Yesterday began with a trip to the Farmer's Market.

Well, of course it actually began with a couple of hours working at the computer, but I had yesterday off, and I am not going to let the fact that I had to spend some of it working change that.

In fact, the day ended up being quite different from my plan, which is of course a characteristic of days off, so that was good.

It was nice to be at the market, with different languages flowing around me and my marketing bag growing more and more distended as I chose delectable vegetables from each farmer's table.

There was no fruit. We had no fruit this summer, because of the odd weather, and I had heard that there would be no apples, but I had hoped it would turn out to be false.

When I stopped in to see my hostess from last week, she and her parents kindly offered me a cup of coffee, and we had a fun and far-reaching conversation. One of the points in it was the possibility that the odd weather was not an isolated weird year, but part of the new, changed climate, and that our region will no longer be able to grow fruit. A sad thought, that.

Here's my swag. Also my shopping list. If you ever have difficulty with the whole make a list and shop thing, you might want to go to savingdinner.com, where they have numerous shopping lists for 6, and converters to make them work for 2 or 4, too. The lists go with the book Saving Dinner, but I have found that even if you don't follow the menu specifically, these lists will still give you a week's worth of healthy dinners.

You still have to figure out breakfasts and lunches and, if you have teenage boys in the house, snacks, which may comprise the bulk of your grocery shopping.

Having replenished the stock of vegetables, I went home. #1 daughter said she was going to go to the shopping center in the next county. I went there in the summer with #2 daughter and #2 son, so I have you shown you pictures of this place before. I asked if I could join her, and we had a very pleasant couple of hours. We ran into old friends, tried on myriad fragrances (and I have to admit that I was quite tempted by Williams-Sonoma's ginger-almond dishwashing liquid, but of course a bottle of dishwashing soap costing $8.50 would count as "buying something" rather than as "grocery shopping"), and checked out the new trends in shoes.

We even looked at clothing. The clothing stores there are clearly divided into the ones for young women and the ones for older women. I further divided them into the ones that use good quality materials and the ones that do not, and #1 daughter has to divide them into the ones that carry clothing small enough for her and the ones that do not. Each of us found a couple of shops where we could expect to shop successfully, and we plan to go back someday.

The horse statue here really charmed me, until I found out that it is a feature of a chain of restaurants, and not just a flight of whimsy on the part of the owner of this one restaurant. We also went to Starbucks (Earl Grey tea for me, blueberry muffin and Caramel Apple Something or Other for #1 daughter) and I quite liked it, too, except that the fun of the mismatched chairs and quirky music was also slightly spoiled by the fact that it was a recreation of something that used to be individual and special.

I remember when you visited a town and went to the very special and unusual coffee house and bookstore and restaurant, because it was different from what you had in your own town, or what you found in other towns. This experience has all but disappeared. I said as much, but also acknowledged that it is curmudgeonly of me to say it. Or even think it. Maybe the chains are like prints of great paintings. I love prints of great paintings, and feel very happy that I can enjoy them in spite of not being able to see the originals. Perhaps I should feel the same way about chains.

In any case, we enjoyed our window shopping there, finished up the grocery shopping, and went home. There I did not do any sewing, but I did make quite a bit of progress with Ivy.

I enjoyed some time with my family, and we had The Great Pan Race and I scrubbed my bathroom (it being the last day for the HGP Week of the Master Bath), and then I made an early night of it.

Today The Empress is coming by after church, and then we will be joining my parents for lunch at the local Palais de Chicken. My husband has taken the day off for the occasion. I slept in this morning till 7:30 (after getting up at 4:00 to let the cat out, as she had not gotten the memo about the whole day off thing), so I am feeling much more like myself than I have been.

I hope that all of you are enjoying your weekends, too.

Fridays are a really long workday for me. I spend three or four hours at the computer, and then go to the store for eight hours. So it was a relief to me when I got home yesterday to find that the kids had ordered pizza. Not that sausage pizza is what I ought to eat for dinner, and I should at least have made a salad to go with it, but I didn't. I plopped down on the sofa with the kids and checked out the mail.

And wow, look what was in the mail! The nice folks at Central Office sent me this gorgeous pan as a present for qualifying.

Janalisa was telling us at the training meeting that we would get childishly excited about the presents they sent us. I may have chuckled in a tolerantly amused way. It is true, though.

I do not have a high enough voice to be able to squeal when I opened the box the way girls do when they open presents in movies, but my response was probably the alto equivalent of squealing.

It's a really nice pan.

Also in the mail was the holiday update issue from Keepsake Quilting, my favorite quilting source now that our local quilt shops have given up the ghost. They have fabric with things written on it. The fabrics have 4" square boxes with clever sayings in them, so that you can cut them out and use them as quilt squares. I love that idea. Unfortunately, the sayings are things like "Dogs are the PAWS that refreshes." Why couldn't they have had lines from John Donne or Oscar Wilde epigrams or something?

Actually, it's fortunate. I have two quilting WIPs and a couple more planned quilting projects, and also I am not buying anything till #1 son graduates.

I do have to go grocery shopping today, though, and pick up a check from one of my hostesses. I also have housework to do, of course. There is always housework to do.

But once I have done these things, I intend to declare this a PSD (Personal Sewing Day, a term from the sewing blogs) and get some work done on my SWAP.

That's the plan.

We have roses. It was too hot and dry there for a while. We also have lots of baby peppers. And herbs (that's lemon verbena in the picture).

Otherwise, the garden is finished. This is my fault. I should have planted some fall vegetables, but I didn't. That's all.

Yesterday was a wonderful autumn day, with a bit of fog followed by sunshine. After a few hours of computer work, I took #1 daughter to pick up her car, and went to the gym, where I finished Gilead on the treadmill, feeling a little silly about crying at the ending. Maybe other people have also cried on the treadmill, if only because they had the incline too high. Then more work, and then book club, which is always enjoyable and enlightening, and then more work at the computer. I made dinner, and then I took the evening off. I relaxed, even though that felt a little odd at first. I saw my husband off to his tournament. I did my homework, watched a movie I'm reviewing for Amazon.com, and knitted.

That is when I discovered that I was making a second left front of Ivy rather than a right front. So I frogged it all the way back to the first decrease, and here I am starting it again.

Sleep deprivation is my excuse.

My homework involved two different studies. In one, we were asked to calculate exactly how much time we had spent this week in religious contemplation, prayer, and study. I am not sure I can do that. In the excellent novel Gilead, contemplation of spiritual issues and theological questions is woven through the story and the thoughts of the narrator, and I think that is more how I go about it, and more how it ought to be done. After all, if I can say that I spent forty-five minutes in contemplation of spiritual matters, then that suggests that at the end of that forty-five minutes I closed my thoughts to such matters. One of the women at book club spoke of how wonderful it was that the narrator saw God in small things every day -- caring for his son, rain, shelling walnuts -- and how, if you are a religious person, your life ought to be like that.

Joanna Weaver's book Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World starts with a chapter describing Martha running around getting things ready for Jesus. This is a story from the Bible. In case you don't know it, let me recap for you here.

Jesus and the disciples visit a family in Bethany. The family includes two sisters, Mary and Martha. At one point, Martha comes to Jesus and asks him to tell Mary to help her. In fact, she asks him whether he doesn't care that Mary has left her to do all the work, and demands that he tell Mary to help her. Jesus tells Martha that she is busy with a lot of things, but that Mary has chosen something better, and that won't be taken away from her.

Margaret Kim Peterson, in Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life, points out that Jesus's suggestion that the hospitable preparations are not that important is not the equivalent of a modern person's saying, "Oh, that's okay, Martha, relax, don't go to any trouble for us." Within the culture of the time, it was akin to another story of the New Testament, when a man says he will come with Jesus as soon as he has buried his father, and Jesus tells him to skip it. Hospitality was a big deal, and women were responsible for it.

Weaver envisions Martha running around barking orders at her servants and getting crazy with her preparations, wanting to carve Noah's Ark and the animals out of cheese. This strikes me as silly, but then it always bothers me when people take a few verses from the Bible and construct elaborate stories out of them (unless they admit that it is fiction), including the thoughts and feelings of the people.

But it also bothers me that Martha is made ridiculous there. I think that most women, or at least most of us old enough to be responsible for hospitality, have felt like Martha sometimes. Her words to Jesus sound petty, and his assurance that Mary is in the right seem like a rebuke, but who among us has not been frustrated by how much there is to do and how little help we usually get?

In the discussion we had before reading this first chapter, it struck me that Jesus might not have been saying that Martha should shut up and do her work, but rather that there were lots of other people who could help. "Have Andrew help," he might have been saying. Peterson points out that Jesus talks quite a bit about feeding and clothing people, and doesn't at all seem to think that such work is unimportant or beneath him, let alone beneath us.

Weaver also proposes that Jesus wasn't saying that Martha should settle down and quit fussing with all that stuff. He recognized, she says, that Martha couldn't do that. It was in her nature to feel that she had to get everything done.

Weaver also envisions Martha feeling as though Jesus had added even more tasks to her to-do list -- she not only had to see to all the domestic arrangements, but also had to find time to sit at his feet and listen.

The question about calculating how much time we've spent with God this week seems like that to me. I prefer Peterson's suggestion that we can spend time with God while we are doing our work.

Gilead is a very beautiful book. We have book club today, and La Bella asked us all to consider the question, "Why is this book important?"

I'm having some trouble with that question.

For one thing, I find books important in general. Gilead is lovely, with tasty language and interesting things to think about and a story unfolding with great delicacy behind the deep thoughts of the narrator. His humility and integrity and devotion to what is important are the surface of the book, with the story going along underneath it. I think that in our real lives, the story generally does go along underneath what we are thinking about and who we are, and it is only after the fact that we can look back and see what the story is, but books are not generally like that.

And that may be a good thing.

But does my pleasure in the book and my admiration for the skill of the writer make it important?

Compare that with The World is Flat, a book which was not lovely and which had no tasty language, and which revealed a level of amorality in the narrator which I found both fascinating and repulsive. I bet that it had a lot more influence on people, and created more change, than Gilead. Does that make it more important?

A thing of beauty is, after all, a joy forever.

I'm also still reading Keeping House: A Litany for Everyday Life, and I read a bit of it out last night to the women in my study group, for which I am going to be reading Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World. And I am also reading Poetry in Stitches, a book which I have been lusting after for years. Literally, years, ever since I saw an item knitted from it in a knitting blog. It has gone out of print, and I saw (at Fiberarts Afloat) an announcement that there were only a few copies left at an online shop. I got the last one -- or maybe they told everyone that they were getting the last one.

I shouldn't have bought that book, of course, since I have resolved to buy nothing till #1 son graduates, but I had signed the form to receive payment for a piece of writing, for a sum which will cover (when I at last receive it) the cost of that expensive book.

Is it an important book? I guess it is to me.

The two books about, as Joanna Weaver puts it, "finding intimacy with God in the busyness of life" are important, it seems to me, insofar as that is an important goal. It is for me. Not for everyone.

But the notion of an important book in the context of literature means that the book had some effect on literature thereafter. Important books, in the context of literature, are those that change the way that we look at books, or the way that people write books.

There is a certain amount of sheer momentum involved in important books. People begin to read them because they are important, and someone tells them that this was the book that created a genre or changed a convention or opened a new vista, and that reinforces the importance of the book.

I don't know that Gilead is important in that sense.

And I can't help but notice that none of these books fits the autumn challenge to read four creepy, spooky books by October 31.

Clearly, I need more reading time.

Yesterday was a full day. I qualified, in Central Office talk, which is sort of like "flying up" for Campfire girls. This means that I now have a website. I am forbidden to link to it, but you can message me and I'll send it to you. I'd like critiques.

I was initially a bit startled to find that we couldn't link, seeing as I spend quite a lot of time courting links for the sites I am paid to take care of, but on reflection I figure that the company doesn't want to take away the human contact. That is, you should have your own PC consultant in your neighborhood who takes care of you personally and cooks for you. Some of you are in my xanga neighborhood, but the company doesn't want people shopping online in a cold and nonhuman way.

The Empress told me yesterday that she is nearly ready to allow people to shop with the store online in a cold and nonhuman way. I have spent some months doing my best to ensure that people who shop at our website call us or go to the store or read our blogs or something, rather than shopping with us as though we were, you know, a store.

Occasional orders from other states and countries slip through, but I do my best.

I do four websites for the store, all linked together. Two are blogs. One is a reasonably popular blog, which gets featured occasionally on those blog-collecting sites, and listed in directories and stuff, and people from all over the world visit it. I find this cool. The other blog is visited almost exclusively by local people, and only gets a few visits a day. But then yesterday, all of a sudden, a couple dozen people from places like Turkey, Greece, and Norway visited it. I don't know why. It only has posts like "We have a new shipment of magnets in the store! Come in and let us help you pick some out," and I can't believe that people in Europe are wowed by that.

It just shows how little control we have over the internet, that's all. If we are in fact going to encourage random shopping from strangers, though, I will need to do all kinds of different things. That will be fun. It will also take time. I don't know whether I should start now, on the theory that we will be ready for it when it gets going, or not, in case The Empress changes her mind.

I also found a science connection for a lesson I'm working on that I am quite thrilled about. It's so perfect, yet non-obvious, that I bored both The Empress and The Princess with it. They were quite polite about it.

However, these little thrills just show how dull and staid my life is.

One of our toy reps had a big adventure. (A toy rep is a person who travels around showing toys to toysellers. A fun job. People with jobs like that probably have adventures all the time.) He was hit by a car.

He, a pedestrian, was hit by a car.

As he lay there on the ground, bleeding, with his wrist bone poking out of the skin, the driver came around to him and said, "You know that this was your fault, don't you?"

For just a moment, let's imagine that it was indeed his fault. Let's imagine that, rather than walking in the crosswalk as he claims, he actually leapt nimbly in front of the moving vehicle just for fun.

Can you now imagine getting out of the vehicle and walking around to the wounded man and telling him he was at fault?

Crafting at last! Here are pieces 2 and 3 of SWAP Part III. I finished up the skirt of burgundy cord, and got the machine sewing done on the green linen top.

"Linen" of course being a euphemism for "wrinkled."

The reason I got some sewing done was that the internet went down at my house.

I had already done eight hours' work, so I was able to switch to the sewing machine without too much angst, though I did still have Pampered Chef tasks to do.

When my son came home from work, he suggested that I call the tech people. I objected that I wouldn't understand what they said anyway. I planned to wait for #1 daughter to get home.

He persuaded me. I called the tech guy. I told him my troubles: "My internet is not working on any of the computers," I told him, and said that we had tried turning them off, and also had tried unplugging the modem, and had gone through the "fix me" options on all the computers, and tried not just AOL but several other browsers. If AOL is in fact a browser, which it might not be. He wasn't bothered by my ignorance.

He apologized, and suggested unplugging the router for five seconds, a strategy I had not yet tried.

I did, and indeed, everything was fine. I think it was the apology.

In any case, I was able to get back to work before rehearsal. I was glad to have the sewing done, too. This is the same top I made for SWAP I, the idea of using the same basic patterns with different fabrics being central to the SWAP concept.

Once I've hemmed and pressed this bedraggled garment, it should be quite nice. I'm thinking about doing some embroidery or something, but I should probably recognize that plain clothes are more versatile and useful and leave it alone.

Over dinner, I got caught up on #1 daughter's dramas at work and with her car (still not fixed, and neither is mine, so I can sympathize). She is working, you may recall, at a weight-loss clinic. They began their day yesterday with a recap of the nasty comments customers had posted about them online. This served to make everyone cross all day, with a predictable rise in pettiness and short tempers.

 It is in the nature of weight-loss clinics that the customers will be dissatisfied, it seems to me.

Hardly anyone actually loses weight and keeps it off. Those who do typically lose about 10% of their body weight, which is not usually enough to make them sylphlike, and then they still have the same approximate shape that they started out with.

The advertisements all have the phrase "results not typical" on them someplace, but people don't internalize that.

#1 daughter begs to differ. She sees the files, after all. The customers who do what they're told do lose weight. If they stick with it and keep coming in for the rest of their lives, they keep it off.

I don't know that eating 1200 calories a day for the rest of their lives is actually a reasonable thing to do, especially in combination with having someone scold you every week, which appears to be a big part of the program. Again, it seems to me that this is bound to lead to dissatisfaction. The center is lucky that people just badmouth it online. They could be getting stink bombs in the mail or something.

Then came rehearsal.

Music has a lot in common with math. There is all that counting, of course, but there is also the need to work with imaginary stuff.

Our marvelous director (he is Canadian, and keeps saying things about "American choirs," but we forgive him; for all I know, he may be including Canadian choirs in his strictures, and he isn't berating us for having gained four ounces, so it could be worse) was telling the basses to count a long sustained note in duples and then in triples. It seems to me that a long sustained note could be counted in rutabagas and hippopotami and it wouldn't matter, since it is just one note.

But as I said, music requires us to work with imaginary stuff a lot. I might have my reservations about the counting, but I do cheerfully "Sing the comma" without taking a breath or even a luftpause, attach "shadow vowels" to the ends of the words, and think of infinity during legato passages, secure in my belief that all this makes some difference to the sound.

I've included a picture of a bowl of oatmeal. Not only does it share with you my humorous cereal bowl, which brightens my mornings even when they begin at a hideously early hour, but it also demonstrates that I am indeed eating properly again, after that rather long spell of pastry and chocolate. Not 1200 calories a day, mind you, but healthy foods.

However, I've also included the banana bread with pecans, because my boys would be very bratty about being served oatmeal for breakfast. I'd like to see those weight-loss counselors have to deal with my boys.

"Only 5,000 calories?!" they'd say. "Do you want me to be scrawny all my life?"

Since, on Saturday, I took bad pictures before the show and during the show, all that was left for yesterday's open house was to take bad pictures after the show.

So here they are. These are Warm Nutty Caramel Brownies.

This was #2 son's favorite. "If I ate as many as I want," he said, "I would be sick." I figured that this counted as high praise from a sixteen year old boy.

I think that eating one whole serving of this might make me sick, frankly, but a bite was quite nice.

This is a Mint Silk Torte or something like that. I could look up the proper name of it, but I am too lazy to do so.

I really like this. I would like to be able to tell you that it is low in fat and full of healthful ingredients, but I would be lying if I said that.

I will say that you will not see it again on these pages (screens?) until the holidays. I have done my Open House and my practicing, and there will be no more of these shenanigans.

Really.

The ladies were very nice about my show. "You're good at this," they said. Mrs. M said I might like to do this fulltime some day, a suggestion which I rejected. I mentioned that I had thought I might not be perky enough for this job, but they disagreed. "You're personable," said the Computer Scientist. "That's better."

Then she suggested that some people might not understand when I was joking. I assured her that, while I am not a sensitive person, I can usually catch on to when people are too dim to understand my jokes, and modify my behavior.

They laughed. Of course, I speak a lot more freely with friends than I do with strangers. I count anyone who happens to read this as a friend, just for convenience's sake.

The party was fun. It was all friends of mine, so we sat around chatting and laughing and having fun. There was some shopping, as well -- it counts as a show, and I will receive some free goodies -- but it was mostly fun.

The discussion of funerals was downright rollicking, only slightly less so that the discussion of alien reproductive organs (don't ask). Suwana has a plan to have her ashes distributed hither and yon across France; she has funds for her family to take a nice vacation to do this. I would think that grief would interfere, but maybe if they wait a year they could enjoy it.

I proposed a database at the church to keep track of everyone's funeral hymn selections. I figured this would allow us to avoid all having the same hymn, but it was not a popular idea. Everyone plans to have a long funeral in order to accommodate all the hymns they've chosen, and no one minds repetition.

We also talked about our families, books, food, cooking, farming technology, and medicine, but those conversations could not be described as rollicking.

After the party, I did my paperwork and then watched a bit of the Monk marathon with my family.

I have no shows scheduled for this week, though I do have two for the first week of October. The goal is two shows a week, so I am not meeting that goal for this week. However, I am looking forward to having some time off. Sleeping, you know. Maybe sewing.

Today, though, it is back to the salt mines. I have a delivery to make and a book to work on, and homework and a rehearsal.

Happy Monday!

I'm going to have to improve my picture-taking, that's all.

I decided to take a picture before people arrived and before there was any food on the table, so that I could make a point of getting a good picture. of the dishes, at least, and of the centerpiece. At The Empress's party, which was quite photogenic, I didn't even think of taking my camera.

Notice that I have mystic angelic lighting on all the interesting parts of the table. The thing that is clear and visible is an empty baking dish.

Still, I remembered to take a picture of the cooked stuff.

Did it include any identifiable shot of the charming centerpiece? Nope. It's even blurry, which is hard to achieve with modern cameras.

I have another show today. I'll try again.

Yesterday didn't involve much lolling around. I cleaned house all morning, and then went to watch #2 son's gymnastics class, after which I set up the show and prepared paper work. The show didn't end until after 7:30, and by then the kids were starving. I fed them something sketchy and cleaned the kitchen. Then I did more paperwork while the family watched football.

Today will be a repeat, but with an earlier ending time, so I am again planning to loll around.

The book Keeping House: A Litany of Everyday Life addressed the repetitiousness of housework. That is the main problem with it, of course. I spent hours cleaning yesterday, but I will have to do quite a bit of it again today before the guests arrive.

Peterson suggests that we think of this as rhythmic repetition, like seasons or the liturgy, not as the Labors of Sisyphus.

I'm working on that.

This week for the HGP, we are cleaning the master bath, buying 1/8 of our bought presents, working an hour a day on our handmade presents (oh, I am sure behind on that), checking the family's clothes to be sure they have something to wear to all holiday events, laying in some canned goods (the ones we intend to use for the holidays, with duplicates for charity), and putting a meal and a batch of goodies in the freezer. This is also the week to go through the kids' toys and clothes and donate all the outgrown stuff to charity. My kids are too old for me to do that for them. I may be eyeing those Nerf guns, but I won't actually make that deicison for them.

We are having lovely days. They are in the upper 80s, so it isn't exactly fall weather, but the feel and the light are not like summer. This is the point where it is possible to believe that fall is coming.

Over the years, I've done some genealogical research, and managed to find out quite a lot about the family history. The internet has really revolutionized the study of family history, not because all the documents are now posted online (as some expected would happen) but because it is now so much easier to get in touch with the person who happens to have the document.

So this morning, when I discovered that I had a couple of emails from people who might well be cousins, I was happy to pull out my files and send them some data from old documents of which I have copies.

A good outcome will be their finding that data useful. A really good outcome will be their writing back with some other information that I don't already have.

As I was looking through my records, some of which are in an album I made, I thought that you might enjoy seeing some of my ancestors. I am of course forbidden to show faces in my pictures here at xanga, for fear that my kids' friends would see them and have their identities exposed, but these people have been dead and gone for so long that it surely won't matter.

As it happens, the emails were not about either of these groups of people. I know all about these people.

The emails were about my mysterious Midwesterners.

First, I have a French-Canadian shoemaker who came to the United States in 1880. I have his census records, business information, paragraphs about him in a book, all kinds of stuff from 1900 to 1920. I also have a census record for a French-Canadian shoemaker of his age and very nearly the same name (close enough that it could have been one of those immigrant spelling changes) who had just arrived in Chicago in 1880. I have what might well have been his marriage license -- but it could also have been some other fellow of the same name who married a woman with the same first name, in Chicago.

The email this morning was about an 1878 marriage in Quebec, between two people who may or may not be my great-great grandparents. I have no more reason, at this point, to think that the Canadian couple are the ones in question than to think that the Chicago couple are. I would like to know.

I would also like to know what happened to the family after 1920. There they are in the city directory, parents and children in several households, still making shoes, right up till that time, and then they simply disappeared. A family with 13 children ought to have left descendants littering the countryside. Someone ought to know whether they went back to Canada or were all wiped out by cholera or something. The trouble is, we are not interested in these things when we are young enough to be able to find living people who know the answers. They probably tell us stuff, and we don't listen. Then, when we want to know, they have all died and no one knows the answers any more.

The other email was about a Civil War soldier born in 1820. I know about his wife and children and his military service, and I have a probable but unproven father for him, a Swiss immigrant to Ohio. The email regarding this family contained no information, but was tantalizing. The writer said that he had been studying the family for 20 years and would be glad to swap data. So I sent him what I knew, and we will see what happens next.

Today I will be cleaning and shopping and cooking. I also plan to loll about. I would like to say that I will be sewing, but I think that might interfere with the cleaning and cooking to a greater extent than lolling about. Knitting, though, that will fit in. And napping.That's the plan.

I made good progress on the publishing project yesterday, and then got to scrubbing. I am reading a book called Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life, by Margaret Kim Peterson, which is about spirituality and housekeeping. I haven't gotten very far into it, just far enough to read about how we undervalue housekeeping and how Christ was all about food, shelter, and clothing (check out Matthew 25) and God's creation has a lot of housekeeping to it (Psalm 104). 

Then Peterson went into the history of housekeeping. When she got up to modern times, she said, "housework is these days the subject of a great deal of fantasy."

 Huh? But as I read on, I realized that it was true. I had just read, in Wintersmith, about someone who thought you could be a witch just by buying things, and Peterson went on to demonstrate just how much of modern housekeeping is about buying things. Not necessarily about using them much -- last I heard, American women spent an average of four hours per week on housework, and men of course do even less -- but we really like the pretty laundry basket and the lavender-scented eau de linge.

In the typical American household nowadays, "every adult works full time for pay outside the home and no one bears explicit, dedicated responsibility -- even part time -- for tasks inside the home. The result ...is homes so chaotic and unstructured that all the adults in the household would rather be at work than at home."

And many working women are imagining that at some point in their lives, possibly with the very next purchase of Martha Stewart Living or a new cleaning product, they will be wafted into a magical domesticity in which they can pick apples from their imaginary orchards and make them into pies in their immaculate yet homey kitchens while wearing Eddie Bauer gear and being admired by their friends and family. 

Just check out the advertising -- I bring you a couple of images that popped right up on my computer, and you will notice many more once you start seeing them.  This particular line of products sounds charming, and costs enough to pay for a maid service, and the chances are that there are plenty of customers with a couple hundred dollars worth of these lovely bottles in their homes, who are still not spending more than four hours a week on housework. They are perfect for  fantasy housekeeping.

I really had never thought about that before.

I thought about it yesterday while cleaning house. I, and many of you, too, I know, do take responsibility for domestic work, even if I would like to share it out more evenly in my household. But I did clean, and I chivvied my boys into doing their chores at least halfheartedly, and I made dinner for the family.

I am out of the house three to four nights a week, so I do not always make dinner. Sometimes I leave it in the crockpot, and sometimes another family member does it, but people do get two or three hot meals a day around here. #1 daughter told me yesterday that she's a bit sad that she won't be able to cook any more now that she's working, and I bit my tongue.

Here's a close-up of those pastries.

They are very easy. You buy some frozen puff paste. Chop half a cup of almonds and mix them with a tablespoon of sugar. Spread this on the pastry and press it in well.

Now cut the pastry into squares and bake the squares at 400 degrees for ten minutes or so. At this point, you can split them and fill them with things. Strawberries and cream, in this case, but I think I will do something chocolate for my Sunday show.

The spinach lasagna and carrots and berries may not exactly counteract the cream.

Since I am doing the week's two shows on the weekend, I was home last night after dinner, too. And I knitted a little bit.

That's it. A few inches of Ivy. The darker knitting is the Doctor's Bag. I left it so long that I cannot now remember what row I am on, and will have to figure that out before I can continue with it.

I have my work schedule figured out pretty well, I have all my classes and choirs and stuff under control, and I am getting to the gym and keeping up reasonably well with the housekeeping, but I am way behind on my needlework.

My husband is working lots of overtime, a circumstance which we hope will lead to our being able to take my poor car to a mechanic.

Really, normal life is just around the corner.

And there was enough puff pastry left in the package to make this nice little apple jalousie for breakfast.

I will be up at the store today, after doing a few hours of computer work, and then I have shows tomorrow and Sunday. More housework will be required. Also grocery shopping, cooking, and possibly gardening.

Normal stuff.