Corner View: Staple Foods

For many Floridians, boiled peanuts are a staple food. They are sold from stands like this one, or just from the backs of pick-up trucks along the highway. Even though we have been here about 6 years, I am not really a Floridian and do not like boiled peanuts. I think it must be an acquired taste. The kids at the school where I work, act like I'm nuts when I pass up their offers to share the boiled peanuts they have in their lunches.



Along the coast, shrimp are a big industry.



DH has made this wonderful shrimp dish several times recently, because it's too hot to cook and this requires no cooking. He places the pre-cooked shrimp in a bowl with homemade salsa and lets it sit in the refrigerator for a while to marinate. Then, just before serving, he adds diced avocado.



For my son, the staple of his diet is popcorn with butter and nutritional yeast,



and when my oldest daughter is here, we can never have enough oranges.



We also live only a short walk from the University of Florida orange grove.


I hope you are all hungry, because there are many more participants for this movable feast listed at Spain Daily

7 things about me

Sunday, Jane from Spain Daily posted a list of seven things about herself and tagged any of her readers willing to do the same, so I figured I'd give it a go.


1. As a child I was enrolled in a lot of extracurricular activities. For nine years, I was in a class that combined ballet, tap, and tumbling all into one hour. I was also in majorettes, violin, swimming class, cooking class, 4-H, and girl scouts.

2. When we were 19, a friend and I drove an orange Volkswagen Beetle, with no heat and a big hole in the passenger side floorboard from Elgin, IL. to Madison, WI. in January. We stole a real estate sign to cover the hole and used my student I.D. card to scrape the frost off the inside of the windshield. When we stopped in Whitewater to get hot chocolate at the McDonalds, there were a bunch of the college students from there, wearing shorts, hawaiian shirts, and leis.

3. I met my ex-husband in a Western Civilization class at Elgin Community College. He sat in the seat directly in front of me and our first communication was when he passed me a note that said, "Celibacy is not hereditary."
Afterwards, he told me that I just looked like the kind of girl who would take it as the joke it was meant to be, instead of getting offended.


4. When my daughters were little, we lived in an old Southern Bell Utility van and did migrant work, well mostly my husband did the migrant work. I have picked apples and raked blueberries, but I'm not very good at either. I would do childcare for blueberry rakers and sell them coffee and breakfast. I think my tree planting career lasted 2 days. I don't have the upper body strength for it when I'm in peek health, but I had just driven all night and the hard labor made me very sick.



5. I started dying my hair about 10 years ago, when I returned to college, because I was afraid of looking like the oldest student in my classes ( I think I had plucked three gray hairs at the time).



6. I was working at the University bookstore's warehouse, while attending horticulture classes at the University of Missouri, when I met DH. I was asked to train him on his first day of work at the warehouse.



7. I moved out of Columbia, Missouri a couples days sooner than I planned, because someone had begun entering my house when I wasn't home. The first time, a box I had left empty, was packed when I got home from work, so I thought it was my daughters helping me to get ready to move (they were living with their dad a couple blocks away, but would come over to help me with housework sometimes), but it wasn't them. The only things missing from the house were some antique silver dollars that I had in my jewelry box (none of the jewelry was gone). The next day, when I left for work, I hung a sign on the back door window, explaining that those coins had been gifts when I was born and asking for them back. That evening, the coins were sitting on top of the cooler outside my back door. The really creepy thing, though, was the day I came home and all the clocks and light bulbs were gone. That was the day the police suggested that my son and I not sleep in the house. I already had the car packed to leave for Kansas City before they even told me that.

Unplugged Challenge: Tiny

The theme of this week's Unplugged Challenge on Unplug Your Kids is "tiny", so Blaze and I made things for his bendy dolls. He built a log cabin out of his set of Lincoln Logs and I made a picnic set out of wooden dowels and wooden balls.







The cups are made from a 5/8 of an inch oak dowel, cut into 3/4 of an inch sections and then drilled part way through . The cup handles are made by drilling a hole in the center of the dowel and then cutting off slices. I then sanded off one side until it was the proper shape and glued the handle onto the cup with strong glue.



The submarine sandwich is made from the same oak dowel, cut length-wise. The sandwich filling is round and triangular shapes cut out of wool felt. Then it was all glued together.

Tabouli

The perfect cool food for those days when you feel like you're melting.




Tabouli


2 Cups bulghur wheat

3 Cups boiling water

3 teaspoons salt

1/2 Cup lemon juice

1/2 Cup olive oil

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 bunch of fresh parsley, chopped

1 small onion, finely chopped

1 large green bell pepper, chopped

4-5 roma tomatoes, chopped

1 small can of sliced black olives, drained


In a large mixing bowl, combine bulghur and salt. Add boiling water and stir. Cover the bowl and let it stand for 20 minutes.
Next, add the lemon juice, olive oil, and garlic. Mix, recover, and refrigerate for 2-3 hours. Add the rest of the vegetables just before serving.

Abraham Lincoln

We haven't been doing as much Summer Homeschooling as I had planned, but we've been sort of informally continuing our American History lessons. This past week, we started learning about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War by reading the following books:









This is a great year for learning about Lincoln, since it has been 200 years since he was born and there have been new websites and books made to celebrate his bicentennial.



If you would like to make a diorama of a scene from Lincoln's life, the state of Illinois offers free print-outs for paper models of buildings that were significant to Lincoln's life, as well as other historic Illinois buildings.

Illinois Historic Building Models

For Middle School and High School aged children, there is this on-line activity about the difficult choices that Lincoln had to make

Abraham Lincoln's Crossroads






"Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? "
- Abraham Lincoln

Lazy River

Yesterday, we had a relaxing time floating down the Ichetucknee River.











It was very nice to just lay back and watch the world go by,



although, this filming came to an abrupt stop when my tube suddenly hit a fallen tree that I hadn't seen because I was floating backwards:



We all had a great time and now DH says he wants to take us tubing again sometime, at the place where he used to go as a child.

Corner View: Music

For music in my corner of the world, let me take you to St. Augustine. The "Old City" attracts all kinds of colorful street musicians and live music in the park.

There are guitar playing folk singers:



A one-man-band:



A giant leprechaun, singing old Irish songs:



and one weekend there was this guy:


We arrived too late to see him dance, but he was happy to strike a pose the second he saw my camera pointed at him.

Soon after I snapped the picture above, a Reggae band started playing in the bandstand and this old lady came up on the stage in front of the band and started dancing. I don't think I'll ever have that kind of nerve, but I hope I still have that much energy when I am her age.




Even closer to home, I have purchased a homeschool curriculum for this coming school year, that recommends a kinderlyre (child's harp) as the musical instrument that second graders should learn to play.
We haven't tried to learn how to play it properly yet, but Blaze has been playing with it since it arrived last week.



Dance your way around the world with these other Corner View participants:

jane, ladybug-zen, ian, bonnie, esti, sophie, cele, modsquad, caitlin, joyce, ani, couturecoucou, kim, a day that is dessert, natsumi, epe, kaylovesvintage, trinsch, c.t.,jeannette, outi, schanett, ritva, dongdong, francesca, state of bliss, jennifer, dana, denise, cabrizette, bohemia girl, ruth, dianna, isabelle, amber, a girl in the yellow shoes, mister e, janis, kari, jgy, jenna, skymring, elizabeth, audrey, allison, lise, cate, mon, victoria, crescent moon, erin, otli, amy, ida, caroline, lisa, dorte, kimmie, la lune dans le ciel, nicola, malo, vanessa, britta, virgina, april, rebecca b, kyndale, sunnymama, karen, kristina, angelina, sophie, dorit,goldensunfamily,Janet, mcgillicutty, desiree,travelingmama, daan, myrtille, cris

Another Little Bird Leaves the Nest

Nika left Saturday morning. I was the only one who went with her to the airport and I cried as she walked away into the airport security line. I seem to always cry at airports.
I hear she has moved into her new apartment and likes it.

Archaeology Field School at Kingsley Plantation is Over for Another Year

This year's field school was mostly girls and mostly very young, so it had more of that summer camp feeling. To show what I mean, here are a couple videos from the final week:

Group sing-a-longs:



and wheelbarrow races:




and, of course, at the end of any camp, there has to be a closing ceremony:





There was not the neat closure they had hoped for, though. Just as they were thinking about covering up all the holes for another year, they uncovered something in the center of the sugar mill. They had been trying to find the sugar mill's gudgeon for weeks now (A gudgeon is a circular fitting, often made of metal, which is affixed to a surface. It allows for the pivoting of another fixture. It is generally used with a pintle, which is a pin which pivots in the hole in the gudgeon. As such, a gudgeon is a simple bearing. -Wikipedia), but what they found was a pig, a full skeleton of a neatly buried juvenile pig, which they have now named Gudgeon.






*Note to Waldorf parents and teachers: That little Waldorf Toy Store dust pan and broom set works very well for archeology work. The little wisk broom became a favorite with the professor.


Saturday, was clean-up day. This was some of the left over food, it doesn't include what was in the refrigerators:





Some of the canned food doesn't expire until after next year's field school, so those things went back on the pantry shelves, but a lot of the food needed to be used sooner and we brought home so much that we won't have to buy any food for a while. I just don't know where we'll put all of it.










Mmm Song

Mmm I'd like to linger
Mmm a little longer
Mmm a little longer here with you.
Mmm it's such a perfect night
Mmm it doesn't seem quite right
Mmm that it will be our last with you.
Mmm and come September
Mmm I will remember
Mmm our camping days and friendships true.
Mmm and as the years go by
Mmm I'll think of you and sigh
Mmm this was goodnight and not goodbye.

- 4-H camp song from Camp Shawanasee

Happy Father's Day and First Day of Summer

Here is a link to the only Father's Day song I know, Groucho Marx singing the Father's Day Song:

Father's Day

and now that you have the tune down, here are the lyrics, so you can sing along:

Today, father, is father's day,
And we're giving you a tie.
It's not much we know,
It's just our way of showing you
We think you are a regular guy.
You say that it was nice of us to bother.
But it really was a pleasure to fuss,
For according to our mother,
You're our father,
And that's good enough for us.
Yes, that's good enough for us.




It a sizzling Summer Solstice here, with temperatures predicted to be right around 100 degrees F., but I still went out to wander around the student gardens and brought you all back these flowers ( for myself, I brought back sunburned sholders).









Even a banana blossom:

Summery Shell Candles

Since Sunday is both the first day of summer and Father's Day, Blaze and I wanted to make something that looked summery to decorate the table. What we came up with, is shell candles.

We chose six of the larger ones from our shell collect. So that they would sit up straight and not fall over, we made walnut sized balls of white air-drying clay.



Then we pressed the shells into the clay, so they had a good base.







Next, we split bamboo skewers in half, and using one of the halves for each shell, tied short pieces of candle wick to the center of each skewer piece and set it over the mouth of the shell.



I melted beeswax in a double boiler and poured some in each shell.







After letting the shells cool for about two hours, Blaze cut the wicks, right next to the skewer, and the candles were done.



( I finally got all the sea shells out of the trunk of my car)