Great to hear! The hill country there is so beautiful. And only ten minutes' drive from Hippie Hollow, for those who like to experience the full diversity of Austin Weirdness. ;)

Since tourists have come up so often in this thread, let me just take this moment to say.... Want to be a tourist and not worry what the locals think of you? Come visit Austin, Texas! Be one of the 27 million people from the US and other countries to visit our lovely city each year! We don't mind your cultural quirks. Be loud, have fun, enjoy the nightlife, eat at the restaurants and food trucks, hike the trails, sail the lakes, spend freely! South By Southwest is in March, Austin City Limits is in October! We like to meet people from other places and cultures, no matter how weirdly you behave. Weird is (literally) our motto! Because those millions of dollars each year from the (clean) tourist industry have a way of making us happy and very forgiving.

My Eye Doctor Guy said if you have to spend any time 'getting used to' progressives, they weren't made right and you should return them without hesitation. Possibly an exaggeration, but do be aware that they can be made incorrectly and it's not your job to adjust to bad lenses. Another vote for CostCo by the way; I got a membership just for the progressives. There was no adjustment period.

Thanks for bumping the thread. From the first post I was thinking, "Yes, BFSU/Nebel science is What I Should Have Used. All the engineers and science people I knew who homeschooled swore by it. But I could barely understand it, my kids didn't remember anything of it, and TOPS Science worked so, so much better for us. Oh and also Wordly Wise. How I tried. How they loved the games. Nobody remembered anything.

Middle Girl just finished both of them (I made her wait until she was 17...) and confirmed my memory that the first novel is much better than the second. She's about to take the second half of her Roman history class, so it's diving into the imperial decadence for her! Tuesday'schild, thanks for the cattle pics! Lovely critters. Idle curiosity question: what are those fence posts made from? Around here they'd be mountain cedar (mesquite further west) for posts or stays.

This week, reading Charles Dickens, David Copperfield; James Joyce, Dubliners; Robert Louis Stevenson, South Sea Tales; and Penguin Modern Poets 23 (Grigson, Muir, Stokes). JennW, are you planning on reading more Dickens this year? I think I mentioned that we're having a Crown Family Year of Dickens, wherein Wee Girl (from picture books to Dickens in less than 2 years! Yeah!) reads the Puffin (abridged but not adapted) Dickens, the rest of us read the full novels, and we all watch the BBC adaptations afterwards. We just saw the BBC David Copperfield (I'm running a little late) and it was quite good. The scriptwriter made many of the same abridgment choices as the Puffin editor, all of which I thought were good. Anyway I recommend it, and Great Expectations is up next. Whenever Wee Girl finishes her Stories from Sherlock Holmes. Junie, don't let people here know but I usually buy cheap books and break the spine to let them lie flat. They're going to have fallen apart by the time I'm done with them anyway. (This is why no one who sees me read even thinks of lending me a book.)

Was that at the same time as their abandonment of blackletter?

As usual I am in envy of your multilingual reading abilities! Frankly I'd like to know what the Danish word translated as "aesthetic" meant to his original readers.

I kind of think Kierkegaard would feel their central flaws derived from the wrong theology of the Church of England, but I'm hardly a Kierkegaardian. I do feel he'd have something specific to say about the Micawbers. Now that I'm re-reading and discussing Dubliners with Middle Girl, I keep hearing relevant Pogues lyrics in my head. (Not a coincidence that one of their album covers shows all the band members as James Joyce.) Also the story "An Encounter" now strikes me as an Irish version of Deliverance: "Beware the predatory deviants inhabiting the countryside!" Either/Or qualifies for three categories: Plucked From the Air (ethereally selected by Middle Girl); Brexit Deal (Denmark); and Gorey Cover Art (see below). If I'm going to finish out the 10x10 categories I will have to resort to overlapping.

Warning acknowledged and accepted.

They're essays (mostly) by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. The most popular of them, though, isn't an essay but a piece of short fiction (meant as an illustration of the aesthetic approach to love and marriage) called "The Seducer's Diary," which is frequently published on its own.

Yes I had to look that up when Kierkegaard used it. Oh and by the way I FINISHED EITHER/OR. Good gravy, that was really something. I nearly crashed and burned at the essay "Equilibrium Between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality." First book of 2020! Meanwhile still reading David Copperfield for Wee Girl and Dubliners for Middle Girl. My theme this year will be "Just read and don't mind that you don't get close to 52." ETA Did I mention Either/Or is 600+ pages long?

No, not at all. My favorites were Time Cat, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Stuart Little.

Negin, thank you for the photos. Especially the last one. Dh's first job after graduation (and right after we'd had a baby) was in upstate New York, and while that was a rough couple of years, at one point we visited NYC and the Met, and that Tiffany window made a strong impression on me. So it was lovely to experience it again in your photo. Do you remember another Tiffany window in the same room, featuring unusual Old Testament figures, like Tubalcain? I'm possibly misremembering details, but something like that. ETA: typos typos typos

Almost ashamed to post; still haven't finished a book in 2020. Working on Kierkegaard's Either/Or and Dickens's David Copperfield. The two are getting oddly combined in my head: I feel for the first time that I understand Steerforth's seduction of Little Em'ly on a deep level as a manifestation of the purely aesthetic consciousness, which eventually functioned to heighten the contradictions in Steerforth's character, maieutically bringing him from the aesthetic to the ethical realm of existence. Or would have if he hadn't drowned first. I really need to finish these and get on to other books. ETA: Suddenly I remember the scene from Karl Dreyer's "Ordet": https://tinyurl.com/tehwu4g

When the app first came out, the chases were terrible; you couldn't tell if you'd been caught until you noticed it had been 15 minutes or so and the story wasn't going forward any more. Now it tells you if you need to run a little faster, and when you've escaped -- and if you get caught, instead of ending the episode and making you do it over, the zombies just take one of your items. But best of all, you now have control over the zombie chase frequency, and over what % faster you have to run in order to escape them (based on your running speed right before the chase). So when I was ready to raise my baseline speed, I just lowered the zombie speed % increase. I think the game is Scottish, and the lovely accents are half the fun. Trigger Warning however: there's a "Texan" character in one episode and it was kind of agonizing. Also slight language and violence/gore warning, if anybody is thinking of it for their kids.

Happy New Year, Bill! Bartleby is a good read-aloud idea. So does your boy go about saying "I would prefer not to"? Another quote from Absalom, Absalom: "one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they dont you change your name and move to Texas"

And interpreted broadly, at that. I mean, when you think about it, isn't everything book related? The thing to keep in mind is that there's no competition, no judgment, nothing like that. It's really not unlike the fitness/exercise thread. Everyone does what she does, at whatever level she does it, and the point is to keep ourselves accountable and have fun and let the group nature of the activity keep us on task. To that end, if you get to the end of January and you haven't finished a book, who cares? You're still part of Book a Week. If someone else is reading five books a week, that's fine too. Marathon runners and gentle walkers are all welcome.

Utterly awed. So much respect. Can human beings survive in such temperatures? I put a foot in St Andrews Bay once. The Gulf of Mexico for me.

Zombie chases! I just escaped from a few packs this morning. Exercise Goals/Plans for this year: pretty much the same as last year, as they've been working well. I slacked a bit but I'm getting back up to speed. 1. Running. More local fun runs; more whole-family runs along our awesome City trails, especially around Town Lake; keep up the Zombie chases to work on speed; fearlessly wear the fabulous festive running gear that makes Teenager raise her eyebrows. 2. Biking. Teenager fixed up my bike, I got a new and colorful helmet for the New Year (see above) and I'm biking more to fetch groceries. 3. Weights. Continuing Menopausal Strength Workout videos with Judy Torel. I love Judy. 4. Pilates. Core!

Well that's only fair since I'm always humbled by your ability to read comfortably in multiple languages. Yes I think you might like Absalom, Absalom more than When I Lay Dying. Which isn't as bad as The Reivers at any rate.

Absalom, Absalom felt like when I've listened to relatives tell me stories over the years and then finally the important piece would fall into place and often wasn't what I'd expected it to be. I regret to tell you that Middle Girl has thrown over English and American writers (except, for some reason, T. S. Eliot) and now devotes herself entirely to Greek, Latin, and French lit. She wanted me to co-read Ovid with her (me reading it in translation, my Latin not being up to Ovid) but after one page of the section she was on I demurred. Some things should not be read in the presence of one's mother.

We had a child with that issue at that age [eta: ... and for years afterward]. Constipation, belly pain, bloating, plenty of fiber, water, and exercise, no allergies to anything. Pediatrician was mystified. Miralax didn't help. And despite being already thin, she started losing weight because eating was so associated with pain. Next step was going to be a colonoscopy to look for obstructions. Dr. Google suggested that the problem might be too much fiber in her diet, which is especially a problem for vegetarians. We took her off the Miralax and reduced her dietary fiber to as near zero as we could. Canned or very cooked veggies, canned or cooked fruits, no more whole grain anything, much higher fat content. And started her eating meat. She got quite a bit better immediately, and after about six months of high-fat, super-low-fiber, she no longer has constipation and abdominal pain. One crazy out-of-town week she had almost nothing but cheese pizza and milk for three days, and at the end of that she felt better than she had in years. Fruits and vegetables are more normal now. She's back to a normal weight. We still avoid super-fibrous foods for her. Google around. She's not the only kid who needed the exact opposite approach to the usual pediatric recommendation.

Resolved: 50 pages a day minimum. More Texas reading. James, James, James.

Still reading Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard. I am through the "Either" section (aesthetics) and about to start the "Or" (Ethics). It was originally published in 2 volumes, and unsurprisingly many more people bought the first volume than the second, so complete first edition 2-volume sets are rare. Kierkegaard was annoyed and required his publisher to make the second edition one volume, but it was just too bulky, so unabridged editions are always two volumes. Wee Girl stayed up late reading David Copperfield (abridged Puffin edition), which we're all supposed to be reading with her, and is 90 pages into it! So I'm already behind for the New Year.