NaBloPoMo

I'm not sure why I decided to join this daily blog posting group. I mean, my life isn't all that interesting to have something profound and worthwhile to write about on a daily basis! But, perhaps the pressure of needing to write something, or post a picture of something each day will give me an incentive to do something useful each day this month.

My useful task for the day was spending an hour doing music homework. In this instance it was listening with headphones (earbuds) to a recording of John Rutter's Magnificat which our church choir and orchestra is performing in early December. I'm concert mistress of the orchestra, aka 1st chair 1st violin, and I figure I need to know the work really well before we head to dress rehearsals with the hired guest musicians. So I listened tonight, tried to figure out all the changing time signatures and made notes about things to ask the conductor. I pencilled in bowings, marked some cues in and made sure rests are marked at page turns.

I had never heard of John Rutter until I started playing church music, and he is now one of my favorite composers. He is a modern, living composer whose music has the dissonance and changing meters of modern music yet is very melodic and deeply moving. And it is fun to play! Not quite the marathon of notes that is the Messiah and Vivaldi's Gloria, but with all the changes of time signatures it keeps us musicians busy and focused!

52 Books in 52 Weeks update

I haven't written about books since school started back up, but I'm still plugging away at the 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge, and am currently on book #49. woohoo!!

When I look at my list I want to categorize the titles into tidy groups by genre, because I'm somewhat smugly satisfied by all the different kinds of books I've read. Then I see the 10 or more Janet Evanovich books and think that I cheated in this challenge by devouring those books like a guilty pleasure snack. But balance is the key, and I definitely have balanced the fluff with some good stuff.

These aren't exactly formal genres, but the categories I see in glancing through the list.

Fluff
Janet Evanovich's books, all except #s 2 and 3 and the newest title.
Timeline by Crichton (my 14yo son and I both heartily disliked it)
State of the Union by Brad Thor (fluff for men that I started reading when bored at the beach)
Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. (never finished it after the bad guy died -- noetics, schmoetics)
Leopard Unleashed (a pure, guilty pleasure read which leads to the next category....)

Historical fiction -- some of which are also very fluffy
Vivaldi's Virgins (about the girl's orphanage where Vivaldi taught)
Jane and the Genius of the Place (a mystery with Jane Austen as the sleuth!)
Dreamers of the Day (Paris Peace accord after WWI)
Gurnsey Literary and Potatoe Peel Society (kind of, sort of historical fiction)
Physik Book of Deliverance Dane (also kind of, sort of...)
The Reader (read the book instead of seeing the movie -- seemed appropriate)

Science most of which I wouldn't have read except my 14yo son urged me to read them
The Pluto Files by Neil De Grasse Tyson
Death by Black Hole (same author as above)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Classics
Northanger Abbey
Persuassion
Emma
Candide
The Iliad
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Good Earth
Once and Future King (is that a classic?)

Memoirs/autobiographies
All My Edens by Pat Welch (a local gardening guru)
Maria Tallchief: America's Prima Ballerina
Home by Julie Andrews
The Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson

History
The Man Who Loved China (about Joseph Needham)
In the Footsteps of Genghis Khan
Gengis Khan - a biography
The Lost City of Z (I liked it so much I'm assigning it to my son next spring)
The Right Stuff

Other good books, including some sci fi:
Dune (I had never read it!)
Dune Messiah (gave up on the Dune series after this one)
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (had to re-read it before the movie came out)
Life of Pi (one of my favorite books of the year)
Garden Spells (maybe this is fluff)
Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein

And finally
Non fiction
The Big Year (about fanatic birders)
To See Every Bird (part memoir, part biography of the author's dad, also about obsessed birders)
Catapult: Harry and I Build a Seige Weapon.

I'm surprised not to find a long list of mysteries as that is what I've mostly read in recent years, but they just didn't appeal to me for some reason.

Day in the Life

Monday.

7:00-10:30 Quiet time for me. Coffee, breakfast, reading the papers. Shower, tidying up, filling the bird bath and one of the feeders. Decided to make muffins and almost burned them because of the spectacle outside the kitchen window -- 5 mourning doves on the fence all watching the finches zooming around the feeder. I had to grab the camera and try to capture it.

I couldn't get all the birds in focus fast enough -- still learning the digital SLR.

10:30 Kids up, thrilled to have muffins for breakfast.

11:00 The teacher from the charter school arrives with boxes of biology lab equipment for us!! Microscope, blank slides and 3 different single-station AP labs. Feels like Christmas in a geeky sort of way.

Brought the teacher up to date on everything and he reads over my son’s work. He sees this son weekly in the Mock Trial class, so it isn’t as if he has no clue what is going on in our lives, but it is his job to review work and assign grades.

12:00 Dad and college son out the door as is the teacher.

12:30 Head to the library to get books, and to stop by the pond next door. My son has made a collection net out of a plastic cup and a section of old hose. After getting a cup-full of pond water, we admire the ducks but as we didn’t bring binoculars and it is hot, decide it isn’t a great day for water-fowl watching and head home.

1:30 Decide it is going to be a lazy homeschool day. While the pond water critters settle to the bottom of the cup, we listen to and read books 10 and 11 of The Iliad. The audio recording skims over the gory battle scenes, actually it pretty much skips book 10, so I read aloud the highlights.

2:30-4:30 Indulge in a lazy afternoon. My violin student has cancelled, college student is out for the remainder of the day, so I don’t have to drive anywhere. Hallelujah!!

4:30 - 6:30 Play with microscope, slides and pond water. Try to identify critters through internet through sites like “Micropolitan Museum”. Dad comes home and has a turn with the microscope.

Decide not to cook. While the menfolk head out to rustle up some fast food grub, I fill in the lesson plans for the remainder of the week. We’ll have to be good about doing real school the rest of the week but really enjoyed our lazy day. Watched a recorded episode of Flash Forward while eating burgers from Chili’s, then will finish laundry and settle down with library book.

Wordless Wednesdays

Happiness is a pair of warm puppy slippers.

Sunday afternoon planning

I can't decide if this is lazy procrastination or necessary work. Probably a little of both. Here I sit on the couch, surrounded by a biology textbook, a SAT II biology subject test prep book, and the outline of lectures from a Teaching Company biology series. Thanks to google I have added to my list of biology bookmarks. I've got us signed up for Project Pigeon Watch so we can have fun with a unit on Mendelian genetics.

My goal? To match Teaching Company lectures to the text book and to be sure every biology topic gets covered before the middle of June next year. Do I follow the order in the text book or the order in the lecture series? Can I find lab ideas and work sheets to match all the topics? Does something at least cover material in the SAT II prep book? Does my ds appreciate how much work it is to do this homeschooling prep work? (I don't want to know the answer to that one!)



This is what the pile of work looks like from today. Sadly that last cookie is now gone, and I still have to finish planning Spanish lessons for the next few weeks. That may call for a glass of wine.

The sad thing is I have no idea what we will eat for dinner. Even sadder is that there is no coffee in the house for breakfast tomorrow morning. Now I am in procrastination territory. Sit here with a glass of wine while looking over Spanish materials, or face the Sunday afternoon grocery store hordes? Hmmm.

Wednesday

If I were a Twitter Tweeter, the morning would look like this:

Googled "Iliad teacher guides". Best hit? A where's Waldo style find it cartoon including, Zeus, Waldo, the Trojan horse and a catapult.

Google search of Iliad Fagle is much more fruitful.

Searching for Celtic fiddle books for my students. $70 and an hour later have books and fingerboard tape on order.

Good grief it is time for lunch.

DS has a blog more random than this one. Why does he hide his entertaining writing???

In denial of marathon afternoon and evening of 5 violin students and orchestra rehearsal. Need chocolate. And coffee.

Friday

I spend my life organizing and managing things, driving, teaching, coaching and cajoling. I am not one fulfilled by completed tasks, however. I can easily ignore dirty dishes in the sink. I recharge by reading, researching and wasting time on pointless video games on my iPod Touch. Aurora Feint is my addiction, though I also love Chicktionary.

But not being motivated by that great feeling of completed tasks leaves me here on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by all that is undone. The clumps of dog fur that need to be vacuumed. The laundry sitting wrinkled in the drier. The bills that need to be paid. The Beethoven that hasn't been practiced.

So in keeping with the spirit of doing anything but housework, I now shall stop and count my blessings, listing all that I have accomplished this week:

• My quartet rocked the sanctuary last Sunday playing Mozart at 2 services.
• I got the orchestra music organized, numbered and passed out.
• Created a schedule flier to give to all the orchestra members.
• Taught 3 violin lessons.
• Played in orchestra rehearsal.
• Finished reading Life of Pi.
• Read Persuasion and sighed once again over the line "You pierce my soul". I am such a sap!
• Drove ds#1 to the train station for college classes Monday and Tuesday
• Drove ds#2 to robotics, par kour and mock trial classes
• Reviewed and corrected 3 geometry lessons (not much to correct, really).
• Taught 2 Spanish lessons.
• Cajoled ds#2 to write an overdue thank you note (which he finally did.)
• Celebrated with ds#1 and family over his acceptance into the internship of his dreams.
• Reviewed biology chapter and watched a dvd lecture in order to finish planning for the week.
• Poked about on internet for inspiration for writing assignments to give to ds#2 next week.
• Walked ds#1 through his first banking transaction.
• Met a friend who is recovering from an operation to get a bit of slow exercize with her.
• Tackled the dishwasher filter system to try to figure out why dishes aren't coming clean.
• Made dinner last weekend -- 2 nights in a row!
• Remembered to buy ice cream at the grocery store...

By the end of the day there will be a few more things to add to the list, then it is time for some wine and movie watching with the family!