Author Archives: witchyrichy

Book Store Tourism

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I went to a conference in Baltimore earlier this week and managed to find an hour to visit a used bookstore.  I believe it is a moral duty of all bibliophiles to support home grown store.  There’s usually at least one within walking distance of my hotel, and Baltimore was no exception.  The Book Escape was housed in two buildings which were connected by a walkway through a lovely little brick courtyard.

The thought of all that shelf space at home emboldened me, along with the very reasonable prices, and I bought ten books!  You can see the list at LibraryThing. I am sorry I didn’t get a picture but the weather was dreary, and I struggled with my bags and umbrella through an early spring downpour.

I decided to start with McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom.  It is, after all, the beginning of the 150th anniversary of the war. Here’s Ken Burns’ version:

The Civil War

Update From Bottle Tree Farm(s)

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We’re still deciding on the “s”…some of it may depend on the availability of domain names.

It is a beautiful Sunday morning at the farm and I was checking in on my online classes so, since I’m tethered, I thought I’d do a quick farm update.  This weekend was all about the chickens.  We had four in our pen in Williamsburg.  They had an automatic door so it was easy for them to get in and out, and since they live on the compost pile, food wasn’t a problem.  The SmokehouseUnfortunately, they had also discovered how to escape and when we went home last week, I discovered three of them roosting outside of the pen.  (Chickens are really good at getting out but not so good about getting back in.) It was time to bring them to the farm.

We’re using part of the old smokehouse, which took me several days of work to clean out.  The pen was easier, and now they are happily scratching away and clucking contentedly.  Chickens evidently deal with change pretty easily as I’ve even found three eggs in the past 24 hours.

Bob is making trips back and forth to the convenience center; there was lots of plain old junk and trash in the smokehouse. But there were a few treasures as well: bee smokers, two file cabinets filled with interesting stuff, a metal table, buckets, several tool boxes, and lots of other interesting bits.   We donated the two lawn chairs to the chickens for roosting, along with two crutches.  (The former owner was a doctor.)  The center section is next and it is similarly filled, as is the dairy barn.  The secret is to just hack away a bit at a time without thinking too much about the big picture.

I am especially excited about the library.  I spent some quality time in there on a cold, rainy day last week, getting organized by figuring out where various collections would go: education, history,  and nature are my three big groups along with lots of fiction, of course.  I have the next group of boxes ready to go inside and unpacking should go much more quickly.  After years of having books everywhere, including the linen closet, I find myself just standing in the room looking at the spines and imagining all the hours of reading ahead of me.  The same rule goes there as with the farm: a bit at a time.

I did take a day away from revisionist history to read The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.  It was refreshingly good with its insights into history, religion and politics.  It makes connections between the past and present in ways that would make people like James Loewen (Lies My Teachers Told Me) happy.  I did find the story a bit thin in some places with a reliance on coincidences that were a bit too coincidental.

Now, it’s back into history with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. It is a bit depressing really, especially when you consider that the attitudes and ideas he discusses are still very much part of our lives even now as reflected in all the budget conversations and deliberations that are going on.  I’ll leave you with this story from Weekend Edition about the school funding fight in New Jersey.

Real People, Real History, Real World

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I finished Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James Loewen. I read the first edition, published in 1995.  I was particularly taken with his description of the more recent past and how poorly books address it: that “recent past” in 1995 was my own childhood: Vietnam, the energy crisis, and environmental degradation.  No wonder my generation tends to be a bit more cynical than say my Boomer friends who grew up with Howdy Doody and “I like Ike!” No textbook, no matter how rosy its outlook, can put a positive spin on Nixon or, for that matter, Love Canal.

There’s an update and I took a glance at the comments in Amazon.  Mostly, Loewen gets accused of his own left wing, anti-American, anti-white-male bias, a charge he anticipates and even tries to address in the book.  For instance, after revealing the people behind the caricatures of Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller, he suggests that seeing them as real people means that we provide authentic role models to students who might help them as  they face their own decisions and the potential consequences: “For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures.  Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody-goody, not merely good” (p. 27).  What Loewen argues for throughout the book is simply a more realistic viewpoint.  We don’t need to go from America the perfect to America the horrible; instead, we need to learn a realistic view of our nation that, like many others, struggled in sometimes incredibly hypocritical ways to define and practice its values, a struggle that continues today and in which every citizen can play a role.

I do wish he would reconsider the title: the book is really about textbooks, not teachers, who while they do have some control over how they teach, often have no control over what they teach. But Lies My Textbook Told Me just isn’t a snappy a title, is it?  This is another one of those complex issues that gets simplified by being laid at the door of the teachers.

Reading Review

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Despite the busy-ness of March, I have been reading and listening to books.  I enjoyed another Flavia de Luce mystery, A Red Herring Without Mustard, read by Jayne Entwhistle.  Fluff but the chemistry and culture keep me coming back.  As for reading, I made it through Outlander although I’ll admit to skimming the last 75 pages or so and am wondering about reading the next one in the series, of which I have all of them on the shelf.  I was put off by the sadistic violence and found the main character to be more annoying than inspiring.  Plus it was just too long.  My other fictional foray wasn’t much better:  I wallowed in Pat Conroy’s gorgeous, thick prose in South of Broad but found the story to be somewhat cliche with a little sexual perversion thrown in to spice things up.

Fortunately, my history reading has been a bit more riveting: I loved Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis, finding it fascinating after the John Adams biography, and finally picked up Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington by Daniel Mark Epstein.  I loved the way Epstein merged politics and poetry and described both men with sympathetic affection.

Now, it’s Loewen and textbooks with Zinn seeming to be the next logical choice.  I may stick with nonfiction for awhile although I’ve got Ken Follett and Jonathan Franzen in the basket by my chair in the library just waiting for the house to get warm.  Aaah…so much to read, so little time!  But for now, I’ll hit post as we are heading to the ferry.  Happy reading!

Of Textbooks and Serendipitous Reading

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Tim’s thoughtful Assorted Stuff blog post about textbooks coincided with my reading of Blood: Stories of Life and Death from the Civil War, an anthology of mostly primary source documents. While it didn’t offer specific dates and times like a textbook would, it provided a human view of the time and, as Tim pointed out, could easily be supplemented with material available on the web to create a completely serviceable “textbook.”   I haven’t ever been a fan of textbooks–especially history–because in trying to get it all in, they inevitably have to pick and choose about both what to leave in and what to leave out, what to emphasize and what to gloss over, and, in the end, leave us with the impression that historical truth in the guise of dates and names somehow exists.  Plus, they are really just boring.  As I’ve written before, I think we can use the media to make history generally more engaging, even (horrors!) at the expense of complete accuracy.

Because, as we’re learning in my own state, textbooks themselves have no great claim to correctness.  And here’s where the serendipitous reading comes in: as I’ve been drafting this entry, I picked up a book that has been on my shelf for some time, right next to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: James W. Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me.  A quote from Zinn graces the front cover, recommending this book to every citizen, and I’m not sure what I thought it was about, but it turns out it focuses on high school American history textbooks.

I am not very far along but had to share this quote as it seems to sum up my own sense of the real problem with using textbooks to teach.  This chapter focuses on the myth of Columbus’s discovery of America, and Loewen provides a table that outlines all the possible voyages to America prior to Columbus.  They go back thousands of years and have varying levels of empirical support.  Loewen points out that they are also not mentioned in most textbooks and suggests that we could really teach students something about history if they were:

The evidence for each of these journeys offers fascinating glimpses into the societies and cultures that existed on both sides of the Atlantic and in Asia before 1492. They also reveal controversies among those who study the distant past.  If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. As they challenged students to make their own decisions as to what probably happened, they would also be introducing students to the various methods and forms of evidence–oral history, written records, cultural similarities, linguistic changes, human blood types, pottery, archaeological dating, plant migrations–that researchers use to derive knowledge about the distant past. Unfortunately, textbooks seem locked into a rhetoric of certainty. James West Davidson and Mark H. Lytle, coauthors of the textbook The United States–A History of the Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasize that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies. Davidson and Lytle’s high school textbook, however, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not questions.

The “rhetoric of certainty” is just a perfect description of the whole process of standardizing history and presenting it in a textbook.  Wish I had coined it…but Loewen did and I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book.  I love it when a book appears just when I need it.  Now, I suppose there are historians who will question Loewen’s ideas but that’s another post.

Really Going Mobile

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Another week of feeling disjointed. I left my laptop power supply in the burg so had to use husband’s windows 7 machine all week. I found it easy to use and I mostly work in the cloud anyway but it wasn’t my air.  Plus I found myself missing the comfort of my desk and office.

Being without my air did have one interesting effect: I found myself relying more on my phone. I finally figured out how to both retrieve my bluehost mail and send using the built in email client. I discovered the librarything scanner and started entering books. And the mobile learning event on Saturday gave me some great tips for reading blogs and being more productive. This afternoon, as we cleaned up walls in preparation for painting, I kept up with the VCU game.

Now, I am reluctant to turn on the laptop so am experimenting with the WordPress plugin on the Droid. I have gotten pretty good with the virtual keyboard. I also installed swype but I wasn’t completely in love with it. I may try it again but for now auto complete has been doing a great job.

I have been reading nonstop despite traveling. I did take advantage of cable in the hotel room to watch Who Do You Think You Are? Steve Buscemi was looking into his past and went first to Pennsylvania and then ended up in Fredericksburg just a few miles away from my Hampton Inn.  I have been to those battlefields and stood at the base of Marye’s Heights wondering at the courage of those farm boys and office clerks. I was also in the middle of a Civil War anthology that I finished today. Blood: Stories of Life and Death From the Civil War was a wonderful if sometimes horrifying collection of both primary documents and classic nonfiction that brought a living, breathing perspective to history and made me wonder why we used textbooks at all to teach history? I was able to quickly and easily download Sam Watkins’ memoir Co. Aytch from Project Gutenberg. There are plenty of timelines and historical websites to provide dates and names. Watkins gives us a reason to care, to want to learn more, to understand that war in a way that no history standard can dictate.

At Home

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It is a lovely day…not quite spring but not winter either.  I am sitting on the front porch of my old house listening to the train come along the tracks.  The whistle blows just at our property and I can’t get enough of it. It’s part of the soundtrack of this place and the rhythm of the clattering cars is reassuring somehow.

After a week away and then two days in Williamsburg to get caught up on laundry and life, I am back at the farm and ready to stay.  The main house has a useable kitchen and bathroom that just need a really good scrubbing.  We sleep and hang out in the cottage as it is easier to warm and have created a little living area amidst the clutter of tools and supplies.  A little shuffling between the two houses, but it works and is certainly preferable to shuffling between the burg and the farm.  I knew going into this adventure that I would not be good at living in two places as I’ve never quite been able to imagine people who have weekend homes.

I am a homebody and very much a creature of habit.  I have a morning routine.  I have an evening routine.  And, I suppose I’m showing my aspberger’s when I say that, if those routines get disrupted for more than about a week, I get cranky. It’s been ten days since I left for Pennsylvania.  I love my visits with stops at the farmer’s markets and favorite restaurants, but the already difficult reentry was more complex as I had to decide where to go–burg or farm–and ended up splitting the difference by moving between both places and back in the space of 24 hours.  Add a client with a last minute programming project and I’ve been a little shaky.

But, as my car slid onto the noon time ferry today, and I saw the newly-arrived osprey land on a piling, I felt some calm returning.  I packed to stay.  Internet access is still a little wonky, but I think I can run the webinar from here.  Mostly, I need to declare one residence rather than trying to live in two.  And for now, the house needs the work.  I’m loving puttering in my library!  I’m going to experiment with scanning bar codes this afternoon as I clean shelves and stack books.  Even cleaning the kitchen and bathroom seems downright fun as it makes so much difference in our quality of life.

The previous owner’s daughter stopped by with her husband and son and we chatted about the farm and books.  He has offered to plow the field for our garden and will do soybeans on the bulk of the farm.  Our realtor lives in the next county and has ideas for forming an informal coop. So, we seem to be settling right in.  Now, if I could just find a drive-through ATM.

I knew I would fall in love with this place, but it’s happening sooner than I thought.  There is something to do all the time, but there are also moments to savor.  I am a bit less connected as I have to tether my phone, so I am better able to monitor my email and work in general.  I find I do it in chunks and then put it away to concentrate on something else.  We haven’t brought a television so I have lots more free time from the sometimes mindless surfing I do. We listen to a lot more music and stream NPR news and that seems to be enough media for right now.

I’ve been reading nonstop and I watched most of the HBO John Adams series yesterday as I wrote code and played with databases.  There is much to report about how important it is for us to understand our current partisanship in light of our early history. I’m also going to commit a bit of heresy by suggesting that I didn’t really like Diana Galbadon.   But that’s all for another post.

Bob just headed down the driveway in his pickup, Tina Turner the beagle riding shotgun.  It is time for me to head inside and do some of my own work.

Preserving the Past While Working in the Present

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Back at the farm…took the ferry yesterday afternoon and stayed the night.  It is still cold, but the air mattress made a real difference!  I am just too old to sleep on the floor.  I spent yesterday working in the library, looking through cupboards and making piles of left behind books that I really don’t want.  The previous owner and I shared some interests–nature and history–but he was much more conservative than I am, and I don’t want to have to explain the Ann Coulter books to anyone.

Today was cleaning day.  With hot, running water available in the main house, I could finally tackle the kitchen floor and walls of the cottage where we will be camping out.  I’ve gotten at least the top coat of dirt off the floor and made real progress on the white paneled walls.  We’ll paint them eventually and replace the kitchen tile but for now, I’m just trying to make them passable for us to live.   I took a few before pictures but I’m actually a little concerned about showing people as I don’t want them to think Bob and I are completely crazy!

We had a visit from our Williamsburg neighbors who were over working with a friend who lives on this side of the river.  He owns an old farm himself and was full of great information about the farm and some of the things we’ve been wondering about, including the smokehouse.  And, he made me feel good about what we doing because he could see past all the work to the beautiful homestead we are imagining.  Despite all the dirt that needs cleaned and work that needs done, it is a special place that deserves to be preserved.  He commented, as I have, on the solid roof and foundation.  The rest is just time and elbow grease.  And he noticed my rocking chair on the porch of the cottage. The perfect place to rest at the end of the day, looking out over the barns and fields.

And, I really have been able to do my regular work from here.  The tethered phone allows me to send and receive email and in about three minutes, I’m doing a test webinar connect as well.  I’m pretty confident it will work since it was the same setup I’ve used before.  It is amazing to be able to combine work and play (if you can consider scrubbing a kitchen floor play) in this kind of way.  Being able to be connected means that work becomes more humane, something done as part of your regular life, rather than being disconnected.  And then I start thinking about school and what it could mean for how we teach our kids.  But the latter is much more complex so I’m going to leave that for another day…

First Night At Bottle Tree Farm

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How to begin…I am sitting in an Adirondack chair in the small living room of a cottage built some time in the mid 1800s.  It sits just behind a larger house built in 1854.  They are joined by a variety of other buildings in various states of disrepair and they all share about 20 acres of land in Sussex County, Virginia, just over the town line of Waverly, Virginia.  And, as of Thursday morning, my husband and I own all of it.  It is something of a surprise since our original plan for 2010 was to build a house on some property we own along a creek that we have owned for years.  But sticker shock over the price of building a new house made us hesitate.  In that moment, this property came on the market and my husband discovered it as he updated the website of his client, the realtor who was listing it.

That was some time last summer.  We spent several hot days watching workman check out almost every inch and tell us everything that was wrong with it.  None of the six chimneys are safe to use and one may have something dead in it.  (“We saw lots of flies,” said the chimney guy.” There was water and termite damage in the front rooms.  All the plumbing would have to be replaced.  The heating and cooling system didn’t work at all.

But it had a beautiful, solid metal roof and hard wood floors.  The front doors were carved wood and one of the large front rooms was all ready to become my library with built in bookshelves.  The front porch was shaded by a huge magnolia tree and the back windows looked out over rolling fields and sloping barn roofs.  It was almost love at first sight.  Despite all the problems–my father laughingly referenced the old movie The Money Pit–we just knew we needed to preserve this property and make it a working farm.

So here we are…camping in the cottage as we start the project.  We brought the Adirondack chair from home and I drug a few other chairs up from the milking parlor where they were stashed along with all sorts of other junk.  We have electricity but no running water.  After a couple hours of scrubbing, the refrigerator revealed that it was almost new and the ice froze quickly.  So there will be coffee tomorrow, my only requirement for camping.

Slow…

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Last year, I entered challenges: a picture a day, 75 books a year.   This year, I did not so, of course, the minute work got busy, I stopped reading and posting pictures.  Actually, I didn’t stop reading, just felt like I could take my time with books.  I’m most of the way through John Adams and last night went to bed early to finish The Weird Sisters.  The latter I bought on a whim because I have a bumper sticker created by a friend that says The Weird Sisters of Toad Hall, complete with umlaut over the “e” in weird.  A well written, if somewhat predictable book, with a somewhat odd second person narrator with all three sisters seeming to contribute to the story.

As for photos, I took some time to update my flickr photos from the 1998 Lewis & Clark trip and here’s a mosaic of 25 photos that should get me caught up on my daily posting:

1998 Mosaic

1. The Sargeant Floyd Monument, 2. Along Iron Mountain Road, 3. The Famous Corn Palace, 4. Lewis & Clark Keelboat Replica, 5. MVC-015F, 6. Getting Started, 7. Buffalo, 8. The Town Beacon, 9. Gauges, 10. Pronghorn, 11. On the Missouri River, 12. The Ohio River Near Wyandotte Caves, 13. Prairie Dogs, 14. Along the Road, 15. Buffalo, 16. Of Bears and Canoes, 17. Mid West Skies, 18. Along the Mississippi River, 19. DAR Monument, 20. MVC-015F, 21. Amelia Earhart Bridge, 22. The Arch, 23. Sunset Over the Missouri, 24. The Missouri State House, 25. Hannibal Lighthouse