Why? It’s a great book that I’ve had a long time (well, since it was published in the late 90′s). It’s a cookbook and more. I found today, while researching something on Migraines that I read in NT this afternoon, that Nourishing Traditions is available, it’s second edition, in HARDBACK! It has wider margins, and lies flat and comes with an Interactive CD-ROM. I’m salivating over it now. This is one book that I want now, this version of it. The paperback I keep in my kitchen, this Hardback edition I’d keep in my “bookshelf” area in the “education/craft room”.

At that link you can order the book for $48.00 + 6.00 s/h (hardback) — and the paperback is 25.00 (you can find this at many bookstores, or order it, at the least. B&N has it for $18 for B&N members online, for example.)

On the NT site page, the link to add either version to your shopping cart (to purchase there) is below on the left, so scroll down a bit and look for the graphic that states “Add Item to Cart”.

Sometimes I just go to the bathroom then try to actually sleep again, or read, or just think. This time my mind stirred before I was even out of bed to go to the bathroom. (I often actually awake sometime after 1am, so glad to see I got a bit more sleep this time!)

I had taken a roast out of the freezer on Saturday, to put in the crockpot that night, with some water, on LOW to have for Sunday dinner (today). I put the roast in the fridge in the AM, and promptly forgot about it.

I was recalling that at 3:30am, along with the fact of knowing that the crock pot wasn’t ready to “just throw in a roast”. I wished it was so, but knew that the dishwasher didn’t get everything out of it last time, and I needed to scrub it a tad to ready it. I had meant to do that beforehand, a few days ago when it was first discovered, actually, but I never did get to it. So here I am now, I’ve gotten that scrubbed out, and the roast is nestled in water on LOW in the crock pot. I’m on the couch roving around the ‘net and now it’s more than an hour ago that I awoke and got out of bed.

I do try to soak my pancake/waffle batter ahead of time, Nourishing Traditions methodology. I meant to do that earlier on Saturday and it totally slipped my mind as well. And so, I busied myself after the roast with getting some Spelt and Yogurt together in a bowl for Sunday morning waffles. It won’t be a 12-24 hour soak, at least it’ll be a few to a few more hours than none though.

I usually make my pancake/waffle batters with Kamut flour, but I had some spelt ground up, and no Kamut here in the middle of the night, so I used the spelt, which is a-ok, I just usually prefer Kamut for batters, and I wasn’t about to get out my grinder at 3-something AM.

Well it’s a new month once again. Happy April! I have no “April Fool” to use and usually don’t. I do appreciate a clever version from others, but find myself too serious to actually wish to fool anyone else (though maybe I was moreso free to do that when I was much younger.) I despise the versions of “April Fool” which are emotionally hurtful, and THOSE are the type that most people utilize, which is probably why I just do nothing for these last many years.

With the new month comes 2 more Audible.com credits for me — I don’t always use them up first thing, but sometimes I do. I’ve, a couple of times in past,  forgotten about them until it was just a day late and lost my precious credits. Lesson learned, but sometimes it feels down to the wire. So this brings to mind that I will have availability of 2 new audiobooks sometime today, and is there anything I want, or do I need to rack my brain to come up with something. The latter is what I have been like the last few months. I troll the site and look and search and wonder aloud and ask DH for suggestions, and finally just get something else

Which reminds me that I have so many audiobooks that I haven’t listened to yet, and wonder at why it’s so hard, I love the idea and don’t use them for me much. I did try to listen to something when we were in FL in February, but I’m so visually oriented it’s hard to “listen” to something atimes, even if you WANT to.

Like even putting music on, headphones or through speakers. I listen, but then miss “intelligently heard” this or that from what I played. Spoken audio is easier for me to listen to through speakers than headphones. Via headphones I drift miles away and continue hearing the audio, but not really. Sometimes I sure can multi-plex my thoughts and listening all together, but not always. I find it pleasant to sit down, shut my eyes with headphones on, and that’s not too useful for audiobooks you want to actually listen to, since I’d then drift to some semblance of nap-nap-ness, that works better with well loved music instead.

I say all this because I’ve been contemplating putting my audiobook player (My little Sansa M230 is devoted to audiobooks only, and I have two others for my two eldest children, who actually DO listen to audiobooks I put on theirs, ah, to be young and technologically advanced … I dreamed of having my own taperecorder from when I was very young, and never got one,  and to listen to a “book” meant to listen to a Vinyl LP of stories. Not very mobile. Not something I could do in my room, it was dedicated to the record player in the family area. And we had no literature on LP, just stories from some Christian company, I can recall something about a Raindrop named April, and visually I have memory of those things, vivid images from my childhood, things conjured up in my mind while listening to Vinyl LP stories.

My mind is the same basically, only clogged up with adult responsibilities that make leisure listening so difficult to attain. It’s not just that, it IS precisely wired into those like me, and my family of P’s, that our audible-ness isn’t our strongest ability, and “in one ear and out the other” is a phrase that means a lot to us, we “Hear” but don’t always “HEAR” … we “See” and do usually “SEE” though. To “See and  Hear” at once is to “SEE and HEAR” absolutely. :LOL:

To be young and not bogged down brings about a more leisure ability to put on headphones and listen to literature read, and look at the images in your mind and not drift away as much as adult-me is prone to (with so many other things floating around my head at the same time.) So that’s my thinking on listening to audio in bed, if I bring my audiobook player up there, I’ll listen some, and who knows where I’ll leave off and stop listening, and then have to re-charge the battery, and re-listen to find the spot I have some sort of re-call to and hope that I can stay “actively listening” and gain some time with the audiobook for real. I have long been a book reader, and the idea of audiobooks is great, and I love the accessibility to great classics via audio, but it’s just so much easier to say “I’ll read it” than “I’ll listen to it.” But I don’t have all the books on paper that I have as audio, so I can’t “just read” them. Oh, I could go on and on, but maybe I should just grab that little blue and white device and give it a try. It’s nearly 5:30am now, time sure flies when you are making a blog post about too much, here and there and everywhere. Perhaps a trial of focus is worthy after such. :rolleyes:

Library Thing’s Bookpile Contest

I do have the VHS version of the 1945 film that starred Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde, & Jeanne Crain though. I want to get it on DVD, just haven’t run across it ever nor looked on purpose for it. It is one of my all-time old-movie favorites. The film is well done, and won an Oscar for Best Cinematography, Color in 1946, and had three other nominations as well.

Leave Her to Heaven catalog card on My Library Thing account.

Inside the book, opposite the first page of the actual story which is on the right, is a quote from Hamlet, which is, of course, Shakespeare:

This post is about Library Thing.

I signed up on 9-11-2005. I wasn’t sure how much I’d like it, since I’ve wanted a bar-code scanner and software for several years now, since I first read about it so long ago, being available, whenever that was.

So when I signed up I was in that mode of thought. I loaded up a few books, then not many more until the other day. I went berserk and have amassed over 160 books into my account up to this point. Not many to go and I’ll have to become a paid subscriber. That’s no big deal though, or rather it is. It’s just $10 for a Lifetime membership. Up to 200 books is the limit for a free account. That’s plenty to see what Library Thing can do for you.

For me it’s like audioscrobbler, only it’s different, it’s books. You don’t digitally listen to books, you have to read them physically. Audioscrobbler aggregates the data from the music you listen to on your computer. It builds a huge database of interactive information on your tastes and gives you suggestions and other options to find other music.

Library Thing is different since it’s a book thing. You have books at home, or you borrow books. Use it how you want, to build a database about what you own, or what you’ve read, or both.

It’s easy to load up your books. Just grab them and type in the ISBN number, if your book has one. In most cases if your book has one and you have the number the right book information is found by the Library Thing searching function. Just click on the link to the right book to insert it into your Library Thing account. It’s zippety doo dah fast, sometimes you have to wait while it searches, but ususally not long at all, and sometimes you have to wait after clicking on the right book until it finishes inserting into your account, but usually it’s fast, fast, fast.

You can manually add your books in also, if you can’t find your book in the Library of Congress data or Amazon. The initial search is based on either ISBN or words you enter, title, author, whatever might help finding the book. If you have the right ISBN it’s generally spot on easy. Sometimes there are other version of the book with the same ISBN, or sometimes when you put the right ISBN in, you do click on the seemingly right book but then if you go to look at the “card” in your account for the book, it’s not quite right. In those cases I’ve found that the ISBN number isn’t right, for some reason it bait-n-switched on you. So I just edit it right there, easy to do, replace the ISBN and save.

Library Thing gets images of the books, thumbnails, from Amazon. The above ISBN switcheroo thing makes for the right image to load. Like a few times the wrong ISBN, but the right book is there, but there isn’t an image. So editing the ISBN gets the image to come in.

Sometimes there is no image for a book. I wish there was a way to upload those ourselves. Amazon allows that and does have customer uploaded images for more obscure books or books with no image for whatever reason. BUT those images aren’t pulled into Library Thing … which is too bad.

With Library Thing you can make a Widget. It’s just a fancy techy word for code that does something. You can make it do what you want, within the allowable constraints. On my sidebar, to-date, is the output from a widget I created on Library Thing. It pulls out 5 random books from my account, and lists them with links to my account page for whichever book, and a small image. I have the widget allowing me to style the css how I want. I’m not done, only letting it be there a bit softer in look for now, until I tweak it more.

The thing about the images, not having one for every book, is precisely bothersome about using a widget on your blog. Also, a non-standard size of the images really messes up the layout without enough space between book items.

This though is what is nice about an online service to get your library database into. You can display it online, different facets of it in different ways. Nifty.

Another thing on Library Thing is “Similar Libraries”. You can find others with the same books as you, or “Similar Libraries” as comparing data four different ways produces four lists to look at for each user.

Also when you view someone elses catalog of books, if you have any of the books that the catalog you are looking at has, they’ll be the first books, with noticeable graphics on the side letting you know, you and they have the same book.

When you vist anyone’s profile on the right-side info will display that you have no books that they have, or list the books that they have that you have, right there. Also, there is a short list of users and the number of books they share, in that area. It’s connected to the “Similar Library” function, in a way. It’s just obvious, they are the top 15 or so users that share some number of books with whoever’s profile you are looking at.

For me right now the top number of shared books I have is (21) with one user, the next is (14) and so on down in numbers.

These things all change every day, minute by minute, hour by hour, depending on who is loading up more books into their account.

I have more books, but they are buried in boxes in the garage where I can’t get myself. I’ve manage to drag out as many as I can though I’m not loading EVERY book at this point, there are some I have out that I haven’t. I’m just trying to load up the ones I like, or that are books I care about in some fashion or sense. Basically, books of consequence. Usefulness, now or before or future.

What it’s done though is make my book passion just burn brighter and higher. I now want to be sure and read some things over again, make sure some things are out and available at all times, get more shelves that can hold the books. We did buy book cases from Target, a few the other month. They are a Thomasville put together nice variety of bookcase. But hold books they do not. The weight is an issue. You have to be careful. So most of the books we planned on having out got put back into boxes. The shelves bow really fast under the weight of real books. So now I have some books out and reinvented the use of the shelves to be book and nicknack and kitchen items shared. I just have to watch for bowing and flip the shelf in question over if it does. Then it’s humped up high in the middle for awhile until it straightens out then eventually is bowed down again. Vicious cycle.

Don’t buy cheap bookcases. $60 can be a cheap bookcase. Buy real wood. But MDF, but don’t buy pressed put together garbage, looks nice, holds fluff, not real books.

Our true aim has been to build nice pine bookcase built-ins around the fireplace. We are hopefully closer to doing that, this winter at the latest. I have to get a good design though, to go floor to near ceiling and have a lot of space to load up books, display the nice ones on top and load up deep shelves behind doors below mantel height. My thinking is to get shelves below that pull out on smooth rollers, european sort of thingies, so that they can be deep, hold a heavy weight, and pull out to access everything easily. All behind cabinet doors. Up top will be book shelves that are just deep enough to hold any book we can throw at it, or collectibles, with lighting, and opened or behind glass doors. Not exactly sure or all the details yet … those are the rough ones.

So it’s Library Thing that has gotten me jazzed up though to start munching through books more than I had been.

I have several books being juggled right now. A few I’ve been juggling without touching for months, but consider them open on my agenda still. Now that Library Thing has got me gathering my things from the four corners of my world, I have the books in touchable space to actually read for sure now.

I was in the middle of reading all Jane Austens works when my hubby brought home a DVD for the one I was reading. I watched it and couldn’t continue reading. I was struggling in the middle of the book in the first place, and the movie only made that worse for me. I will be smacked for saying it most likely, but I liked the movie. The book I found much more dry and not easy to be drawn into like Pride & Predjudice, Sense and Sensability, etc. Yes, I was reading Mansfield Park, and the movie is the version that most everyone that likes Jane Austen books deplores, and says the book is her best book. I say, whatever. Really, I do. I much loved P & P as a book. I love the A&E adaption of it on DVD too. Book is better. I like the DVD of Sense & Sensability too, but not as much as P & P, but I love the book for S & S, really loved that one much more than the movie. So I’m stuck there, in Manfield Park. Stuck in the rut. And I will try to get out.

Mansfield Park is the book on my plate that’s been there the longest, unfinished.

I started to read the Dirk Pitt novel “Sahara” before we were going to see the movie of it. I read all the Dirk Pitt series back when they first came out in print. So I was only re-reading it to be able to highly critique the movie. Well I got several chapters into it and then put it down and didn’t pick it up again, then Frank got the DVD. So I watched it and was able to super-critique up to the parts I had not long before re-read, but after that I wasn’t in super-critique mode since it’s been a long time since I read that portion. All in all, the movie was horrible. It doesn’t resemble the book in the slightest. Character choice was poor, for starters, and they left out major portions of the story in the beginning, middle, and end. They invented some things that weren’t in the movie, a few were in the true spirit of Pitt, but moreso things were not Pitty, and the other characters were really off-par as well. Really, a southern syrup boy is NOT what Dirk Pitt is, if you know Pitt, you know him well if you read all his books, and Matthew McCaun…whatever-his-name-is-spelled-like just ain’t the man. So I have half a mind NOT to re-read the rest, but it’s nagging me that I’m in the middle of it, so maybe I’ll get to it.

Sahara is a re-read that is on the agenda maybe, partially re-read and need to finish it.

The Hobbit I had planned to re-read now, but after reading the first page I fell asleep and never picked it up again. I read Eragon in a day, and Eldest in a day, but couldn’t stay awake for The Hobbit right before. Oh well. Now I’m reading:

The Golden Compass, by Phillip Pullman. It’s a trilogy, so I’ll finish up them since they are new material, then plug into The Hobbit again.

I also have a few Lemony Snicket books that I was supposed to read before Russell gets them. I’ve not even started them, but htey are on the agenda and should be read, are supposed to be for sure. They are easy enough to do. I read the first few that the movie was based on first, and so did Russell, then we both went and saw the movie. I guess that turned off my reading machine for Lemony Snicket. The movie was good, in the spirit of it, and all that, but changed enough for me to say WHY!?? No need to change the story and timeline and who did what and leave that out and make that up. The books were good and good enough and would have made a wonderful movie if the screenplay could have just stuck to the book logicalness and kept all the pretty stuff in line with it and had a more successful movie, IMVHO. Anyhow, there are scads more books after the 6th one, that’s all that we have. Someday we’ll maybe get to them, maybe.

I have a few other books I was planning on getting into, but I won’t go into that here. It’s just that I have so much to read, and often just stare at the TV instead. Eragon broke that chain for me. I often at night am tired, too tired to read, reading puts me to sleep, then I wake up and can’t sleep and can’t read, just blah zombie awake. I find that I do watch TV either that or a DVD in all night, and sleep more, than if I try to sleep or do go to sleep usually without TV on. Nutsy, yeah, just part of my nightowl wierdo self, and getting older.

I have a task light by my bed, it’s not the best for reading by, but is that good Ott-Lite sort of light, which is true light, like sunlight. It feel glorious and looks good. If I have a good enough book I can stay awake long enough to read it a bit at night, if I try to read using the Ott-Lite, which is curiously hard in the task light sort of form it’s in. In any case, I find that if it’s a good book, as Eragon was, I could read it in the day and get into it deep, and then read a bit in bed at night and fall asleep with that Ott-lite on and sleep soundly all night under the Ott-Lite, and wake up feeling pretty good. It’s weird. That light is like yummy magic to my silly sleepy-lack there ofs.

Anyhow, I sometimes have turned it on and just lay there by it and sleep more right than not under it. It’s better if I had a book that I was really deep into though. So if I use Library Thing, it is inspiring me to try to read at bedtime and to try to read what I meant to, and inspire me to read old friends again, and to take good care of my books, get them where they are useful once again. Long ago we had our books out. But the bookcases were ugly. So I tried to spray paint them, and so they are now in the garage holding tools and junk in a half-painted status. They are a plain cheap sort of bookcase. Anyhow not good quality, just a heftier put together sort than the Thomasville nice looking ones we now have inside. Anyhow, in the day, we had them and most of our books out on them and another bookcase we used to have (but don’t anymore). Book collections do grow though, and so … time marches on. I have more reading to do for myself, and need to do pre-reading for Russell, and have to get back to read-alouds, which have pretty much slipped away, due to allergies all summer, groggy crackly voice after one or two pages, and so I nixed it totally. I was never as good as it as I wanted to be anyhow. I have good ideas and fail miserably at it. My singing voice is great and goes on and on, but my speaking voice for read-alouds just goes froggy fast. Also, that yawn thing, I have. Some others I’ve seen on an email list get it too. Yawning when reading aloud. Not yawning when talking, only “read-aloud” times. It’s annoying, and unkickable for me. I’ve tried different things, and continue to have it less or more but always some.

In all this then is the cost of getting books. I like books and don’t get many due to price of new books and not having the ability to go shop rumbling for used books much. It’s something I’d like to correct. I’ve sometimes been able to get stuff on eBay, but mostly I haven’t gotten many books, that’s better for my Cordwainer Smith collection, or buying music, and other things. I have bought a few lots of picture books. That works. I buy Economy Co. Phonics series there too, old workbooks and teacher tools from the 50′s through the 60′s. I had that in my first grade school year. Dot and Jim and Tag. We moved though and my new school in second grade had nothing notable that I recall. I’ve been highly interested in collecting what I can from the series though, and found an interesting sub-plot to the whole thing. The books look different a bit through the years, colors brighter later on to a degree, and graphics same, but changed in details in later years.

Take a 1952 book and a 1967 book and compare pages, covers … you’ll see a white kid in the ’52 book, but same kid is just turned into a black kid in the ’67 book. It’s not the features, only the “skin” color. It’s really obvious and embarrassing, I think. They’ve changed the color of the skin only, and then changed the names of those children too.

It’s an obvious educational ploy to change race ideas in the young years of classes. All in all, it’s not something done well, it’s something I’ll get here in picture later, I’m planning on scanning a lot of these books into my computer and I’ll post a few examples here soon, if I can get them done.

OK, so now that I’ve changed the subject, I’ll just change it again. I like eBay, but want to get books in bookshops, find old books on the shelves and feel the pages before buying. There’s a store up the road a few miles that Frank goes to to exhange paperbacks, they have mostly used books on the shelves and some new. I’ve been there a few times, but money is tight when I have been there. Gotta change that! So Library Thing has lots of my books in the database now, and it won’t be too many more until I hit my limit for the free account. I’m happy to say I’m sure that $10 won’t be a problem and is well worth the price.

www.librarything.com

Like the majestic dragon, Saphira, you are brave and ferocious in battle but also deep in ancient wisdom. You think before flying headfirst into battle. You prefer the solitude of the wilderness to the populated cities of Alagaësia.

WHICH ERAGON CHARACTER ARE YOU MOST LIKE?

The quiz is fairly meaningless if you haven’t read “Eragon”, but you can answer and get a result, of course, like I said, it’s just pretty meaningless if you haven’t read the book.

I’m glad to come out as the beautiful blue sparkly dragon Saphira, I like her a lot.

Pronunciations:

Eragon – EHR-uh-gahn

Saphira – Suh-FEAR-uh

Alagaësia – al-uh-GAY-zee-uh

I declare the rest of today, Day after Birthday Recovery and Sinking into Egragon through Literary Portal Day.

Cheerio!

I got a “Spam Karma” warning: two links, and a different email address, no doubt, pegged me for a spammer :veryshocked: :LOL:

What book would you use to escape?

I prefer to curl up with any of the Cordwainer Smith stories … here is a link to an Illustrated Bibliography, on a site run by one of his daughters.

I also love to sink into Little House on the Prairie series at times, but my preference runs to read Farmer Boy time and again. That’s my favorite, Little House in the Big Woods is second. I’ve been reading these (Little House) since I was 8.

Then put into a category: Chronicles of Prydain & Lord of the Rings Trilogy — they are pure lovely escape at other times. In this category will be a new entry, the second in the Inheritance Trilogy just came out. I haven’t read the first or second, but know that, from reading ABOUT them, the tradition this writer comes from is bound to be richly portrayed in the pages … Eragon is the first book, Eldest is the second and just came out mid-August. I have them sitting on my desk … just need the time to dig in now.

I love good literature written for children, it’s never outgrown

Marysue (Maisy)

Time has flown for me the last few years, and this last month, July 2005, has been quite the fastest, by far, in my estimation of historical events in my life. It’s now officially August. Wow.

August is a month that has historical attachments to it for me. I guess I was ingrained with the “school year” calendar in my younger days, and I view July and August as pure Summer days of freedom, with it all beginning in early June at the latest, if not May.

In my own lifetime and school “career” I saw that idea taken and smacked up and torn apart. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s the idea of freedom from tyranny which I have, it’s a beautiful picture in my head that is connected to the idea of Summer and that is what this part of the year is.

We homeschool, and are not on any sort of schedule as the public school’s have. I felt horrid when I opened up the Ads in the paper around the last weekend in June or first weekend in July and saw all the “Back to School” ads … really I felt bad. I understand that most schools around here start this very week that we are just beginning on the calendar. That just messes with my internal summer clock.

We “officially” begin a new year of homeschooling in September, but that’s only in the eyes of the school board. We do our thing year round, but nothing formal. This coming year I’ll be doing more with our eldest. He’s 9 and reads well, can write, needs more practice there, he has an electrical experiement set that we can get an upgrade for. There are other things in that realm of electrical and computer that we’ll be looking at. He likes Bionicles and is collecting them all. Also into K’nex. The other two children love the K’nex too. They follow directions to build things, and also make things on their own. (I would have loved K’nex when I was a child!)

The two younger are 6 and 4. I’m working slowly to get them reading. That’s all they need, it’s the code to open up learning in any way they want to. If I push them, they won’t get it any faster than they could by doing it slowly. I do it slowly and punch up whatever they seem ready for.

All the children draw and color. Eldest draws intricate scenes: boats, houses, cross-sections with all kinds of things going on. Sometimes people are in the scenes, often robots, bionicle-like things, dinosaurs, etc. He’s not fastidious, but fastly draws things in, and spends time filling in with lots of things. His “coloring” is hurried too, and it’s sloppy.

His younger brother is 4 years younger. His coloring is really good. His drawing is simplistic. He’s opposite of his brother in that way. He’s also an extrovert, whereas his older brother is an introvert.

The middle child is our girl. She’s into drawing faces. She has some neat things she’s done lately, on a regular sheet of paper, plain 8.5×1, she has faces started landscape at the top left edge and uses up a couple of square inches for each face, one after the other, then down a line and continuing.

She’s had an interesting way of drawing people, usually going for frontal format. Her elder brother is the one that does cross-sections, and makes people/things from different angles. She herself does make people from the side, but likes the faces so much I think, she prefers to make them so that their faces can be shown.

I’m a doodler, I draw things that flow from my pen. I have never stretched my abilities and done much more. In school I did have “instruction”, in 6th grade more so than not, that I recall best. My teacher there was very strict. She was art and English teacher. My homeroom teacher in 5th grade too. Most people didn’t like her much. She’s one teacher I was sort of afraid of in my lower grades, but when I ended up in her class, I started to see something, and I am thinking of it now, and think she saw something in me that others did not. I think she’s the one who got me to be tested for the gifted program. I didn’t get in, my math stuff was all too low. I felt a softness of lovelyness in that teacher though, when everyone else saw her as hard as nails. Hmm.

So anyhow, I did drawing there in her classes, more formally in 6th grade. She insisted that all English things, like stories and poems, have art included with them. You must know that I hadn’t considered her in a long time. She was an older woman (probably only in her 50′s back then ).

I never had considered myself good at replicating actual life. I am able to draw things I see, but I don’t LIKE doing it. I see it too nicely to reproduce it with my poor hand to my own perfections faulting.

So I doodle. I doodle graphical-like. Just shapes of meaning or nonsensical creation. I’ve done a particular type since childhood, mostly then on bookcovers for certain. I still do it today and realized not too long ago it really is like tattoos I’ve seen on people IRL, TV, Print, etc. I’ve not copied it from anything, it’s only natural doodling. Nothing new under the sun, you know.

One of my most favorite simplistic graphics is what I have on this site in use as my “gravatar”, which is “globally recognized avatar”, something I’ve enabled for comments on this site … you sign up for a free account on the gravatar site, and upload your avatar, and it’s associated with one email address. So anytime you comment on a site that uses the gravatar service, if you use an email address that is registered with gravatar.com then your avatar will load on that comment. You can see mine on any thread of recent time here I’ve commented on. I don’t always comment with that email address on other sites, so I do have a colored version of that graphic I’ll associate at a later time with my other email I use.

I have graphics from very recent years in books and on a few pages of things, and have scanned a few into the computer, and want to get them all in. I don’t really have many that are that good, but some have potential for working on further, and some are standalone pretty good, IMO. Some I have to take into a graphics program and remove lines behind them, seeing as I do often doodle on lined paper. Something I truly want to get away from doing. I want to take my doodling more seriously. It’s actual an art form that I didn’t consider art. It is art. Bowl me over with a feather when I realized that finally.

Along these lines I’ve been encouraging the children to draw what they want to and to be as careful doing it as they can, making it as nice as possible, without pressuring them to make it perfect. There is a book I have, but haven’t really read it. It met with the Green Incident and I need to replace it. The Green Incident is an Asa Event. He found something that I had under the sink and poured it over a bunch of my stuff, back when I had my old laptop in the kitchen, and had just put a new pile of books that I was going to do stuff with, out. A bunch of good books. The stuff he poured was thick green pungent smelling concentrate to kill worms on tomato plants, etc. “BTKiller”. I was not happy, to say the least. So anyhow, that book I referred to is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, or something similar. It’s about learning to really use your right-brain to draw, whether you are left-brain dominant or right-brain dominant. Some of it I gleaned, and it’s what made me realized that I do draw with the right-side of my brain. My designs come from my hand, straight from the right-brain, as I don’t design things I think of, I just let it flow. So my thoughts are that someday I can better myself through drawing if I get that book in good form again, and use it with the children and see what can develop.

I often make things with hearts in them, as my gravatar is. I use gel pens, I have a large set of colors, and many of my designs are full of color, and it’s my choice as to what they look like, but I turn my left-brain off entirely and just do it. If you aren’t “right-brain”-ish, you might’nt know what I mean, it’s just automatic for me, not something I have to turn off. It’s particular of me that my left-brain is able to be turned off and on, but my right brain is always on. My left-brain functioning isn’t 100% useful either, just part of it. Well this is part of the whole thing about my family, we are all VS, that’s Visual Spatial, that’s “right-brain dominant”. So I know that my kind of learning is theirs, and we just “do it”. We learn through many things, and I think that reading and artisticness and nature are the best things to learn via.

So Summer is freedom to me. I hate the thought of formal school in August. (It was hard enough to think it right in September back in my youth! The lure of new supplies is what drew me usually.) It’s stifling of breath to me. It’s stifling to think of learning being something to go to school for. I learned in school a bit, but learned much more outside of school. I learned on my own from the start and never stopped. Summer was the best learning time, reading, reading, reading, no interference from school work; and climing trees, running, exploring the hills, and woods and cemetaries and … ah, just really living and learning from everything around. Drinking it in.

That’s the idea I have of freedom in the first place, real freedom, freedom from tyranny. The Summertime ideal is written of in literature, like The Penrdragon series (King Arthur) by Stephen Lawhead.