Eve, Persephone, and Thanksgiving

Today my usual pomegranate-seeder is on her way to Valparaiso for Thanksgiving so I got this messy but beautiful task myself. (Valparaiso, that's fun to say!)  I have always loved seeing the beautiful arils when you open the plain fruit, they sparkle like cut jewels hidden away inside. 

I have a theory that the pomegranate is the fruit offered to Eve in the garden. I would have taken it, myself. That would also explain how the Persephone story got its start. 

Why do we have pomegranate at Thanksgiving? We cut a pineapple in quarters and then chunk each quarter and replace the pieces in the shell, and set three of them out on a platter. Then we sprinkle with pomegranate seeds. I did this one year because I thought it would be pretty, and my brother announced, "Look, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria... and some of the pilgrims have been swept overboard." And thus a tradition was born.

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I will give you the treasures of darkness and the hoards in secret places, that you may know that it is I, the LORD, the God of Israel, who call you by your name. ~ Isaiah 45:3

Please Do Not Mention My Housekeeping Skills

Look at this, would ya? I went to check through my random extra spices if I have bulk whole cloves or if they need to go on my shopping list for making orange pomanders. I didn't find any but instead found this bottle of yellow food color, with the lid so so corroded:

So. Not sure what you are thinking but my thoughts ran pretty much like this: Look at how corrosive yellow is. What does that mean about hope? I decided to scratch corrosive for something more positive. What do you think about transformative? I like that one. Hope is transformative. It cannot even be bottled up (think of Pandora, ye random thinkers) but escapes the bottle. I like that.

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apologies for the excessively rambly nature of this entry. Mr Music is reading through Histories of Herodotus and believe me, I stuck to the point by comparison. 

One Moment, Please

Anyone else have a washing machine like this? My washing machine has a countdown timer. Only it is totally erratic... it will rest on 2 minutes for about half an hour... sometimes... and sometimes for only a few seconds from 2 minutes till zero... 

It just may be payback for all the times I tell my dear children, "Just a minute." :P 

Whittington

I want to post book reviews of things as I finish reading them. This one is out of order but it is short and the book is at hand. I picked up a copy of Whittington by Alan Armstrong at one of those "fill a bag for a dollar" sales at our library. Big risk there, huh? It made it into the bag because the cover picture looked, um, interesting.

My copy doesn't have the Newbery seal on it and at first I wasn't sure if it was for adults or children.

It is interesting, though not as I expected. It is a heavy-handed didactic barnyard Charlotte's Web with 16th century lore woven through (the more interesting part to me) and a strong moral lesson on the value of hard work and Learning to Read. 

My favorite parts were a quote near the end which I read aloud at lunch to Devastatingly Handsome and Mr Music, where, IMNEHO, an editor might have been useful: "He went to the side of the ship and untied the blue silk he wore around his neck. He wiped his face and tossed it overboard as a token for the cat." (Mr Music guffawed.) You will be stunned to learn, only a few pages later, that apparently his face was still intact, as we read that the beautiful Mary "touched his face gently, tracing his scar."

The other thing I liked was the listing of sources cited in the endnotes. I appreciate the author's thoroughness in listing everything from 1605 plays (the perfect date to encounter here on November 5th :) ) to The Blue Fairy Book to Robinson Crusoe and Herodotus.

My Parents and Tomato Sandwiches

Looks like today will be the last day of summery weather for us. I celebrated by making a tomato sandwich for lunch the way my Dad liked them -- American cheese, thick slice of fresh tomato, mayonnaise, and some garlic salt -- and even having a buttermilk with it like he did, only I skipped adding pepper to the buttermilk. 

That has got to be one of the best sandwiches ever and quite possibly the only good use for American cheese. All the flavors get nice and gooey together without even heating it up. I remember a couple years when we had lots of tomatoes coming and my Dad would buy those huge blocks of sliced American and we would have cheese and tomato sandwiches many happy lunches in a row.

And my Mum and tomato sandwiches?

Well, she taught us to love silly little line drawings called Droodles. They always have an unexpected caption on them and it's great fun to make them up and try to guess the caption, or see if you can improve on the artist's label. My Mum taught me this one, which has been a favorite of mine since grade school:

Got it? "Tomato sandwich as made by an amateur tomato sandwich maker."

But my Dad was no amateur. :) 

Poor Hello Kitty

My lovely mouthless but still apple-pie-loving friend has hit the news. Devastatingly Handsome woke me up with the news that it has been reported that Hello Kitty is not a cat at all. 

Talk about shocking news. A real crisis to test your worldview. I turned to the computer to see if it could be true and found that like most news, there are several sides to the story. The latest information according to Sanrio says that she is actually "a personification of a cat." Not sure what that means, it sounds a bit like she is a dream, as if she appears in the thought bubble above a cat's head. Or maybe a little girl's. I think I can live with that. 

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By the way, the smartest Hello Kitty in the world lives in our schoolroom: 

Fungi Day

Today Devastatingly Handsome, Miss Dog Lover, Miss Dog, and I took a walk through our woods and carried along a picnic for our lunch. It was a beautiful day, cool for July but pleasant. It rained for maybe three minutes, tops, perfectly timed, while we were eating lunch in the shelter. 

It turned out to be what I declared fungi day. 

Here is a picture of my "fun guy" along with the girls: 

And here are some of the other fungi we saw... a pretty red toadstool of some sort... I am pretty sure there were fairies nearby...

there were lots and lots of Indian pipes... is it still pc to call them that? I may have to go back and see if I can get a decent photo... 

pretty sure some sort of (very small) alien came out of this ship cleverly disguised as a puffball...

and these fellows really were purple... if I can find them again I will turn off the flash and see if it shows that way...

"And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, on the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed according to their own kinds, and trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day." ~ Genesis 1:11-13