You might check out American Scientist's recent article on mathematical knitting. http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2013/2/adventures-in-mathematical-knitting/1

The old Vision Books series had quite a few well-written missionary stories, many of which have been reprinted by Ignatius Press, including Father Marquette and the Great Rivers St Francis of the Seven Seas St Ignatius and the Company of Jesus St Isaac and the Indians Also, Augustine Came to Kent (about the little Augustine, not the big one!) is very good. Bonus points: the Fr Marquette and St Ignatius books were written by August Derleth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Derleth

It's hot. And we all have fevers. And some have allergies. And it's hot. Still. Middle Girl gamely tried to do some math, but soon slumped down over her paper and started to cry quietly. Then she tried to read her new book about the Texas Rangers, only to find several pages ripped out. Thank God for Fred Rogers, free on Amazon Prime, who has kept Wee Girl hypnotized for the last 48 hours, when she wasn't sleeping or throwing up. Trolley to the Land of Make-Believe, take me away.

lorisuewho, I really don't worry about the morals much. The fables' endings and morals were much tinkered with over the centuries, and the authors of children's Aesops seem to have felt particularly free to shape the morals to suit their own times. Some of the best-known fables aren't even Aesopic: The Miller, His Son, and the Donkey and Belling the Cat, for instance, are medieval, and the latter originally had a moral that was startlingly different from the one usually presented. I say let them learn the stories and internalize them; the lessons to be drawn will find their own way through.

http://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Penguin-Karen-Durrie/dp/1619132303/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366216552&sr=1-9&keywords=I+am+a+penguin

O the Provensens! Now I am sunk in envy.

Sticking to the cultural/literary issues, I vote for getting children familiar with all the stories. To read, say, Paradise Lost in high school, you obviously can't even start without a thorough familiarity with the Genesis story of the Fall; but to get Milton's flood of biblical references (second Adam? jasper sky? "chariot of paternal Deity"?) and so understand the complexity of his thought, you have to know the Gospels, the histories, the prophets, Revelation, everything. (Not to mention a thorough familiarity with classical mythology, and a heaping helping of Jewish mystical tradition.) I rather like the Golden Bible as a start, as it includes lots of the lesser-known stories, and preserves langugage that has had a cultural impact (e.g. the archaic phrase "gave up the ghost" in the crucifixion narrative). Of course the not-child-friendly aspects of the stories are omitted; but I don't find that inappropriate for familiarizing younger children with their cultural inheritance. Just like I have no objection to the D'Aulaires cleaning up Pasiphaë's tryst with the bull, or Enkidu's fling with Shamhat being toned down for young readers. I want my children to understand a reference to "a pillar of salt," but don't feel that entails their knowing about Lot's later relations with his daughters until they're older. A really thorough knowledge of their cultural inheritance is why our family chose classical education for our children in the first place. And I think knowing all the Bible stories, on a level appropriate to their maturity level, is a significant part of that. (For the record, Great Girl did get to college knowing all the parts that her children's Bible, children's Greek and Norse myths, children's Plutarch, and children's Gilgamesh glossed over.)

I would gladly swap cussing and nudity for the horrific death/violence/sexuality combos (generally female-centered) prominent in CSI and its thousand spawn. Tv was banished in our home back in the 90's, after then-tiny Great Girl watched in horror as a commercial (during a perfectly acceptable prime-time show) for The X-Files showed her a bloody half-skeletonized corpse. I would have vastly preferred she have been shown somebody's wardrobe malfunction.

Plato's Republic is proving difficult to stick with. Every time he has Socrates quote something from Homer or Aeschylus as an example of the terrible things poets will no longer be allowed to say in the Just City, it makes me want to put it down and go read Homer or Aeschylus. Dh swears it gets better. Great Girl disagrees.

Red-legged purseweb? They're supposedly endangered. Sure would be endangered if I found it scuttling across my living room floor. Venomous fangs glistening.

I'm surprised the cartoon site isn't working for y'all - it's running on my iPad fine. Usually the iPad is what things don't run on.

Yes, I was going to suggest the red-backed jumper too. Is the red on the back (topside) of the abdomen, or the bottom? Southern black widows have a more rectangular (not so much hourglass-shaped) red mark on the underside than the northern variety. Hwo big, roughly? Any chance it's not all that big, with a crablike "shell"?

I can't say this is due to the ACA, but we are fighting a substantial denied claim by our previously satisfactory insurance. The medical people involved are outraged at the denial and encouraging us to keep fighting. I'm hearing a lot of similar stories lately. What's the use of paying for good insurance if they won't pay claims? As I say, the ACA may not be to blame, but it's an obvious move for insurance companies that are feeling squeezed. ETA: I'm not anti-ACA, except insofar as it seems like a stupid half-way alternative to a sane single-payer system. This experience is only hardening my views.

Finished The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's not a full book, of course, but I've got it as part of a collection of Stevenson stories, so I'll read the rest of them before I count the book. (This is one of those lovely, crisp, cloth-bound editions I got from our library discard store.) If you just stepped off the cargo transport from Mars, then CAUTION: SPOILERS!!! -------------------------- He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter - and the next moment I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arm raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror. "O God!" I screamed, and "O God!" again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll! -------------------- Or, see the Bugs Bunny version: http://www.supercartoons.net/cartoon/698/hyde-and-hare.html

No apology nor explanation ever need be made for looking at pictures of Sean Connery. I hear that. This week will be better.

I'd be interested to hear your ultimate take on Murakami. I only read Hard-Boiled Wonderland, at dh's recommendation, and thought it was okay, but was somewhat put off by the science fiction elements.

Finished (right before the board attack) - 7. Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains. A 1935 novel about two Englishmen getting by among the politics, intrigue, and decadence of pre-Hitler Berlin. ------------ Poor Arthur! I have seldom known anybody with such weak nerves. At times, I began to believe he must be suffering from a mild form of persecution mania. I can see him now as he used to sit waiting for me in the most secluded corner of our favorite restaurant, bored, abstracted, uneasy; his hands folded with studied nonchalance in his lap, his head held at an awkward angle, as though he expected, at any moment, to be startled by a very loud bang. I can hear him at the telephone, speaking cautiously, as close as possible to the mouthpiece and barely raising his voice above a whisper. 'Hullo. Yes, it's me. So you've seen that party? Good. Now when can we meet? Let's say at the usual time, at the house of the person who is interested. And please ask that other one to be there, too. No, no. Herr D. It's particularly important. Good-bye.' I laughed. 'One would think, to hear you, that you were an arch-conspirator.' 'A very arch conspirator,' Arthur giggled. --------------- I got started on vol.2 of Newman, but was challenged by Great Girl to read Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (when she discovered I only knew the plot from the Bugs Bunny parody), and by dh to read Plato's Republic, because he just feels I ought. So those may get in first. At any rate, I've poked my nose back into the 20th century and am done for now. Was there a post at some point listing the various challenges? I've lost track.

Don't think of yourself as being behind; think of yourself as being ahead in the Book-of-the-Month club. That's how I'm justifying still posting. I finished James' Portrait of a Lady, which was vastly better than when I read it as a callow youth with no life experience to draw on. So many books are. I'm currently reading both Volume 2 of Newman's Historical Sketches, and Christopher Isherwood's Mr Norris Changes Trains. It was written in 1935 and set in Germany, and it's strange to see Hitler and the Nazi party referred to in rather an offhand way, as just another set of political actors. Not that that's the strangest thing about this book.

Week 3 of acute bronchitis for me. Already on antibiotics for something else. What I find works best: humidifier at night, caffeine during the day, lots of hot drinks, never cold drinks, cough drops constantly, Nyquil so I can sleep and not wake up coughing spasmodically at 4 a.m.

Welcome to the "Manosphere." Try googling "MRA" or, for recent fun, "I need masculism because." But for pity's sake don't attract any of them here.

Dh has a visiting lectureship as well as his university job. The extra money is nice, but it takes him out of the country for a couple of months each year. :(

For a moment I thought you meant the poem. I was going to say that it might depend on how you felt about the Celtic Revival.

Here's what made me regret buying Artistic Pursuits: it's inexcusably expensive for what it is, and there are better things that are cheaper. Want detailed study of great works with interesting and varied activities? Museums have already produced cheap (taxpayer-subsidized) materials for that - some out-of-print, but easy to find second-hand (I paid no more than a dollar for each of them): National Gallery of Art (Washington) http://www.ebay.com/ctg/National-Gallery-Art-Maura-A-Clarkin-1994-Paperback-Activity-Book-/633998 National Gallery (London) http://www.amazon.com/The-National-Gallery-Childrens-Book/dp/0901791903 Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.amazon.com/The-Metropolitan-Museum-Activity-Book/dp/0394852419 If you want a very structured, incremental art curriculum that incorporates great works, teaches concepts, and includes art project ideas, broken up into lessons and even arranged by month, for FREE, use the art section of the Baltimore Curriculum Project and get the pictures off the internet. http://www.cstone.net/~bcp/BCPIntro2.htm I've used all these resources as well as Artistic Pursuits, and I regret paying for AP.

How timely - today I started Hillyer's A Child's History of Art for the second time, having gone through it with Great Girl five years ago. Its biggest drawback is the black-and-white photos; but the internet has made that fault go away completely. If anything, the tech improvements of the last five years have made it vastly easier to instantly summon up a good copy of all of the art Hillyer refers to. For instance, today was the Lascaux cave paintings. Five years ago, a little searching turned up several good-quality images from the caves. Today we took an awesome 3-D guided tour through the caves courtesy of the official Lascaux website. I like Hillyer's easy and accessible writing style; and his unfortunate obsession with race (a feature of his geography and original history texts) makes no appearance in his art book. ETA: For music, I like How to Introduce Your Child to Classical Music in 52 Easy Lessons. It is very usable for the utterly amusical, like me. I let their cello and piano teachers take care of the theory.

Completely agree. I went through a brief period of this, but had the immense advantage of an attorney and a police detective putting things into blunt and brutal perspective for me. This is where I think counseling is very necessary, when the legal system isn't involved (and undoubtedly in many cases where it is): there must be some third party with *experience* in these matters who can reattach you to reality rather than the bizarro-world that another person is trying to have you live in.