed: A Memoir ,Wangari Maathai
2. Danse Macabre ,Stephen King (about writing and the genre of horror)

3. Tell Them Who I Am:The Lives of Homeless Women, Elliot Liebow (women’s studies,sociology)
4. Ghosts of Kampala, George Ivan Smith (history)
5.Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos ,Robert D. Kaplan
My alternates….
In Small Things Forgotten:The Archeology of Early American Life by James Deetz (sociology/archeology)
Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight by John McDermott w/ Eddie Kramer (biography)

And yep, I changed another one too. I picked up Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan yesterday and it looks pretty interesting.

Things I Want To Write About But Can’t Seem To Find The Time

- McCain and his whole “Bomb Iran” thing

- my fat ass

- Christian Environmentalists

- book reviews (both for big people and little people)

- my Grandma

- dumbass hunters who shot one of the last Amur leopards

- homeschool stuff

- my bike

- the lady that planted trees and won a Nobel Peace Prize a couple of years ago (dude, did you know she was beaten and imprisoned for her planting tree movement? And I thought Bush was an Environmental-Nazi!)

- my Mission Organization progress

Last summer with all the construction going on outside my front door, all I did was complain about how much I hate living in town and how much I missed my rural setting -listening to frogs sing at the pond and red-winged blackbirds in the fields…..deer frolicking in the field (and raiding my garden),the mama and papa geese and ducks herding their young ones from pond to pond….the obnoxious owl in the tree outside my window at night…..being able to watch fireflies twinkle in the sky and seeing a sky full of stars…all that good stuff.

Construction is over yet I’m still wishing I had our Hypothetic Homestead in the country. Yesterday I cleaned up our backyard and filled a garbage bag full of stuff that was not our trash. I realize how fortunate we are to have found the place we did in town because even though the backyard just outside the back door is as big as a postage stamp, the previous owner of the house built stairs leading down to a level area on the bank of the creek…yet it’s far enough from the creek that I feel comfortable about the kids playing down there. If we lived next door for example, we’d only have concrete and pavement for the kids to play on.At least here we have some green spaces and there is wildlife if you look and watch for it. The problem is that no one else but me seems to like green spaces and likes to decorate them with shiny candy wrappers,beer bottles(broken),milk jugs and other trash.

The neighboring apartment building actually has tenants that throw crap on purpose down the embankment…into where my kids play.Yesterday I found a Gatorade bottle down there filled with a yellowish liquid.The Gatorade flavor was something BERRY, not lemon,if you catch my drift.

So disgusting.

At least having Dmitri around is almost like living on a farm. This morning he sat up in bed at 6:30 a.m. and said,”Cock a doodle doo”. Who needs a rooster when you have a 2 year old who wakes up early and can imitate a rooster to boot?

One night last week (Tuesday, it must have been because it was the day Maia had her fiesta), I heard Dmitri over the baby monitor and I thought he was awake so I went upstairs to check on him but when I got to the bedroom, I found that he wasn’t awake at all but singing “Pio,pio,pio” in his sleep.

“Pio,pio,pio” is what “Los Pollitos Dicen” (the chicks say). It’s “peep,peep,peep” in Spanish.

My 2 year old thinks he’s a chicken. Funny stuff.

This is from my local Stitch-n-Bitch group:

For those of you looking for another charitable project, I ran across
another. Jewish Family Services (based in Dallas)is collecting knit or
crochet hats, booties, and blankets for preemies born in Haifa,
Israel. The items will be distributed among Israeli and Arab babies in
the area. The very nice woman I have been communicating with, Janine
Pulaman, mentioned that there is also a need for helmet liners for
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has a pattern for those
interested. If you are, her email is jpulman@JFSdallas.org

Photo Friday- The Country

:: The Current Stuff::
Reading:::That same Hitler Youth book and The Sisters Grimm:The Fairy Tale Detectives (recommended by Annie, a homeschool blogger,as in she’s a kid who is homeschooled and blogs…not a parent who homeschool their kid and blogs.Got it?)
Listening: ::I had The Pixies on until Emily turned it off
Watching(ed):::I watched most of The Adventures of Grey Friar’s Bobby this morning
Project:::ummmmmmmmmmm…………………………………..

I really need to stop reading people’s book blogs. I keep adding more and more to my To Be Read pile and signing up for more book challenges. The good thing is that I read a lot anyway so I suppose it gives my reading habits some sort of purpose and direction.

Today I picked up Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at the library on a whim.It’s not on a list I have made of books I should read and in fact, it was one I avoided on purpose.

When I was growing up, I was always referred to as “Becky”, which I hated .I didn’t feel like I was a Becky. I hated the way the name sounded and worse, every book I had ever read with a character named Becky was always some dumb girl I didn’t care to share a name with. (I hadn’t read Tom Sawyer at that point yet and encountered the most famous of literary Beckys, being Becky Thatcher). Occasionally, my Grandmother would call me “Rebecca” but it was always…and I mean always followed by “of Sunnybrook Farm”. All I knew of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was the movie version starring Shirley Temple as Rebecca. I couldn’t stand Shirley Temple with her wide-eyed obviously mock expressions and sickeningly saccharine performances that made kitties and bunnies look like Satan. Ew ew ew.I had no reason to want to read the book.I assumed the main character would be just as annoying as her film counterpart.

As I got older,I became aware of another famous literary Rebecca …

this one the polar-opposite of the Sunnybrook Rebecca apparently, since Alfred Hitchcock thought she was worthy of a making a psychological thriller. The Rebecca in Daphne DuMaurier’s novel that Hitchcock adapted for the big screen was a vindictive,manipulative,controlling psychopath…and she wasn’t even alive.

Clearly, my name does not have good literary karma. Or maybe it does and I never realized it. That’s what I thought as I picked Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm off the shelf at the library. On the jacket cover,Mark Twain says it’s “beautiful and warm and satisfying”. That Mark Twain guy…I like him. What I respect most about him is his wit and humorous way of looking at life and the world in general. If he says it’s a good book, then maybe it really is.

Unless he was just being sarcastic or something and no one got it when he said it. That would figure.

The bottom line is, I’m reading a book I’ve never read because I always assumed I would hate it.

Go me. I’m growing by leaps and bounds.

On a side note, if anyone should come across some good, positive Rebecca or Becky in a book, please let me know.Thank you.

Since Debi just reminded me and while I’m still thinking about it….(I’m very scatterbrained these days and can’t remember anything)……

Here’s my reading list for The Non-Fiction Five:

1. Danse Macabre ,Stephen King (about writing and the genre of horror)
2. Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight by John McDermott w/ Eddie Kramer (biography)
3. Tell Them Who I Am:The Lives of Homeless Women, Elliot Liebow (women’s studies,sociology)
4. In Small Things Forgotten:The Archeology of Early American Life by James Deetz (sociology/archeology)
5. Ghosts of Kampala, George Ivan Smith (history)

This should be an easy challenge for me. It’s my normal reading habit to read a fiction and non-fiction at the same time. BUT I have this habit of finding myself half-way through a non-fiction and skimming the rest of the way and not really reading. So therein lies the real challenge for me!

Stephy tagged me.

Write 10 facts about yourself and tag 10 people to do the same.

1. My perfect dinner has a pasta salad with artichokes & spinach w/ feta cheese,some sort of fruity salad with all fresh fruits, a main course with shrimp,crab,scallops & lobster, a desert with something very chocolaty w/ perhaps berries and a really good beer.And somehow there should be avocados worked in,maybe in the appetizer.How could I forget my avocados?

2. If it wasn’t so drilled into my head since birth to be patriotic, I’d probably be an ex-pat .I have an easier time relating to people in other parts of the world than I do to most Americans.

3. My morning isn’t complete without my coffee.

4. Organized religion isn’t for me.I know what I believe and how I want to practice those beliefs and I don’t need another group of people to do it with, even if they do share common beliefs.

5. My cat is in heat and highly annoying.

6.I don’t like being criticized by people I like. If it’s someone I don’t know,I couldn’t care less.

7. Laundry & dishes are my nemesis in the house and snails & slugs are my nemesis in the garden.

8. If there’s a door that says “Do NOT Enter”, I’ll open it. If there’s a sign that says,”Do not cross this line”, I’ll cross it.”Do not push this button”…I gotta push it. The signs at the park that say,”Stay on the trail”…I never stay on the trail.Yeah,I know….I know. There’s signs up for a reason but I like to know the reason. If the sign said,”Do not push this button….it’ll drop the bomb”, then I’ll understand the reasoning and obviously not push the button.

9. I’m really running out of things to put on this list and the kids are getting restless and it’s nearly time for me to start the day with them

10. I’ve spent more than my allowed time on the computer this morning