Melissa Wiley's Blog, page 169

I Know, I Know…

…all my photos look the same.

Same salvia, same bees, same blur.

Can't be helped. I am powerless to resist those blues, those greens, those coppery wings, this pointed face buried in blossom.

You understand, don't you?

(You're just lucky I'm not into spiders.)

Martha & Charlotte Books in Studeo Giveaway

Love2LearnMom, who is one of my dear online-first-then-real-life friends, is celebrating five years of blogging at Studeo with a giant giveaway. Among the gifts she is offering in a drawing for commenters are three copies of my books: one of The Far Side of the Loch and two of Across the Puddingstone Dam. How nice is that? Hurry on over and throw your name in the ring for those or other nifty prizes, including a copy of a book that made me cry like a baby not too long ago.

Happy Anniversary...

Whew

Hands tired after an intense Twitter debate about unschooling misconceptions today. So instead of a post, a hasty recap of the day:

—Dawned gray, cold, rainy. Scott picked a playlist of songs about rain, but then the sun peeked out just as Karen Carpenter's spirits began to sink. It was like that all day. Sun, rain, sun, rain.

—Set bread to rise. A basic white loaf, today. Made darn good paninis later.

—Some bookish time with the girls, while baby napped and littles played. Some days this works ...

Snippets

I have had this post sitting open on my screen all week. What kind of week is it when you can't even get a snippets post written?

And yet it's not that we've been so terribly busy. Just regular busy.

It's rainy here and that throws me off in every way. I'm not complaining, mind you—we need the rain. It's San Diego; we always need the rain.

Out there in the wet backyard, the salvia has erupted into bloom. And suddenly the sunflowers are fencetop-high and fat-budded. The cilantro went and...

"Due to any of the following"

Last Monday we drove ninety miles east to the Desert View Tower. I'd been meaning to take the kids there for months. Amazing view and irresistible climbing-rocks, that's what everyone says about the place.

We'll have to take their word for it.

Jane and I thought the sign alone—"blight or famine"?—made the trip worthwhile, but some members of the back seat brigade opined otherwise.

We all loved seeing the wind farm, though.

A ballet of giants: breathtaking.

The desert was spread with a threadbare q...

I've Got Sunshine

…on a cloudy day.

Interesting Indeed

At the Study Hacks blog, a post about a girl who won a major scholarship to UVA despite an application that was not fat with extracurriculars—

Want to Get into Harvard? Spend More Time Staring at the Clouds: Rethinking the Role of Extracurricular Activities in College Admissions

In other words, to become more interesting…

Do fewer structured activities.Spend more time exploring, thinking, and exposing yourself to potentially interesting things.If something catches your attention, use the...

Tax Day Reading

J.K. Rowling on paying taxes:

…the first time I ever met my recently retired accountant, he put it to me point-blank: would I organise my money around my life, or my life around my money? If the latter, it was time to relocate to Ireland, Monaco, or possibly Belize.

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain's; to be citizens,...

But Whatever Happened to Penny Knocknutter?

That little baby is four years old today. I went to my archives to hunt up an appropriately melty photo (how'd I do?), and I found this post that made me laugh—because it is such a perfect snapshot of then, when I was wrapping my head around having five kids eleven-and-under, and because it pretty accurately depicts our now, too. I mean, sure, now there's a teenager at one end and a fifteen-month-old force of destruction at the other, and sure, we're living clear on the other side of the...

Mid-April Garden Notes

It has been troubling me in a quiet way that I've not seen many bees in the garden this spring: an occasional lone native bee, one carpenter bee, and that's it. But just now I checked my archives and I see I was worried about the same thing in late April last year. The carpenter bee appeared in early May, and it wasn't until mid-May that the honeybees began to dominate my posts and pictures.

Whew, then.

I did have sunflowers blooming last April, but the birds had planted those in February...