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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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)
I don't have time to work on much of a post today. We are leaving to go to Kingsley Plantation this afternoon. It is DH's last real work day there and then tomorrow there is clean-up. Also, tomorrow we are putting Nika on an airplane. She is moving into her own apartment up in Wisconsin, but will be living close to her grandma, so grandma can check in on her from time to time.
So, this lack of time, gives me an opportunity to transfer another entry here from the blog I had last year. Last year, at this time, we were very focused on gardening:
We purchased a garden stepping stone kit that was on sale at Michael's and Blaze was able to make it with very little supervision. He chose the sun design out of several design options offered in the box.
There were still quite a few of the colored glass pieces left after this was made, so we will probably make another one when we have time.
I have a Summer Reading Recommendation for anyone over 4th grade, especially if you like Greek Mythology, the five book series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan.
The first book in the series, The lightning Thief has been very popular with the Middle School boys I work with. I've been recommending the book to children with ADHD, Dyslexia, or both, because according to this series, that is a sign you are a demigod (one mortal parent, one Greek God parent). The Dyslexia is because your brain is hardwired for ancient Greek and the ADHD will keep you alive in a battle situation.
One of the things that the middle school boys particularly like, is the fact that the story doesn't take place in ancient Greece. Percy is a modern American boy, who has been raised by a single mother in New York City. At the beginning of the story, Percy has no idea he is anything special, in fact, he has pretty low self esteem, because he struggles with reading and paying attention. He has also been kicked out of several schools.
J.R. coloring a picture of Zeus for the marque of The Lightning Thief he had to hold up during his oral book report at the end of the school year:
If you or your children really enjoy Greek Mythology and would like to color some pictures to go with your reading, here are two links to coloring pages.
I just finished reading the last book in this series, The Last Olympian, which was just released in hard cover last month, but I don't think this is the last we will hear of Percy Jackson.
This week's Corner View topic was "street fashions"
DH took us out to eat at The Cheese Cake Factory restaurant at St. Johns Town Center in Jacksonville, and I did a little people watching while we waited outside for a table to be ready for us.
Here are some examples of what people are wearing in my corner of the World:
The Fashion Show continues on the following blogs:
The students at Kingsley Plantation, uncovering more of the walls of the sugar mill's octagonal shaped cane crushing room:
The archaeology students were getting a lot of media attention this past week. First, a movie crew was at the plantation, filming them for a new PBS Ken Burns series on National Parks. Then, there was a write-up in The Georgia Times-Union newspaper on Friday about the dig at Kingsley Plantation, as well as the dig a little further North that NFU is doing.
The article gave a web address to go to for a video related to the article, so here is that link, as well:
We drove about an hour North on Saturday, to the quaint little town of St. Marys, Georgia, to see the ruins of another tabby sugar mill, built by one of the former owners of the Kingsley land.
Blaze has expressed an interest in what DH does for a living, so we read The Magic School Bus Shows and Tells and Archaeologists Dig for Clues.
We will also be reading Motel of the Mysteries, which is about future archaeologist misinterpreting what they find, when they dig up a 20th century motel.
There is only one more week of Summer Field School at Kingsley, so Blaze and I are driving out later today to spend the weekend, since it will be our last chance to spend a full weekend there.
I don't think I've shown any pictures of The Fort George Club. This is now the rangers offices and volunteer housing. It's also where they house the students during field school, but back in the 1920's this was part of a private resort.
Blaze on the porch, flirting with all the college girls. They thought he was so cute and he loved the attention.
The Fort George Club building is an interesting place. It's built using faux tabby, so it looks like it's built out of the same stuff as the slave cabins, and it has some unique architectural features. This is the most inexplicable thing in the house. This door is only about three feet tall and leads to a small attic, but the door is located on this platform about shoulder high off the ground in one of the bathrooms. The students keep the chair propped against the door, because they say the door scares them.
Finally, here is the funniest of the movies DH took at Kingsley on week 4 of field school, once again starting the professor:
The extremes a photographer will go through, to get that perfect shot.
This past week has been a good time to be learning about the weather, because we've been having quite a mixture. It's been sunny and rainy part of every day, and over the weekend we saw 3 rainbows in 3 days.
It's a little hard to see, but there is a little rainbow just at the top of the trees in this picture I took on the way home from Orlando.
Blaze and I have been making weather related projects out of 2 liter soda bottles this week.
It was a hardship, but somebody had to drink all this soda in the name of science (I had a little help from Nika). ; )
Our first project was connecting one empty bottle and one that was 2/3 full of water with a "Tornado Tube" ( a screw-on plastic connector) that we bought at the local teachers' supply store.
Blaze loved this thing! He played with it for hours, even taking it with him to the bath last night.
We tried it going clockwise and counter clockwise and both directions worked well.
Our next project was making a rain gauge out of another empty 2 liter bottle.
To make a rain gauge, start with an empty, clean 2 liter bottle and remove the label.
Using sharp scissors, cut off the top (curved) part of the bottle.
Next, use a permanent marker to draw a line all the way around bottle along the ridge near the bottom of the bottle. Use a ruler to mark a small line every inch up from the circle.
Number the lines starting at the lowest one, 1-5.
Fill the bottom of the bottle with pebbles and water up to the circling line. This will keep the bottle from tipping over.
Place the rain gauge outside, away from trees, and wait for the rain.
I don't think we'll have to wait long
If you have more empty soda bottles laying around that need re-purposing, we made this "ocean in a bottle" project a couple months ago.
I found these lovely pictures of her at a recent school dance on Facebook. I know she complained about wearing this black lace dress, but she really does look nice in it.
Ula through the years:
I had a little trouble with this week's Corner View, because we live in University Family Housing and our apartment does not have a back door or a back window. The view from our front door is an ugly concrete breezeway, so if you aren't all tired of seeing the birthday girl yet, my Corner View for this week is Ula at the Gazebo behind our apartment building on her birthday last year.
Please visit these other Corner View participants, many of whom probably have backdoors or back windows:
This was supposed to be the day I set aside for having my nervous break down, because I thought this was the first day that I had nothing to do since school started last August. Silly me! I forgot that Blaze has Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, and Speech this afternoon, so I am only getting half a mental health day. My intent is to do absolutely nothing until noon. I will return to my normal, busy life tomorrow.
*This picture was taken Dec. 22, 2008 in Williamsburg, VA., It is a recreation of one of the rooms in the first hospital in the country to deal only with mental health cases.
We spent all Sunday in Orlando, but it was a much more relaxed day. We slept late, played in the pool. and then went shopping at the Bass Pro Shop and Ikea.
We arrived at Disney World's Magic Kingdom around 6:00 p.m., so there wasn't time to see the whole park and go on all the rides, but we were more goal oriented at this park. I had never been on the Pirates of the Caribbean before. When we took Blaze to Magic Kingdom when he was 4 years old, the ride was closed for renovations, because they were adding Jack Sparrow stuff to it.
So my main goals in going to Magic Kingdom this time were to go on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, see the nighttime parade, and see the fireworks show. Anything else we had time for, would just be gravy.
We did end up with some extra time, so we went through the haunted mansion, and then I dragged DH onto the ride he truly finds scary (but in a whole different way), It's A Small World.
Then it was dark and time for the parade.
Spectro Magic:
Only about 15 minutes after the parade ended, the fireworks show began. The theme of the fireworks show is "Wishes".
I think I may have mentioned after our trip to Epcot, that I believe the term "sea of humanity" may have been coined to describe Disney parks at closing time.
We had a lot of fun at Disney's Animal Kingdom yesterday! The very helpful woman on the phone when I made our lunch reservations had told me that it was best to do the animal related activities early in the day, because those would be the first things to close in the evening, so as soon as we got to the park, we went to The Kilimanjaro Safaris.
There were also walking trails through other animal exhibits.
The central focal point of the park is "The Tree of Life". Look carefully at the tree trunk.
It is a Disney park,so of course there are also rides. We had a lot of fun on the Kali River Rapids ride in the Asian themed part of the park.
We did not have as much fun on Expedition Everest, a huge roller coaster that features a track that has supposedly been torn up by a yeti and then the roller coaster speeds backwards for awhile. I'm so glad we didn't eat lunch before going on that! Blaze made us promise several times that we would never take him on that again. Blaze braced his leg, so hard during the ride that he hurt himself and he's still limping.
I didn't take this video, I found it on YouTube.
We had lunch at the Tusker House in the African section of the park. The Tusker House is an all-you-can-eat buffet with both American and African items on the menu. There was a good selection of vegetarian dishes served at a separate area of the buffet from the meats. The food was excellent. We have now eaten at a buffet in each of the three Disney parks we have visited. DH and I both agree that this was the best food we've had at any of the three. We had perfect timing for lunch, as well. It started pouring rain outside, almost the minute we were seated and quit raining just as we were leaving the restaurant.
Blaze's very ethnically mixed plate of favorite foods, mini corn dogs, samosas, hummus, pita bread, and macaroni and cheese.
The buffet:
One of the Tusker House dining rooms:
I think that as far as healthy food options and catering to vegetarians, Animal Kingdom may have the best selections of any of the parks.
The best thing about Animal Kingdom, though, was the shows.
The Festival of the Lion King show:
Finding Nemo The Musical:
It's hard to explain just how awesome this show was.
Animal Kingdom closes at 5:00 p.m., but our tickets were "park hopper" tickets, which mean that you can use them to get into more than one park on the same day, and Magic Kingdom doesn't close until 10:00, so that's where we went next. I'll show you pictures from there tomorrow.
There was some question about where or not we would. The drive to Kingsley was fine, but just as we were getting ready to leave the plantation, it started raining. For quite a bit of the trip to Orlando, the rain was coming down so hard that there was almost no visibility.
We are now safely staying at a hotel in one of the more touristy parts of Orlando. Our room is on the 14th floor (well, really it's the 13th floor, but thanks to superstitious people, the floors are counted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14). This is the view from our window:
Those things that look like giant neon lit chopsticks sticking out of the ground are a huge bungee jumping ride.
This is the vertigo inducing view from the balcony just outside our door. There is an open air, central courtyard.
Right now, Blaze is watching a fireworks show off in the distance.
In theory, I really liked the idea we had at the beginning of Spring to have a seasonal tabletop garden as part of Blaze's nature table, but in actuality that spring tabletop moss garden included moss invested by gnats. We had to transplant everything into the garden to get the gnats out of the house.
So, here we go again. For Summer we have planted a cactus garden in hopes that less moisture equals fewer bugs. We added sand and shells to make our xerophytes (plants that need very little moisture) look like they are living on a beach.
Blaze had fun picking out the little cacti. He didn't want prickly ones. He chose smooth or fuzzy plants, that I think he chose for their names as much as for how they looked.
Last weekend was the first weekend for awhile that we spent at home, so the garden was getting very overgrown from neglect. There were some things that needed harvesting, too, like our first tomato of the year:
I don't know what these are, but there were several of them on the brussels spouts plants.
The green bean tepee is doing o.k., but some creature is still eating all the bottom leaves on my bean plants.
So, here we go, leaving town for another weekend. Our garden will have to fend for itself, again.
Today is the last day of school! I'm doing my happy dance right now, while humming Alice Cooper's "School's Out". The crazy schedule I kept this year, with home schooling Blaze and working, was really exhausting. I don't get to rest quite yet, though. We are driving out to Kingsley to pick up DH this afternoon and then driving down to Orlando. Tomorrow we are going to Disney's Animal Kingdom, and then Saturday we have a wedding to go to. We're spending Saturday night in Orlando, as well, so we'll probably do something fun there before driving home. Monday Blaze has a neurology appointment, so I think I'm scheduling my nervous breakdown for Tuesday.
This week we are continuing to learn about the Underground Railroad, by focusing on Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave, who returned to the south to lead around 300 other slaves to freedom, earning her the name of "Moses". We watched this movie about Harriet Tubman. It is a 6 part video on YouTube. This is part one. The next part should show up as an option after you view this one.
Harriet Tubman was later able to say about her days as a "conductor" on the underground railroad, "I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger."
Our bedtime story for this week is The Last Safe House:
For music this week, we are learning to sing "Wade in the Water" a song that Harriet Tubman sang as a reminder to the escaping slaves she was helping, that wading in water would erase their scent and throw the dogs, used by search parties and slave hunters, off their tracks.
Blaze was really impressed with the strange things these guys can do with their voices:
Wade in the Water (Lyrics)
Chorus: Wade in the water, Wade in the water children. Wade in the water God’s gonna trouble the water
Who’s all those children all dressed in Red? God’s gonna trouble the water. Must be the ones that Moses led. God’s gonna trouble the water.
Chorus:
What are those children all dressed in White? God’s gonna trouble the water. Must be the ones of the Israelites. God’s gonna trouble the water.
Chorus:
Who are these children all dressed in Blue? God’s gonna trouble the water. Must be the ones that made it through. God’s gonna trouble the water.
We may revisit Harriet Tubman during future history lessons, because her heroism didn't end with the underground railroad. She went on to serve as a nurse and spy during the Civil War.
A final quote by Harriet Tubman: "Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. "
Like many Northerners, when we first moved to Florida, I did not believe that there were seasons here. I grew up near Chicago where seasonal changes are not subtle. Winters are cold and sometimes full of snow and ice. Spring is unpredictable, but usually mild, with beautiful flowers. Swimming pools are only open between Memorial Day and Labor Day. Summers are so hot that people loose electricity because of of "brown outs" caused by too many air conditioners running. Autumns and mild, with brightly colored foliage.
The house we rented when we first moved here had a Live Oak in the backyard, which lost leaves all year long, covering the entire lawn with broken twigs and brown leaves, giving it a perpetual late Autumn look. Yet, it was not unusual to have days in January when everyone was wearing T-shirts and shorts.
Now that we have been here for about six years, I have become more in-tune with the seasonal changes here. Yes, Florida has seasons.
Today is the first day of Hurricane Season. To celebrate this time of year, Floridians go on big shopping sprees for canned goods, flashlights, and batteries. We religiously watch weather reports and tell each other stories about storms of the past. For our family these stories are about the several hurricanes and tropical storms that came through here in 2004.
During one of the hurricanes ( I don't remember which one, because we seemed to have been having one every week that Summer), our power went out and stayed out for 12 days. No one complained much about the lack of electricity until the day that Nika's Gameboy batteries went dead. Then she screamed about how much she hated Florida, until DH took the batteries out of his camera and handed them to her. Then she was o.k. again. On day eleven, a GRU (Gainesville Regional Utility) truck pulled up next to an electric pole around the block from our house and we all went out to watch them work. A little while after we returned home, the girls and I were sitting on the back steps when we saw the lights come on in all the houses behind ours, but our street remained dark. We sat there and sang "We Shall Overcome" at the top of our lungs. Then we sang every drinking song we could think of (It turns out, we know a lot of drinking songs), until the neighbors yelled at us to shut up.
I even found a rhyme that explains when hurricane season is and which months are the worst:
June- too soon. July-- stand by! August-- look out you must. September-- remember. October, all over.
For Science this week we will be learning about weather, using the following books:
and just for fun:
We will also be testing our weather knowledge with this Magic School Bus weather quiz:
Me: I am the mother of three vastly different people, a part-time tutor and teacher's aid at a small private school, and a homeschool teacher to my youngest child.
