Photography: Kentucky.

Last month my family and I went on a roadtrip to Kentucky to visit old friends and see if my parents would like to retire there.  (Results: one doesn't, the other seems undecided.)  Anyway, I took the opportunity of a hike around the campground wherein we stayed to practice a bit of photography - I've been really neglecting this hobby lately, and it was a gorgeous place.  I think the photos came out rather nice, all things considered, so I decided to share them.  Also I haven't posted anything in a while and I'm drawing a blank, so this is to fill it. 

I know that these first two are a bit over-edited, but I can't help it.  I like things to look "atmospheric," for lack of a better term, and because I'm not artistic enough, this is the way I get the atmosphere right.  Deal with it.

I'm pretty sure this is a cornflower.  It's hard to tell from the photo, but they are just the loveliest blue...

These are my boots.  I'm quite fond of them.  Awkward angle, I know, but I couldn't stop long enough to set up a good picture.

About the above picture: there were various water pumps stationed throughout our walk, so of course they must be tested.  As my siblings' wet clothes testified, the pumps worked.  My baby sister shown is obsessed with water, and was gleefully squealing "wa-wa!" the whole time.  (She also thinks that fire is wa-wa, but I've explained that it is something very different.  I'm not sure she listened.)

Truth be told, I'm obsessed with water too.

Isn't it beautiful? It's like a watercolor painting, the lake is so still.  Yet there was a lovely little breeze blowing as we walked.

I am in love with the light in this picture.

Yes, that is my hair.  Don't ask.  (Okay, I was proud of the focus.  It's not easy to focus correctly while holding a camera behind your head with no mirror.)

Though I don't fancy living there, Kentucky is a gorgeous state and I'm glad I got to visit it.  Seeing new places is always exciting.

O For a Muse of Fire

I've spent most of today so far in fire-related activities.  Chopping wood, coaxing flames, piling on sticks, groaning about how my back and hands hurt... fireplaces are a lot of work, as some of you may know. 

This morning we woke up freezing cold and rather miserable (Virginia having finally realized that it's January, not October), so my mom and I decided to make a fire ourselves.  Usually it's my dad's job, but since he was at work it was up to us.  We had it nicely built up, but then we ran out of wood.  At first we sent out the little 'uns to gather sticks, but then they brought in a huge log....and I had a bright idea.  I would chop it.  My dad has a little hatchet which I've always wanted to try out, and now I got my chance.  (I'm certain there''s a bigger one somewhere in the garage, but I'm scared of the garage - too many spiders - so I didn't hunt too far.  So I grabbed my brother Joe and went out chopping. 

Chopping wood is glorious fun.  You get to whack an inanimate object with a sharp tool.  What's not to love?  I think I shall keep a supply of sticks to chop when I get angry from now on.  Really.  I think it would be quite beneficial.

So, to give this post a reason for existing, I shall explain some basics of stick-gathering and fire-making to you poor city slickers.  (You have no idea how hypocritical it is for me to say that.  I am by no means a country girl.) 

So, stick-gathering.  The sticks should be dry, but not rotted.  If they're rotten, they'll burn up like twigs, which is okay for a quick blaze, but isn't really worth it.  The lighter they are, the drier they are.  The drier they are, the better (and quicker) they'll burn.  Obviously the bigger they are, the longer they'll burn.  I don't know much about types of wood...I know some burn better than others, but I have no idea which.

Once you've got the sticks, you can make the fire. (By-the-by, unless you have a strong man, a saw, and big tree limbs, I recommend that you buy logs from a grocery store or something to supplement your sticks.)  If you have a huge fireplace or are making a bonfire, the best method is to lay your logs in a square shape with sticks and kindling (pinecones work well) in between.  If you've only got a regular fireplace, you can lay the logs in a triangle or x-shape.  I've been laying my sticks vertically against a log in the back and stuffing the middle with twigs, but it's not working terribly well.

So yeah, that's what I've learned about fires.  They're great fun, even though it's a ridiculous amount of work.

If you've got anything to add to my fire-making-knowledge, tell me in the comments.  And if I've got anything wrong, pleasepleaseplease tell me.  And if you made it to the end of my chattering...congratulations.

via google images

Picking Peaches

Remember my post on apple-picking?  Well, about a month ago, on the coolest day we could find, my family and I drove down long country roads and through lookalikes of the Great Dismal Swamp to a lovely farm which had pick-your-own peaches.  We picked forty-three pounds of the the things, but even so I managed to take lots of pictures.  They came out rather well, too.  (This post is getting up so late because it took me until now to edit everything.)

From the parking lot, we had to walk about half a mile down to the orchard.  Some intelligent people drove down, but we walked.  It was just as well, because I wouldn't have been able to take photos from the car, and I'm not sure our giant of a fifteen-passenger van would have made it down there anyway. 

There was a lovely little pond with a bridge across it, so I got to practice landscape photography.

There was a lot of Queen Anne's Lace growing by that pond.  I love Queen Anne's Lace (or yarrow, as some call it), so I couldn't resist taking pictures of it. 

Now you know what it looks like. Yarrow has medicinal properties, but I can't remember what they are anymore.

 

 

 

This is the super-edited version of the first photo.  I would love fabric with this print...

I kinda sorta really like this one, even though it's a bit blurry.  It looks so fairy-ish.

Then we reached the actual orchard:

These are nectarines.  Just thought you might be wondering why they're red...

Despite asking me and my mom if every peach they picked was "good," my siblings did pretty well.  All the buckets were at least halfway filled.  (Hence the forty-three pounds.) 

 

 

Some of them had to be lifted.

I really like this sepia-toned photo.  Sepia makes everything better, doesn't it? :)

 I thought it was fun.  Orchard peaches and nectarines taste so much better than the grocery-store variety, I promise you.  Really, everything tastes better when it's not from a grocery store.

 

And yes, I am left-handed.

After we paid, we all sat out on the picnic benches and tried our lovely (and hard-earned) fruit.  I think it was worth carrying an over-ten-pound bucket (plus a sibling's smaller one) half a mile in the noon heat.  I do have a picture of us all sitting around stuffing our faces with peaches, but I'm thinking my mom would kill me if her picture was up here.  She'd say she looked fat, which is, by the way, nonsense.  My mom weighs ten pounds more than I do, and I am not fat.  Anyway, one of my brothers looks like a creep in that picture, and I wouldn't want you get nightmares.  Seriously.  He looks like the Grim Reaper or something. 

When we got home, we cut up and froze about two-thirds of the peaches.  Now my mom won't let us eat any until winter, which I protest is not fair, but she doesn't seem to care.  (I hate it when my sentences unintentionally rhyme...the rhymes are always so dumb. Ergh.)

Speaking of my mom, she did a peach-picking post (ha! Alliteration! Oh my gosh, I am such a poetry geek...) as well.  Voila: http://mrsrabbitsmusings.blogspot.com/2012/07/picking-peaches.html

Cause you know, I'm a lot like my dad.

I had to do a Father's Day-ish post, because my dad actually reads my blog.  Sometimes.  Once in a while. 

He doesn't like to be talked about "in public" so that's exactly what I'll do.   I'm just like him, so I know how his brain works.  Yes I do. *evil cackle*.  My dad's a choleric-melancholic, which basically makes him a drill sergeant with a shy streak.  Nothing makes him happier than to have something done right - so at work he does everything for the incompetent people who are supposed to do it.  He's smart as anything and he discovered Einstein's theory of relativity in grade school, just to find out it had already been discovered.  At least, that's what he says.  I know he's smart, but if he's really that smart, it's scary.  He explains stuff to me all the time and makes me read books on philosophy and logic and theology and all kinds of complicated things.  I skim through them and then pretend to know what I'm talking about.  Sometimes we have deep discussions (in which I get mad and then get disproved into an embarrassed silence) late into the night. Those are fun cause I get to be completely and unabashedly nerdy, even if I am disproved into oblivion.  But you see, I got my know-it-all attitude from him, too.  I always say he gave me the worst traits, but in reality I like being like him, except for the hair and the temper.  Could have done without those. Oh, and I could have done without the love of internet surfing, too - though that can't be genetic because there was no internet when he was born in the far-off days of hippies and crazy hair and seriously freaky music videos that I still have to see because he has a sentimental attachment to what my mom calls "the music of his youth".  I have a different name for it, but we won't say it.

ANYWAY, so my dad's kind of amazing and I love him.  The end.

Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

I haven't got much time today, but I couldn't let the day pass without mentioning one of my favorite holydays.  It's my favorite partially because of the obvious reason that the feast celebrates Our Lord's infinite love for us and it's a beautiful thing to think about, and partially because I have fond memories of the quiet way we used to celebrate it when we were stationed in Germany.  It was always perfect walking weather there this time of year, so we'd walk down to the little town near our house and buy a big bunch of red roses from the florist's little shop to place in front of our image of the Sacred Heart.  Then my mom would tell the little ones a bit about the feast and how it was established, and we'd say the Litany of the Sacred Heart after the nightly rosary.  Simple but beautiful - and isn't that the best way?

You can read about devotions to the Sacred Heart here, and an extremely long but insanely good article about it here.

Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!

Victoria Has A Real Life? Shocking!

Well my dears, as you may or may not have noticed, I have not set pen to paper fingers to keyboard for nearly two long weeks.  The cause of this dreadful neglect, though, is - for once - quite legitimate.  The cause I speak of has ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes, a good deal of hair and a cute little nose.  And no, I did not mean to go rhyming there.  I would never make such silly rhymes.  NOT AT ALL.

In short, ladies and gentlemen, my mother gave birth to a beautiful baby girl last Sunday, which of course made an end to whatever vestiges of order ever existed in this family, thus making it near impossible for any blogging to be done.  Also, my slow noggin has finally accepted the fact that normal beings will be finished school in two weeks, while I....won't.  So I really must get down to business and defeat the Huns make some progress in my work.  I have no desire to graduate a year late, thank you.

I may attempt to post sometime this coming week, but I really don't know if I shall be able to, so no promises, no precious.   The source of happiness and light which is my beloved blog (KIDDING, PEOPLE) shall probably remain silent for some time yet.  So yeah.  Be back in a bit.  *waves awkwardly*

Mothers' Day + Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

Firstly, today is the anniversary of Our Lady's first appearance at Fatima.  Everyone should know the basics of this story, so I shan't repeat it.  Just thought I would remind you all. :)  Happy Mother's day, my dear mother in heaven!

So it is of course Mother's Day.  All my blogging companions write beautiful posts to their mother on this day... I am not even going to try to measure up to their standard.  (My mom doesn't read my blog very often anyway.)  Suffice it to say, happy Mother's Day to my dear mommy, I hope you liked your chocolate, and I am aware of how very much you do for me and all of us.  Thank you. I love you so much.

And a very happy Mother's Day to all the mothers in the blogosphere, just in case any of you happen by this post!  May our heavenly Mother bless you all - I know you need it! 

Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra

Today, December 6th, is the long-awaited Feast of St. Nicholas.  The children all rushed downstairs this morning and found their shoes full of chocolate coins and surrounded by gifts - Playmobil Advent Calendars for the boys, a Playmobil fairy for Cecilia, a truck for the baby, and books for the elder children (including me!).  Elisabeth and I also got embroidery kits...mine is to embroider a pillow, and it's mostly ribbon embroidery, which I've never done before.

Anyway.  I'm supposed to be talking about St. Nicholas, not myself and my family.  He's rather well-known, so I don't think I need to give the whole story.  Suffice it to say that Nicholas was bishop of the city of Myra in Asia Minor in the third century A.D.  As with most saints, his feast is the anniversary of his death - St. Nicholas died today some 1,970-something years ago.

In case you're thinking that it's rather morbid to celebrate the day of someone's death, let me remind you that for the saints, it was definitely a joyous time!  Their deaths were just the beginning, and the Church has us celebrate them because the days on which they died were days when pure, unspotted souls rose straight to heaven.  If that's not something to celebrate, I don't know what is.

For more on St. Nicholas, here's a great article from Fisheaters on him.  They tell it better than I can, but for those of you who are too lazy to go clicking links (yes, I know you're out there!),  I'll quote the most famous tale here.  (This is from the 16th century book The Golden Legend):

And it was so that one, his neighbour, had then three daughters, virgins, and he was a nobleman: but for the poverty of them together, they were constrained, and in very purpose to abandon them to the sin of lechery, so that by the gain and winning of their infamy they might be sustained. And when the holy man Nicholas knew hereof he had great horror of this villainy, and threw by night secretly into the house of the man a mass of gold wrapped in a cloth. And when the man arose in the morning, he found this mass of gold, and rendered to God therefor great thankings, and therewith he married his oldest daughter.

And a little while after this holy servant of God threw in another mass of gold, which the man found, and thanked God, and purposed to wake, for to know him that so had aided him in his poverty. And after a few days Nicholas doubled the mass of gold, and cast it into the house of this man. He awoke by the sound of the gold, and followed Nicholas, which fled from him, and he said to him: Sir, flee not away so but that I may see and know thee.

Then he ran after him more hastily, and knew that it was Nicholas; and anon he kneeled down, and would have kissed his feet, but the holy man would not, but required him not to tell nor discover this thing as long as he lived.

I guess the man broke his promise and told, after all, because if he didn't, we wouldn't have this story. 

Well, happy feast of St. Nicholas, my dear readers!

Tutorial: St. Nicholas Shoes

 

In my family, the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6th) is an important part of Advent.  On December 5, Black Peter, St. Nicholas' helper, sneaks into the house and distributes packages of cookies and such in random places for the children to find.  Then, the next day everyone wakes up and rushes downstairs to find the books and candy and small trinkets left by St. Nicholas in their little felt shoes.  I shall now proceed to enlighten my dear readers on the manner of constructing these shoes.

Unfortunately I don't have the pattern to give you....it's quite simple, though, and since my mom originally got it off the internet somewhere, I'm sure you could find it if you searched.

So, first you draw the sole shape onto your first piece of felt.  If you have sharp scissors to cut it with, I recommend that you fold your felt in half, thereby cutting two soles at once

The cut soles:

Now cut the uppers.  I pinned the pattern to the felt for this part.

Yes, the pieces are sitting on top of my laptop. :p

Here I just put the felt pieces together so you can see how they go, though I think it's pretty self-explanatory:

Now comes the harder part: sewing them together.  In the past we've tried to glue them, but it's pretty difficult to get it to stick correctly, so this time we sewed them.  It took a while, seeing as only my mom and sister and I can sew, and there were seven pairs of shoes.

Here's a closeup showing how I sewed the back and the bottoms.  If you can't tell what's going on in the picture, the black part that looks like it's just empty space is actually the sole, and the stitches are holding it to the upper.  I used some sort of whipstitch/basting method.

All hail my epic hand-sewing skills!

The shoe all sewn together:

And, for your entertainment, a picture of my dad's glasses (his extra pair)  which I was wearing during the process.  My mom said I looked like a diligent Puritan-ish girl, bending over my sewing with my hair pulled into a severe bun and my dorky glasses perched on the edge of my nose.  And she put a (rather unflattering) picture of me wearing them on her blog.  Love ya, Mom.

Ahem.  As I was saying....

At this point, your shoes are basically finished.  If you're feeling simplistic (read: lazy), you can technically leave them like this.  But decorations are the spice of life, so go ahead and decorate!  Glitter glue is the medium of choice in my family, but you could also use those little plastic gems, or, if you really want your shoes to look just knockout lovely, you could embroider them.  Just make sure that you have enough time to finish before the feast day, if you choose that route.

I used glitter glue, and I'm actually fairly happy with the way my shoes came out.

Happy crafting!

On Power Outages

This is a bit late, but I figured I'd write it anyway.

When hurricane Irene hit the East Coast, we were directly in it's path.  We had no high winds and very little flooding, but our power was out for a day and a half.

I loved it.

There's something about having no electrical power.  It's amazingly freeing!  We couldn't use the computer, the phone, the microwave, the stove, the lights....everything had to be done the old-fashioned way.  (Thank God, our water didn't go out.  That would not have been fun, because seven children use a lot of water.)

Me being me, I had to have something modern, so I took a bunch of random pictures.

My little siblings painted most of the day.  The table was covered  in paint sets and soggy papers.

I took pictures of the bouquet my dad had given my mom a few days before...

...but then I got bored and took pictures of the rug.

It stopped raining around lunchtime, so my mom, my sister Elisabeth and I ventured outside to see if there was any damage.  There was one downed tree, but otherwise everything was okay.

Left - right:  the downed tree, a large puddle, and a tree branch practically suspended in mid-air.  My mom got a kick outta that one! :)

When dusk fell, we went for a walk.  We wanted to save our candles, in case we needed them for a long time.  Everything was very peaceful, and the only lights were the solar lanterns that some families had in their yard.  You could see the candles moving from room to room inside of the houses.
As we came back, the stars came out.  The streetlights weren't there to block them out, so they twinkled down strong and bright.   (I did try to take a picture, but my camera refuses to capture stars.)

When we went inside, we shone flashlights in each other's faces until the candles were lit.

We lit these before we decided to take a walk.  That's why it's light outside.

I love candles.  I always have!  When I was a little girl, I went to Williamsburg with my parents and my uncle.  He told me that he'd buy me anything I wanted.

I got candles.   I came home with an armful of them, and I had them for years.

Anyway.  We made some lame attempts at storytelling before my mom rescued us by reading a real story.  My brother shone a flashlight for her, because the youngest, Louis, kept trying to grab the candle.

Finally, we went to bed.  Now, this is going to sound weird...but brushing your teeth by candlelight is super awesome.  Seriously!  It was so much fun.

My sister freaked out because it was "so dark!" and had to sleep on my bedroom floor, but I was in such a good mood from the candlelight that I didn't mind.

The next day, the power came back on around noon.  (Of course it would have to wait until after I had cooked lunch on the grill...)  Pretty much everybody was disappointed.  I guess a lot of it could have just been in my head, but it seemed like all the peace vanished instantly when the power came back.

That was the longest I've ever gone without power, and I think it taught me a lot.  It taught me that electricity is not all that important (as long as you have water), and that we rely on it too heavily.  It taught me that life is more fun when you have to rely a bit on yourself and nature.  On the practical side, this particular outage showed us what we done right and what we were lacking in terms of emergency preparedness.  (Some of the things we learned were that we should stock up on batteries, buy more dehydrated meals instead of just basic foods, and, most importantly, that propane stoves should be operated outdoors.)

If we have another outage now, we won't freak out.  And I shall light many candles and enjoy their lovely glow.