niotnot

The second week of the Summer Reading Challenge -- two books a week -- is finished with Wuthering Heights and The Shangri-La Diet as the two books for the week.

This week I am -- as decided for me by Booksfree -- reading Leann Sweeney's Yellow Rose series. The heroine reminds me of #2 daughter, or the writing voice does.

Craftymomma reminded me of the book Sugar Blues, which I believe I read back in Biochemical Anthropology class. I remember some stirring discussions of whether it was reliable or not at the time. We were also reading Linus Pauling, and some quite disgusting documents on diseases caused by lack of protein. It was an interesting class. I will have to see if I can hunt up a copy.

Yesterday was slow at work, as Saturdays normally are until the Back to School frenzy begins, so I got to spend much of the afternoon getting ready for the workshop I am doing tomorrow. Someone had mentioned to me how helpful it had been at a workshop she had gone to, when the presenter told them the framework standards the lesson plans went with. That refers to the list of things the state thinks kids should learn on a given subject.

So I have a cool lesson on prehistoric tools that involves role play with bears and an integrated lesson on force and motion. I'm scanning through the state standards on history, and finding nothing anywhere that suggests that our kids should learn about prehistory. Students should know how technology affects business and agriculture.... Students should use multiple techniques including role play to communicate... Those are what I came up with. As though prehistoric bear-hunting were some form of business or agriculture. In fact, our history standards are so heavy on economics that I always suspect they were made up by Marxists.

I also have a cool lesson on the different points of view on Indian Removal. So is there any suggestion that kids should know about that time period, or those events?

Nope. That one I listed under the standards about the existence of different cultures and distinguishing between fact and opinion. I debated including it under the "contributions of different cultural groups", but that seemed to be a stretch.

No, the truth is that, in our state, the closest thing to an actual requirement to know any history is the bit about recognizing that history is a succession of events, and that the past influences present circumstances.

You could teach state history every year -- and it is in fact required by law -- without ever mentioning the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the Civil Rights Movement, and meet the state requirements. There is simply no content specified.

This was part of the shift from content to skills. The idea was that there was no way to know what people might need to know in the future, and the quantity of information around kept growing, so all we really needed to do was make sure that kids had the skills to get information.

The Cultural Literacy movement was a response to this, and we have some Core Knowledge schools in our area, but the state standards never got away from that helpless skills-only approach.

Actually, this is the problem with working six days a week. It gets very hard not to end up working on the seventh day as well, or at least thinking about work. I will be baking cookies for the workshop today, but I am determined not to spend the whole day thinking about it as well. I am going to read and knit and sing and try to finish up some of my sewing projects and talk to my kids and possibly watch a movie.

To make up for having brought my work into this day-off post, I will go back and add irrelevant pictures of my baby vegetables.

In spite of requests in the comments, I cannot tell you the name of my novelist mother, because I am only allowed to have a xanga under conditions of strictest secrecy. In particular, #2 son has told me that he will be mortified if his friends can ever recognize him in any cute stories I might tell about him.

Not that it is impossible to figure out who I am, but it has to be more trouble than the junior high will go to.

I had to go pick #2 son and Pinky up on Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. from a friend's house. I had directions, though no actual street name or address or anything, but eventually I fetched up at a farm. There was a nice border collie to greet me, and a pool with a rock waterfall, and cattle, and a basketball hoop, and a trampoline, and I was admiring all these marvels as I went up to the door and rang the bell.

No answer. I knocked, I went around the house, I peeped in the windows. Nothing. I figured that, if the boys had to be picked up at 7:00, someone would surely come down soon, so I sat on the porch and read for a bit.

It did cross my mind that, since I did not have any address or street name to go by, it was possible that I was at the wrong house, and was sitting by a total stranger's pool at 7:00 in the morning, enjoying their waterfall under false pretences.

It was this reflection which prevented me from diving in.

In any case, I waited there for half an hour, and then gave up and went to the gym for half an hour on the treadmill, and the two bits of time combined gave me the chance to read The Shangri-La Diet, so I can report to you fully.

The main question is, of course: is it insane?

There really are two parts to this question. The first is, does this wild claim seem plausible? And I guess, having read the whole book, I can imagine that the wild claim in question could be true. The author is saying that drinking oil and sugar water is an appetite suppressant. He himself only eats one meal a day, and sometimes only every two days. I daresay that would lead to weight loss. And his arguments about it being an appetite suppressant seem plausible. I do not know enough about rats and associative learning to be able to judge -- we will have to get Sighkey in on that -- but the argument seems at least internally consistent. So yeah, I guess it could work.

But the other part of the question is this: is this an insane thing to do? After all, plenty of things are appetite suppressants without actually being smart, as this famous ad reminds us.

The Shangra-La diet proposes that we swallow 29-60 grams of sugar, two or three times a day. Do not think this is a small amount of sugar. A chocolate-coated, caramel and nut ice cream bar only has 19 grams of sugar. I could not even find anything in my house that contains 29 grams of sugar. The government food pyramid, which has been pretty heavily influenced by America's convenience food lobbyists, recommends a limit of 22 grams of sugar a day. The author claims that people following his diet, with as much as 180 grams of sugar a day in addition to eating whatever they care to, will naturally choose to eat less sugar than usual, but I can't imagine that he could be right, because the amount is so large. Who among us is already eating that much sugar? (And, for me, since sugar is a no-no for those concerned about triglycerides, this would be particularly worrisome.)

What's more, you have to do this forever. The author admits that, as soon as you stop drinking the stuff, you will gain weight. And I daresay he is right, because you will not have made any changes in your behavior. So we are talking about something fairly unhealthy on a permanent basis.

We should bear in mind that this book is directed toward the person who has tried dieting repeatedly without success. I don't believe in dieting, myself. I don't think everyone has to be thin, and I am more concerned with health than with weight. However, I dieted once. My doctor told me to, so I got the book Change One, which said the same things my doctor had said, but in a practical and step-by-step way, because I am biddable and good at following rules when the directions are clear.

I lost weight, and have maintained that loss for a couple of years. I would not say that it was difficult, though I faced some challenges with which I will not bore you, but which should help me do the same thing again, now that my doctor is getting onto me again. I did have to follow the rules about eating and exercise, and to learn to accept hunger. There was a point at which I wondered whether I would be hungry for the rest of my life, but it was followed soon after by a point at which I stopped feeling hungry. I also stopped losing weight at that point. Having lost a good bit more than the 10% of body weight that experts say is realistic, and required for health benefits, I quit following the diet. I kept eating right and exercising, and maintained that loss.

However, when my triglyceride levels were the same this year as last, my doctor -- though impressed by my muscular development -- reiterated his views on diet and exercise. I am intending to go back to the stricter rules, for the sake of my lipids.

Roberts says, if you are doing what your doctor says and eating right and exercising, his bizarre ritual will just make it easier. My mother said I could try it out for a couple of weeks, what's the harm? So I tried drinking a cup of his sugar water, and I am here to tell you that it is literally sickening. Roberts, in the Q & A section of the book, suggests that you see a doctor if all that sugar makes you sick, but I have just seen a doctor, and have no troubles with insulin function or anything of that kind. It makes a person sick to drink two to four tablespoons of sugar in water, IMHO, because that is a sickening thing to do. I got through the entire cup in the morning and about half the cup in the evening, but I do not think that I could do that again. Maybe people like the author who usually drink sugary drinks could do this more easily than I.

Obviously, the sugar method is not going to be the right choice for me, but there is an alternative. You can instead take two tablespoons of oil a couple of times a day. This will come to the entire amount of fat I ought to eat, which is not realistic, but it is at least olive or canola oil. My problem with this possibly healthier option is that I am afraid that I could not bring myself to drink a spoonful of oil, let alone a quarter of a cup each day. Capsules don't contain enough to do the trick, Roberts says, and he claims that you get over the loathsomeness of drinking oil with time. You are not allowed to brush your teeth or do anything else to take the taste from your mouth for at least an hour, so give up those thoughts of fixing the problem that way.

Will I try the oil? Hmm....

It seems to me that between tolerating hunger and having to drink sugar or oil, tolerating hunger might be the less unpleasant of the two.

As for #2 son, he was snoring away, as was everyone else in the house. I picked him up an hour or so later with only mild recriminations. After all, I enjoyed reading by the pool. Too bad I didn't take a picture for the Summer Reading Challenge.

Here is a collage of all my WIPS. Woe is me! I never used to have multiple WIPs. I might have a zombie project and an epic one, or a sewing and a knitting, but never bunches of unfinished things going.

I would read others' resolutions not to begin any new projects till they finished all the old ones with a disbelieving shake of the head (I might have allowed a sad smile to play about my lips... can't quite remember), knowing I would never get caught in that trap.

And yet, here I am... The magic collage button actually repeated some pictures, possibly things it thinks I ought to really get moving on, for heaven's sake. But still, it is undeniable that I have four knitting projects, two quilts, a crochet project, four bits of dressmaking, and a lawn chair going. And that doesn't even count future plans.

Hmmm. Maybe I better not start anything new till I finish something.

I really am reading The Shangri-La Diet, unlikely as that seems. My mother sent it to me, following a conversation about my triglycerides. Perhaps you have read about this or heard of it elsewhere. I had not.

Apparently, the central claim of this book is that you can, by drinking oil and sugar water every day, lose weight effortlessly. No exercise, and it doesn't matter what you eat. As you can imagine, this has made it a popular idea down at the old diet book factory.

It sounds insane to me. I am reading it anyway, because my mother sent it to me. Now, my mother is a science fiction novelist, and she believes in reincarnation, so we already know that she is more open-minded than I am. However, I do try to be open-minded. If I can attend a fundamentalist Bible study, then surely I can read The Shangri-La Diet without prejudice.

Initial reaction? Well, of course it sounds sickening, but imagine that you get over that -- or perhaps the nausea is part of the plan. My doctor told me to avoid sugar entirely, and to keep fats to a minimum. Lean meats, nonfat dairy, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, that's what I am supposed to eat. Obviously, this book doesn't fit that prescription at all. And, frankly, if I were going to have 29 grams of sugar every day, I would prefer to have it in the form of Ghirardelli dark chocolate (3 squares, you can have for that amount of sugar -- and the fat content is covered too, by the oil), thank you very much.

But there is a whole book here, so there must be more in it than "drink some sugar." I'll let you know.

Last time I mentioned the Sewing With a Plan project, I was having trouble finding a print.

(If your reaction to that sentence was either "Ah,yes, what happened with that?" or "So what?", you can safely skip this paragraph. Sewing With a Plan, or SWAP, is a popular thing with the sewing bloggers, where they plan out a coordinated wardrobe according to rules apparently developed in Australia, and then they sew stuff according to that plan, rather than according to whim. The beginning of the thing is to make a two-piece dress in a print which contains two colors, mystically determined according to another set of rules. Then all you have to do is take a swatch of this print along to the fabric store with you, and all the things you sew will work together and you will be well-dressed in spite of yourself. #2 daughter and I went through the planning process and got a start on our sewing while she was here over Memorial Day weekend, but neither of us had come up with a print, even though we went to all the fabric stores and I tried really hard not to think like a quilter. As it happens, we both found plaids we liked -- you can make a plaid jacket as long as it goes with your two-piece print dress.)

I ended up ordering this fabric from Keepsake Quilting. It arrived yesterday. It is Windsor Paisley from Moda fabrics.

My mystically-determined colors are burgundy and gray, with blue as an accent, and this is as close as I could get.

I was pleased, when I laid it out with the solid colors and the plaid (none of which, of course, are supposed to be bought before the print, but there it is), that it went very well with them.

 It goes well with the Silken Damask Jasmine sweater I'm knitting, too, and the yarn for my next planned sweater, and with Erin, which is languishing in my knitting basket waiting for cool weather to return.

It should make an excellent skirt to wear with these sweaters, when and if I ever finish them all.

I have even attempted to take a photograph of the fabrics all together. I try not to apologize for my photos too much, because a) I find it boring when other people do it and b) I don't know what it looks like on your monitor anyway, but I do wish that I were able to photograph cloth better. Still, in spite of the dreadful picture, the print works well with the completed top here, and with the other fabrics I had gathered up for my SWAP. That is a relief.

The thing is, in spite of my efforts not to shop like a quilter, I did end up buying quilting cotton. I wanted to go with silky microfibers or challis or something, like a dressmaker, but I just didn't find a print in such a fabric. This is a good quality broadcloth, but it is broadcloth.

The pattern I chose for my two-piece dress is Butterick 4467.

I already made the top in a blue microfiber (haven't hemmed it yet...) and it turned out well.

I'm not sure that this is going to work as well in broadcloth. I think it might have a homemade rather than a handmade look, if you know what I mean.

So I may need to find another pattern for my two-piece dress. I certainly am not going to start looking at prints again.

Natalie has just popped into my mind, though, so I am thinking that when I wash this fabric, it may feel quite different, or indeed I may feel different about it.

Seamstresses out there, your thoughts on this matter are solicited.

Bonanza came to visit last night, bringing bags of flax meal. I thought it would be the ground grain from flax, but apparently that is only good for making linen. Flax meal is actually the ground seeds of flax. I am researching what to do with it. All I know of is to add it to baked goods and breakfast cereal by the teaspoon, and I have six pounds of it, so I think I need some further information.

Unfortunately, I have mostly just babies in my garden right now, so I sent her home empty-handed. If she comes again next month, I can load her down with zucchini.

It is not yet the perfect time for zucchini. The perfect time for zucchini is when you are getting four young zukes every other day. That way, you can have them for lunch, dinner, or breakfast a few times a week.

Right now, it is two young zukes a week, so I have to decide: can I have it in my breakfast sandwich, or shall I save it for a lunchtime salad?

Almost immediately after the perfect point for zukes comes the point at which you are getting four fresh young zukes every day, plus two old bearded ones. This is the point at which you begin to make zucchini bread (the summer equivalent of fruitcake, according to a magazine I once read), zucchini cookies, and zucchini burgers.

Or leave bags of zucchini on the steps of neighbors.

Wuthering Heights is a terrific read. Right at the beginning you get the humor of Lockwood's reaction to the pathos of the horrible Heathcliff household. Then you get the sad tale of Cathy and Heathcliff, told by Mrs. Dean.

I have to say that Mrs. Dean has always been my favorite character. She has tea and knitting, too, so I feel sure that she would have had an old-fashioned pleated tea cosy, and that is my Knit the Classics project for this month.

To make this tea cosy, you basically knit a rectangle of vertically striped garter stitch. You carry the yarn along the back and pull it tight at the joins, so that the reverse of the work looks like this.

The result is that the stripes get pulled up into pleats, giving you two inches of wool and air as insulation for your tea pot.

You'll make two of these rectangles, by the way, and join them together, leaving openings for the handle and the spout. Shape the top, add a loop so you can hang it up by the tea caddy and the kettle, and Bob is, as they say, your uncle.

As for Wuthering Heights, it is the archetypal romantic novel. Not a romance novel, mind you. That is something different. Romance novels are genre books, as mysteries are, and therefore have rules. The basic shape of a romance (novel or movie) is that there are characters A and B, who will end up together. The center of the plot is some hindrance to their love -- it can be mistaken identity (Fred Astaire did that a lot) or obligations on the part of one of the protagonists, or anything at all that the reader or viewer could believe would keep the two apart. Then the story must overcome the hindrance, just as a mystery must solve the central puzzle.

Wuthering Heights, since it is not a romance, is not bound by these rules. However, there are some characteristics of the novel that readers of romances will recognize. For example, Heathcliff and Cathy are soulmates, inextricably bound together by Fate (and by having supported one another through an abusive shared childhood), yet Heathcliff is entirely unsuitable as a husband. So Cathy must choose between the entirely suitable Edgar and her entirely unsuitable soulmate.

This device is common in romances, where the soulmate often turns out only to appear to be unsuitable.

In real life, there are many young women who seem to prefer unsuitable young men, because they are more exciting, more dangerous, and altogether more Heathcliff-like than the nice guys.

I do not know whether Wuthering Heights created this phenomenon, or is merely reporting it, but it has been a source of concern for parents of daughters, and for nice young men, for as long as I can remember. If you want to read a romance novel to compare with Wuthering Heights, Olivia Goldsmiths' Bad Boy is a good one which focuses on this phenomenon.

Or you can read, much more briefly, about #1 daughter's intention to marry a pirate here. #2 daughter is not necessarily drawn to Bad Boys, but we have noticed among her long string of harmless flirtations a slight preponderance of mentally unstable fellows.

Now Healthcliff is not just a Bad Boy, and Cathy is not a spunky romance novel heroine, but she is a saucy minx. and the Saucy Minx is just as much a fact of romance novel life as the Bad Boy. A Saucy Minx can be counted upon to Cause Trouble and to Drive Men Mad. There is a minority position in the family that #2 daughter is not so much prone to dating boys of tenuous mental stability as that she drives them round the twist.

As her mother, I do not of course take this position, but I admit that I watch her suitors closely, hoping to determine early on whether or not they will survive dating her. I would like to ask them for a certificate from the family doctor attesting to their calm and steady disposition, but that might be seen as interfering. #2 might have slight tendencies toward Saucy Minxosity. (Let me say, however, that I recently heard through the grapevine that she is considered straitlaced on her campus. Since she attends a school where "How is your walk with God?" is considered a normal conversational opener, I am proud of her for achieving this distinction, and I think it absolves her of any excesses of Saucy Minxosity.)

If, looking back upon your own life this past semester or over the years, whichever is appropriate, you discern a tendency to choose or to be a Bad Boy or a Saucy Minx, you might consider that this combination is only actually good in fiction.

Oh, and please leave your best flax meal recipes. I thank you. My family thanks you.

Yesterday's sermon was about the cathedrals of medieval Europe.

I happened to have a bunch of cathedral photos hanging out on my computer, and had read The Book Junkie's tip for making picture grids, so I have prepared for you an overview of cathedrals, in case you do not have a mental image.

When I was looking at these pictures from #2 daughter's UK jaunt, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the buildings, and the thought that people had built them -- buildings of a beauty and complexity that we never match today -- with the equivalent of the hammer and awl I was using all last week making our shopping carts.

We don't do that now, I thought, because we do not take the long view. We do not consider doing things for the glory of God rather than for profit or immediate self-glorification. We do not have the grandeur in our thoughts.

But the pastor pointed out the enormous importance of the cathedrals in the daily lives of the people. For many, they provided most of  the beauty and comfort in their lives, the respite from the struggle for survival. The feeding of their spirits. They did not necessarily have the option of creating beauty for themselves in their own homes, or of choosing to spend their working hours in creative endeavors. They could not read the Bible in their homes or keep up with the news through the written word. They only had daily music if they could produce it themselves.

Now, most of us live lives of beauty and comfort most of the time, or can do so if we choose to. And yet many of us choose not to. We have ready access to the very best of literature, music, film, and graphic arts. We have company whenever we want it, either in the flesh or at the end of electronic devices. Few of us are honestly engaged in a struggle for survival, though many of us talk as though we were.

The two main uses of time among American adults apart from work -- here, where most of us can sample the glories of nature and art at will -- are shopping and watching TV.

Something to think about.

Book number 2 for week number 1 of my Summer Reading Challenge was Agatha Christie's Elephants Can Remember. Dame Agatha's worst book is still worth reading -- and this could be it. One of the latest, written in the mid-'70s, it relies on a central clever idea and a lot of conversation. These conversations are so vague and rambling that you have to wonder whether she was just going through the motions, secure in the knowledge that anything she wrote would sell.

Here's where I read it.

Yes, that is the entrance to my home. It may be that the bushes are in need of pruning. I may need to take a saw to them, in fact. Those are weeds which took root in the azaleas and are now six feet tall. It is not that I intentionally grew a jungle across my walkway.

It's a great rocker -- another wonderful hand-me-down from my parents. Here is the view you have when you sit in it. Frankly, I like it. It is like being in the forest, even though there is a street and houses and all that sort of thing just beyond the foliage.

I knitted up one ball of the Luna in Silken Damask.

The second Jasmine sweater is underway. I won't be showing it to you much, because you have already seen numerous pictures of Jasmine in progress, but I am enjoying it.

The other thing that I did yesterday -- besides reading and knitting, church, and a modicum of cooking and housework -- was to watch the BBC film of Cold Comfort Farm. This novel, by Stella Gibbons, is one of my favorite books, and they did a good job on the film. There were a number of  literary allusions, including Wuthering Heights and the works of Jane Austen. See, even if you don't want to read old books, you have to, because otherwise you won't understand the TV shows.

I have completed the first book for the Summer Reading Challenge: My Very Own Murder, by Josephine Carr.

I read a lot of mystery novels, enough to be able to generalize. Michael Innes is not at all like Colin Watson, who is not at all like M.C. Beaton, but all of them are mystery novelists. Some mysteries are serious novels and some are light-hearted froth, but they all follow some basic rules. There is a puzzle at the center of the story, and the writer plays fair with the reader in the sense of providing all the clues so that we can, if not actually figure it out alongside the detective, at least say, "Aha! I should have noticed that!" at the denouement.

My Very Own Murder is not a mystery. It is chick lit with the word "murder" in it.

I am not saying this is a bad thing, but I want you to know what you are getting into. It is still an entertaining book, if very meager as to plot and a bit mingy as to characters. It is in some ways a coming-of-age book about a middle-aged woman, but doesn't even really explore that concept very fully -- the protagonist cuts her hair and has casual sex with a neighbor, and that's about the strength of it.

Part of the non-challenging challenge of summer reading was to post pictures of the places where we read.

I have already posted the exciting recliner photo. Here is another place where I read that book: in bed.

Today I am intending to read and knit most of the day, probably not in any very exotic locations. The boys are out of school so summer has officially begun. Iced tea, vegetables from the garden, and sitting on the porch figure largely in my after-church plans.

I had my annual blood test. Once again, everything was good except my triglycerides. Actually, my triglycerides were identical to last year's, and last year the doctor was happy with them. But last year, they had improved over the previous year. This year they did not improve.

What, you may wonder, are triglycerides? They are a thing in your blood. If you have more than 500 of them, you may get pancreatitis (sp?). Or, if you are a man with heart trouble and have more than 200 of them, you have an increased risk of stroke. I am a healthy woman with 182 of them. However, my doctor -- who spends way too much time hanging out with sick people -- worries about heart disease a whole lot and wants me to have only 150 of these things.

So I have been told that I must exercise and eat better.

Excuse me? Am I not the oldest woman in the cardiopump class? Do I not spend more time at the gym than any of my kids? Do not the meals I prepare cause my husband to shout "I need FAT!" and my sons to claim that they are being starved to death? Is my kitchen not filled with whole grains, nonfat dairy products and fruits and vegetables? Do I not actually eat that stuff most of the time?

Okay, I admit that I am not perfect. I eat pizza sometimes. And chocolate. I eat cake whenever it is around, which fortunately is not very often. I have not given up butter or cheese.

But I am feeling put upon. I am thinking things like, "Everybody ELSE gets to eat doughnuts and bacon cheeseburgers! Why MEEE?"

In fact, in honor of being told to clean up my act, I had chili dogs and a candy bar for dinner last night (oh, and celery, but that wasn't part of my Great Rebellion).

So, I know you are out there. I see your Footprints. So tell me, how perfect are you? Am I being terribly bratty and unreasonable? Can you assure me that it is worth it to continue to be more and more and more careful about what I eat? Or is it really the case that everyone but MEEE gets to eat chili cheese fries (I don't know what those are, but my husband eats them for lunch) and banana splits without consequences?

The noodles! You need MaMa noodles, Wai Wai noodles, or Kung Fu noodles. That kind. You can find them online, or at your local Asian market. You will recognize them because the name will be in Thai. You will find the "MaMa" part on the outside box, where it says "Keep from sunlight and chemicals." There are many flavors, like duck and shrimp, chicken, pork, and tom yum, whatever that may be. You can eat them right from the package, or cook them first. I leave out the mysterious oil packet and just use a little water, but when my husband cooks them, he puts in everything. Add vegetables and meat if you want. Sorry for leaving out this useful data in the first place.