Perhaps I’m a bit jaded after the experience of paying closer attention.  I did not particularly like John McCain as a candidate.  Contrary to what his ditzy daughter keeps saying on every talk show she can get on, “moderate, sort-of Republican on… um… most issues” is not really inspiring.  Let’s face it; most conservatives and/or Republicans (the groups do not entirely overlap) were more inspired by Sarah Palin, and the volunteering rates and donations showed it.

In short, the primary process is a bit short on principles.  It’s very long on guessing what the hypothetical swing voter will go for.  “Well, Candidate X is nice, conservative, and photogenic, but he isn’t electable.“  It’s great for torpedoing candidates without having to really explain why, I suppose, but it really guts the process of any principles it may have had.  Candidates aiming for the electable middle ground don’t have to think too hard on principles, just say something vaguely pro-Constitution, add some “this country is great” stuff, and sway with the pubic opinion polls.

It looks like Mitt Romney is going to win the Republican nomination.  Why?  “Oh, he’s electable,” the pundits gush.  Apparently, “electable” means “passed a failing state-run mandatory health care program, but he’s got great hair.”  Oh, yeah, and during the debate, Romney said he’d just write presidential orders to stop Obamacare.  And Romneycare is ok, because the state is forcing people to buy health care, not the federal government.

Problem 1: Any pro-lifer can tell you presidential orders are fairly useless, as they are trumped by actual law.  We learned that painfully in the health care bill passage, when the pro-life Democrats defected because, “Oh, Obama wrote a presidential order, so this bill won’t fund abortions!”  How’s that presidential order thing working out for you?  It took a while, but the Catholic bishops’ conference just recently woke up to the fact that abortion is going to be shoved down their throats by the law, promised conscience protections be damned.  Hate to say we told you so, but…

Problem 2: We’re trying to get rid of an over-reaching president with a loose grasp of “checks and balances”, why do we want another one?  When Virginia elected a Republican governor the last time around, one of the big issues first on his plate was the re-regulation of abortion clinics as ambulatory surgery centers, not just doctors’ offices.  Some people argued that the governor should just sign an executive order right away.  Governor McDonnell insisted that no, this needs to be done the right way, through the General Assembly.  Otherwise, the next governor could just overturn the regulations again.  He was right, the regulations were passed, and the abortion clinics are scrambling, because many of them don’t meet the requirements.  If our problem is overreaching government that pushes things through against public or legislative objection, then I don’t want someone abusing the system for causes I believe in, either.

Problem 3: I don’t want any level of government telling me what I have to buy.  From where I sit, it’s about the same level of interference if the federal government tells me I’m required to buy health care or if the state government tells me.

So, Romney may win, but I can’t say I’m thrilled.  He wins on the politics, but fails on the principles.

Personally, from the beginning, I was rooting for Rick Santorum.  Yes, he played politics some as a senator, but so did everyone else (including Ron Paul, so don’t write to tell me he’s pristine!).  Yes, he worked for lobbyists and made money (do we have a problem with making money?  did he do something unethical?).  More importantly, Santorum understands and clearly explains principles.  Welfare isn’t problematic because of cost, but because its structure does a poor job of encouraging people to take back responsibility for their own lives.  Health care reform isn’t problematic because we’re all snotty rich types who pay for our own, but because government does a poor job at micromanaging, and it shouldn’t be doing it.  And, more than anyone else running, Santorum believes in encouraging and supporting the family and the unborn.

Former senator Rick Santorum at the annual March for Life in DC, 2011.

Santorum also walks an important line: where should government end?  Ron Paul would tell you the federal government should shrink to nearly nothing.  Other candidates would shrink some areas but grow many others.  Big government with a Republican flavor just becomes big government with a Democratic flavor when the winds shift.  Shrinking government for the purpose of shrinking ignores the question entirely.  The real question is, “How big is just big enough?”   Our Constitution laid boundaries for the federal government, many of which have been extended to curb the states’ powers as well.  At the same time, however, precedent has been used over and over to extend government’s reach, often on the excuse of “regulating interstate commerce.”

Santorum espouses more of a “we need to right-size government,” which is a much sounder principle to argue on.  I would also point out that it is a very Catholic principle.  Catholic social teaching is rooted in the idea of subsidiarity, that the lowest possible level should handle problems.  The national government should not interfere in what the states can handle, the states shouldn’t step on the cities and counties unless necessary, and, if the family can handle it, no government should interfere.  Much of our problems with government stem from the accretions of unwarranted interferences from more distant levels into more local decisions.  In so many departments, money flows from the states to the federal government, just to have some skimmed off by the DC bureaucracies, then handed back out to the states with strings attached.  At the same time, some things are so foundational, like equal rights for all races and the right to life, that they have to be federally enforced.  (Ron Paul is pro-life, but says the states should decide if people in the womb are yet people.  That’s better than a pro-abortion federal government, but not much.  I seem to remember we had a bit of a problem with some states declaring that certain people were not, in fact, people, based on the color of the skin.  “In this state, you’re a person, but in that state, you’re just property.”  Are we really ok with that?)

Obviously not.

But, we are now home, after nearly two weeks in China.  Very generous friends and family (most of whom seem to still be on speaking terms with us) watched our kids, our dog, and our house.  Someday soon, we even hope the newest addition will start sleeping through the night and in his own bed.

DH looked at me today on the way to the photo studio and said, “Hey, do you realize the minivan is full now?”  Yep; if we go again, we’re going to need a bigger van, I said.  He gave me a still jetlagged blink that said something to the effect of, “You aren’t honestly thinking about that yet?!”  We’ll see.

He’s kinda insanely adorable, so we’ll have to forgive him the turbo-poops and throwing up on Daddy on the plane (and at several restaurants, and in the middle of the night…).  He’s also talking, sort of; mostly he seems to babble, but he does yell, “WO!” a lot, which means “I” or the first half of “mine” (“wo de”), which makes some sense.  He’s chubby, his hair never lays down, and he’s a *bit* spoiled (Diva hates to hear him cry, so she’s been carrying him almost everywhere, which he loves).

And it’s really hard to catch him still enough to get a non-blurry photo!

I suppose I can officially update the “cast” page now…

Kathryn Lopez at Townhall wrote about Chai’s testimony on the One Child policy in Congress and in her book.  It is heartbreaking:

That she was a victim of the one-child policy didn’t dawn on her until a 2009 [Congressional] hearing… In that hearing, a woman named Wujian talked about her forced abortion under the one-child policy. …

“I was not prepared for her testimony,” Chai writes in her book. “I felt the pain and helplessness of Tiananmen when the tanks moved in on us. I felt the pain and helplessness of that horrible afternoon on the operating table when they performed the abortion on me without anesthesia.” She felt a “deep-rooted sadness” for a baby she would abort while married, after leaving China, having been so accustomed to it as a routine option. …

Chai Ling did not even fully realize what she was protesting in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the pain of tyranny having oppressed her — body, mind, and soul — in such deep and abiding ways, as her book makes clear. As she said on Capitol Hill this September: “We are here to report and mourn the loss of 400-plus million lives taken” under China’s one-child policy. “But I never realized until I was writing my memoir that three of those babies are mine.”

Abortion is dehumanizing — and not just to the unborn child whose life it ends. It’s degrading to the entire family, to society and civilization as a whole.

Sadly, the comments on the online article bear out that assertion.  While many wrote of their support for political action against China’s policies, one person wrote that the article was an “odd take” on the situation, since the only problem the poster saw was that Chai wasn’t free in her ”reproductive choices.”  Because, as long as you “freely” chose it, murder is ok?  (and she thought she was choosing this freely, at least her third abortion, so how free is free before it’s really free?)

Yet another person who didn’t read to the bottom before posting a comment, since the end of the article discusses the tendency of women to excuse those who pressured them into an abortion or failed to support them when they needed help.

Chai Ling’s book is A Heart for Freedom.  I will try to get to reading it soon.

But probably not on the plane to China.  I had a hard enough time biting my tongue last time in Tiananmen Square and in front of the guide (“Oh, Chinese don’t care much about abortion,” he dismissively told our adoption group.  Really?  Like the people who lynched the family planning officials last month, I wanted to say.  They seemed to care…).

It has been a tremendously weird week…

1.  We had an earthquake.  Yes, for those of you native to California, it wasn’t a “real” earthquake, just a 5.8.  It was interesting enough to those of us who’ve never felt one before.  I yelled at the kids for shaking the car, before I realized that, for once, they really were telling the truth and it wasn’t them.  Then I thought the brakes were going or something!

2.  I didn’t figure out it was an earthquake until my husband called.  The kids totally geeked out on the fact that they’d experienced an earthquake… and then wanted to know how we could have one when we don’t live on a plate edge.  (The North American tectonic plate edge is a ways out to sea.)  A few too many episodes of “How the Earth was Made”, and you, too, could have nine-year-old science geeks like this!

3.  And then I started actually looking at the news about the earthquake and noticed in other headlines that, hey, there’s a 400-mile-across hurricane headed for me.  Oh, joy.  We are at what passes for a “high” point in SE Virginia, so I’m not too worried about flooding (at least not in the house, because our house was built with the tallest crawl space in the neighborhood) (and, yes, my elevation above sea level, in spite of living miles and miles inland, is so small that a four-foot-high crawl space is a major advantage).  The winds, on the other hand…

4.  In the middle of all this, I got into yet another argument with yet another family member about Christmas gifts.  A particularly difficult to deal with family member, too.  Anyone have any tips for gently explaining to people, “The toys appropriate for a generic girl three years younger than my oldest or a generic boy three years older than my son just doesn’t say, ‘I care,’ it says, ‘I couldn’t care less,’ and following that with a lecture about how I should teach my kids to be more thankful (they’ve shown remarkable maturity, actually) for your poorly-chosen gifts doesn’t improve our relationship, could you please just follow the list”?  I think Christmas gift-giving headaches should count as a natural disaster.  Especially when they start in August.

5.  But back to Hurricane Irene.  Have you ever hurricane-proofed a yard?  It isn’t fun.  Every time you think you’re done, you realize something else can’t stay out, either.  Tall statues have to be tipped over so they aren’t blown over, anything that could get airborne (including lawn chairs, kayaks, and deck furniture) has to be secured or moved inside, and anything that could be smashed by flying debris (a dozen different garden decorations) has to find a home in the garage.  Ugh… the garage.  The garage is a two car garage, but only barely; there is no extra room for a workbench, bikes, the lawnmower, the trash cans, etc.  Since we have all those things, our garage does not fit two cars.  But now it has to (reference the “flying debris” comment.  Lots of things will fly when the wind is going 80 mph, and it will not be pretty when said items smash into DH’s Mustang).  Let me tell you, those bike pulley systems are wonderful at times like this.

6.  Have you seen the website Stormpulse?  It’s addictive.  It’s downright mesmerizing if you have a hurricane coming at you.  Being a homeschooler, I’ve shown it to the kids multiple times, since it has satelite imagery of the land and clouds, under-sea geography and depths, and integrated radar and hurricane predictions.  You can clearly see the green of the Nile valley, the Tibetan plateau, and, most pertinently, the verdant swath of Africa just south of the Sahara that generates giant thunderstorms that roll off across the Atlantic to pick up energy and moisture to develop into hurricanes.  For something so horribly destructive, hurricanes are really fascinating.

7.  Preparing for the hurricane is exciting; I get to be organized, I get to show off how much I can take care of so DH doesn’t have to worry about it, we got hurricane books from the library, the yard is mostly picked up for the fall because everything had to go in, I have water and sandwich fixings and new batteries for the 5 million watt portable work lamp, etc.  Living with the hurricane is a lot less fun, particularly since this one doesn’t look like it’ll peter out into nearly nothing like so many have over the last seven years or so. (I’m trying not to wonder if my new roof will still be attached to my house in 48 hours or so.)  Diva has been warned that hurricanes are noisy, frustrating, and mind-numbing… and so she can’t be, or else she’ll be given a book and banished to her room for the duration.  Please pray that the damage is minimal, both to our home and our sanity!

And go visit Jen at Conversion Diary… she’s likely to still have power in two days.

The Saints Are Normal; What Are We?

(originally posted Aug 2008)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is in the news again, declaring that she has never been denied Communion because of her pro-abortion views and voting record.  She assured readers, however, that she’s “in agreement with Catholics” on other issues, so I guess that makes the legal dismemberment of babies in the womb ok.  Besides, it varies by region whether or not the bishop pushes the issue, she commented, again implying that, in California at least, abortion isn’t a moral problem. (article at http://lifenews.com/nat4098.html )

Indeed.

In discussing the issue of denying Communion to Catholic politicians who promoted legalized abortion, the USCCB (U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops) has issued a number of, well, waffling and unclear statements.  In 2004, with John Kerry on everyone’s minds, the bishops condemned abortion in the strongest language, but then hid behind, “Well, maybe pro-abortion politicians don’t know it’s wrong.  The bishop has to talk to the particular politician and have a dialogue on the subject.  You can’t judge any given bishop’s response to the situation.”

Funny, since Cardinal Arinze, head of the Congregation for Divine Worship, laughed at Raymond Arroyo during an interview on EWTN when asked whether communion should be denied to pro-abortion politicians.  I forget the exact wording, but the reply was along the lines of, “Yes, of course they should be denied.  Is this even a question?  You do not need a cardinal from the Vatican to tell you this!”  Apparently, we do, but is anyone listening?

(Read more…)

But you’ve got to go read Kimberlie.

In a dual-Navy household, the comparison of the proverbial “spending like a drunken sailor” and the situation with our federal debt was inevitable.  Lately, however, we have had to caveat it with the follow-on comment, “and that’s an insult to drunken sailors.”

The problem is, as any former division officer or chief could tell you, that the inebriated and overspending sailor often comes with a wife and kids.  If he’s young, single, and lives on the ship even in homeport, you can just laugh at him for not having a dime left to spend in the next liberty port.  If he has a family, however, now you have to find out just how badly he wrecked the budget and how long this has been going on.  We all heard the cautionary horror stories about spouses living without electricity or a working car because their sailor spent the money on beer and fun overseas, while the Navy made sure his lights and food kept coming.

Unfortunately for us, Congress is the drunken sailor, and we’re the spouse left dealing with the consequences.

We have a copy of Schoolhouse Rock that we bought for the kids around the last election.  My kids think “Tyrannosaurus Debt” is pretty funny.  I thought it was pretty funny that the song commented on the debt having “already reached five trillion dollars, and it could go higher!”  Yes, Schoolhouse Rock is decades old, but the debt has more than doubled.  If you count all the promises we’ve made for pensions and entitlements, the federal debt is actually much, much worse.

Many states aren’t much better off.  Although some states are required to live within their budget (apparently not including California), they get around that by not funding their pension funds.  So, they get to pay lower salaries to police and teachers today for the promise of a really nice, fat pension later… except that the politicians then spend the money on other things they want and leave the next guy in office to figure out how to pay for the pensions (or, more often, how to pass the bill down again without paying on it).

The saddest part of this is that it has rubbed off on the average American.  Our savings habits would be atrocious, if they weren’t nearly non-existent.  AARP, I have been informed, advises people to spend all their money before retirement; that way, the federal government has to give you a bigger Social Security check because you’re penniless.  (Oh, yeah, I want the federal government in control of my retirement!  Not.)  Dave Ramsey will inform you that surveys show that more people under thirty believe in UFO’s than believe they’ll ever get a penny from Social Security.  It’s a Ponzi scheme, and everyone’s known it for decades, but most people want to believe that they’ll get “their” money and their grandchildren won’t get ripped off.

Unfortunately, wanting to believe that the grandchildren will get social security, too, so you can go ahead and soak the system for all you can get doesn’t make it so.  Eventually, the states will have to face the fact that they drove themselves into debt by promising pensions they weren’t saving for, even if the accountants said that technically it isn’t a debt until it’s due.  And the federal debt has been something we should have dealt with decades ago.

Instead, we kept on spending, hoping that the economy would expand or something would happen that would just make the problem go away.

Guess what?  It didn’t.

Last week, I read an article about some major Chinese official dressing down the U.S. for getting its credit rating downgraded.  Understandably, the Chinese are a bit worried about losing the money they’ve loaned us.  The official lectured the U.S. that it could no longer borrow and spend its way out of the problems it had created for itself.  (Given China’s egregious human rights abuses, I hate to say this, but we could really use someone with that attitude in charge of our fiscal policy!)

Underneath that, the article quoted several other countries’ finance ministers’ comments on the situation.  Great Britain’s finance minister weighed in by condescendingly noting that the U.S. stupidly brought the downgrade on itself by not raising the debt ceiling more promptly.

Really?  That’s sort of like our initial drunken sailor blaming his wife for dragging her heels and insisting he get his spending somewhat in check before she agrees to call the credit card company to get the credit limit raised.  She’s trying not to be an enabler to his spending addiction, especially since it is adversely impacting her ability to feed herself and the kids.

Her insistence that the spending has to be decreased, not just increased more slowly, is not the problem.  The problem is the spending addiction.

Given what currently passes for the ”more restrained” political discourse the president has demanded, I assume at this point the sailor would loudly denounce his wife as a “hobbit” and a “terrorist” for trying to interfere with his spending habits, which are obviously so necessary to bailing out every bar owner from Marseille to Bahrain, and then get his buddies together to complain about how stupid she was for not understanding modern economics and accounting practices.  (Although I hope the sailor, unlike the president, would also be willing to apply the word “terrorist” to the real terrorists, too.)

As a nation, as states, and as families, we have often chosen to have our fun now and let our kids or grandkids pay for it by failing to save for the future bills which we know will come.  At some point, we have to put our foot down and declare, “IT STOPS HERE.  The disaster was handed to me, but I will not pass it on to the next generation.”

I just finished Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover.  As he says in the introduction, there isn’t any financial advice you couldn’t get from the Bible or your grandma, but the old common sense isn’t very common any more.  On the one hand, it was dangerous reading, because I kept looking at the case studies and saying, “Wow!  We are nowhere near as in debt as that guy!”  On the other hand, though, it was inspiring to think of being totally debt-free, not having to look at the bills for the fun the month after the fact but having the money to pay up front.  To have enough saved to pay cash for cars.  No mortgage.  Wow… that’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

Maybe we should require every member of Congress to read the Constitution and Total Money Makeover over the summer and winter breaks every year.  They seem to have nearly completely forgotten the principles they’d find there.

• an unblogable, frustrating, long-running family problem
• an unblogable, frustrating, gone-then-back-again child problem
• football season (i.e. dinner at 8:30, I see my husband maybe half an hour a night, and I have to mow the lawn on top of everything else)
• the beginning of the homeschooling year, which has yet to hit anything I could even somewhat euphemistically call “orderly”; things get done, but not with much gracefulness
• checking Rumor Queen about fifty times a day to see if anybody else got any adoption paperwork in and re-re-checking the charts to see where we are in the waiting process compared to everyone else  (DH ultimately banned me from checking more than once a day)

Oh, yeah, and I’m still killing trees for the purposes of an adoption from China.  They don’t warn you at the beginning that ink and paper will become major budget issues for the adoption.

“Congratulations!  Your LOA came!  Now please do the following three checklists of paperwork…”

Now that the official you’re-really-matched-this-time paperwork came (the previous “match” was only a preapproval), I can start obsessing over what there is to do and see in China.  And bemoaning the fact that the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou had the horrible timing to shut down for renovations in September.  How am I supposed to survive this stressful two weeks of adjustment to our new son without the White Swan’s awesome (and dumpling-laden) breakfast buffet to look forward to?!?!

Having the LOA in hand means one definite thing: another step with a wide variation in completion rates is removed from the equation.  So, we now know, within a range of a few weeks (instead of a few months), when we’ll be travelling.  No, I’m not saying when.  (Have I mentioned that DH is a bit of a privacy freak and that there’s been entirely too many stories out about people who put info online about their vacation and got robbed because someone figured out where they lived and that they wouldn’t be home for another week?)

I cleaned my craft area (thanks to a lovely new cabinet that Mary was trying to get rid of on Craig’s List (“You’re asking $80?”  “Do you think that’s too much?”  “No, I think I’m going to buy it…”).  I pulled out all the 24 month boy clothes.  I’m trying (without much success) to finish make progress on my SIL’s Christmas present before I can’t sew for a few months.  I’m trying to keep up with the figs and tomatoes in the garden (the dehydrator is running almost constantly, and if it isn’t, it’s because I didn’t clean tomatoes, not because there aren’t any that need to be in there).

And I’ve hardly read another blog all summer.  (sorry, y’all)

I’m trying to keep this blog going.  We’ll see; maybe I need to shift direction.  Or length.  Or something.  Or just put to rest the nagging, “Yeah, you tried to change someone’s mind, and they obviously only skimmed and misread what you wrote and dismissed you as ‘not understanding the situation,’ and then freaking testified to Congress that Chinese adoptions should be shut down, so why bother?”

Summary: adoption is going well.  Some other things, not so well, including the computer situation, so I can’t access my precious two post-cleft-lip-repair photos right now.

A number of the talks I attended at the homeschooling conference were on the subject (or study) of G.K. Chesterton.  In one talk, a particular idea (among the dozens of wonderful quotes offered) caught my attention (so much so that I failed to write it down, apparently) and sort of stuck in my head:

We have been taught to want abnormal or extraordinary things, and, so, have forgotten how to want normal things.

Think about that for a second.

What do kids dream of?  Being famous: football star, music star, movie star, whatever.  Never mind that someone is probably more likely to be struck by lightening than to be the next Brett Favre or Angelina Jolie.  The old (and attainable) dreams of fireman or teacher are largely forgotten by most children.  (Diva first wanted to be a nun, now she declares that she’s going to be a mommy.  Don’t know how I managed to make it seem like an enviable job, but I’m thankful.)

To be honest, what do we dream of?  ….

Read the rest here.

Last Sunday, several people at church commented to the kids about summer being “half over”… which it isn’t for us, since we homeschool.  In fact, it’s all over.

You know how they tell you that the population of the South didn’t really start to increase significantly until the invention of the air conditioner?  They aren’t kidding.  There are reasons for this, and August is the main one.  So, instead of listening to a month of, “But I don’t want to go outside!  *whine*  It’s too hot!” we start school at the beginning of August.  This has the lovely secondary effect of us being done with school by the beginning of May, when the weather is frequently lovely and the garden needs a ton of work.

All that being said, I offer (in homage to teachers past who seemed to love the old standby): What I did on my summer vacation, by the Political Housewyf

1.  I made an awning.  Three 2x2x8 treated pine poles, pipe strapping (DH insisted I shouldn’t screw the poles directly into the dock walls), six large screw eyes, six D-rings, a package of huge grommets, some PVC pipe and the stand from the failed patio umbrella (to hold up the fourth corner, where I couldn’t install a pole), and yards and yards of fabric (on sale!).  The D-rings stay in the grommets and hook quickly into the screw eyes.  It takes about two minutes to walk down to the dock and put it up.

And this view is part of why I haven’t gotten a whole lot of blogging done lately…

2.  I read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.  The cover has a panda with a smoking gun running away.  (If you don’t get it, you need this book!)  I loved it and discovered that some of my odd punctuation practices would be considered proper in British punctuation but not American.  Thanks to my high school English teachers (who were better at imparting grammar than enthusiasm for Shakespeare), none of the grammar rules was new to me, but the book is very funny.

Sticklers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but you’re your misplaced apostrophe’s apostrophes’ apostrophes!  (Contrary to what some of you may think after reading my blog, I do know grammar rules… I just choose to break them upon occasion.  And I shall continue to do so. )

3.  I killed a whole lot of trees doing adoption paperwork.  Our dossier finally went to China in June, got assigned the all-important log-in date (LID) quickly, and… now we wait again.  We hope to see our LOA from China before the end of August, which then triggers- get this- even more paperwork.  But at least we got some updated photos.  (No, no photo here.  Yes, everyone else does, but “everyone else” usually has a adoption-specific website that doesn’t get into criticizing certain governmental policies.)

The good news is that I have rediscovered the joys of the Rumor Queen’s website, populated by number crunching waiting parents who, like me, want more info than the adoption agencies are usually willing to commit to.  (The agency says, “Well, it could be four to six months…” and the number crunching waiting dad says, “The average for the year, over two hundred familes, has been 74 days.”)

4.  I made sushi.  No, no raw fish (which is technically sashimi, a subset of sushi).  A trendy little sushi place in Richmond (I don’t think we’re cool enough or left-leaning enough for it, honestly) had a special one time we were in there on our way back from running adoption paperwork in DC.  They called it Kong’s Lunchbox, and it had tempura-fried banana, peanut butter, and grape jelly in a sushi roll.  The kids adored it, which is why what was supposed to be a photo of happy kids eating sushi has no sushi slices in it.

Ah, there it is, along with some tempura-fried figs and pickled ginger.  Good stuff.  (My DH informed me that the tempura-fried okra was not acceptable.  I suspect it’s because the tempura doesn’t coat heavily enough to disguise the vegetable.)  (Tempura-fried green beans are really good, too.  Start with fresh, raw ones.)

5.  I grew rice, although, really, it’s very low-maintenance, so I can’t claim much credit.  It started out tiny and pathetic.  Recently, though, I told Empress to stand behind it to show off how tall it is… except that you can’t really see her in the photo, the rice is so tall!  So, I took another shot with her in front of it.  The rice seems to take up a ton of water; I’m not keeping it full of water constantly, because of mosquitoes (I let the top of the soil dry just a bit in between floodings), but it does get watered every few days in this heat, especially since it is in a windy location (it makes the nicest swishing sound in the breeze), which could be causing it to lose water faster.  Just this morning, I found a fat, bulging part that is about to erupt into the seed head!  Woo hoo!

6.  I spent way too much at my friend Jen’s favorite local yarn store in DC, Yarn Cloud.  Yarn stores are usually nice, but this one is gorgeous!  Well-lit, easy to navigate, and the yarn is well-arranged.  What do I mean by well-arranged yarn?  Some was stacked neatly on shelves, but lots of it was hung on peg board display hooks, which encourages you to touch the yarn… which is how my bill got so big.  Once you start petting the yarn, all kinds of wonderful projects come to mind, and oh, that linen blend feels interesting and…  (If you’re on a strict budget, DON’T PET THE YARN!)  The priority right now, however, is to get the baby’s blanket on the loom: a single-ply silk blend weft on a plied silk blend warp, both in a gorgeous, deep shade of red.  Yes, photos will be forthcoming whenever I get going.

7.  I pulled my SIL’s Christmas present out again.  It’s an embroidered map of Middle Earth.  I spent more than an hour tying knots to make Mirkwood last night, and it’s nowhere near done.  (As I told her, “The forests are taking hours each, and that’s just the small ones on the fringe of the map that don’t figure in the stories.  I’m not sure I like you this much…”)  I had been avoiding it, because I couldn’t figure out how to do mountains.  I think I figured out a decent solution, but you’ll have to wait for a photo; it’s just too unfinished right now!

As always, I’ve been a bit wordy for “quick takes”, but there it is!  Go check out Jen at Conversion Diary for a weekly dose of 7 Quick Takes from her and dozens of other bloggers.