Friday, August 31, 2012

Is summer over?




                                                  
Indian summer arrived today on the last day of August.
HOT again. Newlyweds came through town on their way to the beach.  So blessed to have them for lunch! Newlywed intown son is on 12 workdays for the DNC and all the other protests and hullabaloo! We've heard low flying airplanes late this afternoon. hmmm.......

Have a restful weekend.
Read.
Watch a good movie.
Work in the garden if it is not too hot!
Read.
Get ready for school next week.
( talking to myself here!)
 



Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Anthropologie in Edinburgh


One minute in Scotland ~~ 

Anthropologie's Sept. Catalog

Click on the video on the page. 
It certainly made me feel pretty today. 
It is a bit misty out and must get a cup of tea!

You can view the catalog here.  

Makes you want to put a sweater on!
I love Autumn.
 







Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Blogging friends



 N.D. Wilson ( Nate ) On Writing

Yeah, I’m back (on my blog). And yes, once more I have waited a month or so between posts. So what? I’ve been busy. And having fun. Almost forgot that I had a blog. But then I heard it whispering to me in the night. And here I am.

* Douglas Wilson's son

Monday, August 27, 2012

Flying Books!



Film to Children's  book.  Imagine that. This 2011 Best Animated Short Film is now a book:







Following a hurricane which destroys his town Morris is whisked away to a colourful old house full of books which come alive and interact with him spreading happiness in the community. He remains their custodian for years until it is time for him to pass on and another guardian of the books take over from him.
Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story. Using a variety of techniques (miniatures, computer animation, 2D animation) award winning author/ illustrator William Joyce and Co-director Brandon Oldenburg present a hybrid style of animation that harkens back to silent films and MGM Technicolor musicals. Morris Lessmore is old fashioned and cutting edge at the same time.

In the busyness, it just takes a phone call


Thinking about how good it was  to just get a call
from my oldest son tonight JUST to SAY HELLO and to see how I was! 

" Do you want anything?"

"No, just calling to see what's going on and how things are."

Gratitude for being missed.
 He lives 8 miles from us! I do text and talk and see him lots but this was just a "How are YOU,  Mom " sort of call.
Then we had a bad connection and our land phone was off because Emma is painting that part of the kitchen a warm and deep shade of golden mustard. 


 







Sunday, August 26, 2012

Fall Book for our Book Club?





The Exact Place


A Memoir


by Margie L. Haack
 
Can preorder girls?

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Books Released later this year



October 11, 2012



A Thousand Mornings 

later this year


A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership 

It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays
 

Center Church by Tim Keller
September 4, 2012

Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City
 
Know of any others?

 

Thursday, August 23, 2012

She's rather BIG


I just can't find a smaller painting image of Corot's painting. Plus I loved this one but it was bigger.



  I changed it and changed it back. SHE is what 
I want to think about as school begins!

When the seventy-two-year-old Corot showed "A Woman Reading" at the Salon of 1869, the critic Théophile Gautier praised its naïveté and its color but criticized the faulty drawing of the figure, noting the rarity of figures in Corot's work. Although the artist had painted similar figure studies after the late 1850s, this was the first and one of the very few that he exhibited.

Close examination of the surface reveals that Corot reworked the landscape. A photograph of the painting when it was exhibited at the Salon indicates that originally there was a willow at the left whose foliage nearly covered the sky, and a mass of trees at the right. A lithographic copy of the painting, made by Emile Vernier in 1870, reproduces it with the present, open sky; thus, Corot must have repainted the work immediately after he retrieved it from the Salon. 
( from the MET) 


Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Using Cell phones and reading


Writing is changing with texting and blogging. Will there be an evolution of grammar and punctuation? 


We use our cell phones to call each other IN the house!
How 'bout that?!!

READ this last night and wondered if long , descriptive sentences will ever return and the reading of them gives one breadth and depth instead of frustration. 




The Docks of London
“”Whither O splendid ship” the poet asked as he lay on the shore and watched the great sailing ship pass away on the horizon. Perhaps, as he imagined, it was making for some port in the Pacific; but one day almost certainly it must have heard an irresistable call and come past the North Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the Port of London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet and Tilbury, up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Galleon’s Reach, past the gas works and the sewage works till it found, for all the world like a car on a parking ground, a space reserved for it in the deep waters of the docks. There it furled its sails and dropped anchor.”

Oxford Street Tide
“The palaces of Oxford Street ignore what seemed good to the Greeks, the Elizabethans, to the eighteenth-century nobleman; they are overwhelmingly conscious that unless they can devise an architecture that shows off the dressing-case, the Paris frock, the cheap stockings and the jar of bath salts to perfection, their palaces, their mansions and motor-cars and the little Villas out at Croydon and Surbiton where their shop assistants live, not so badly after all, with a gramophone and wireless, and money to be spent at the movies – all this will be swept to ruin.”

Great Men’s Houses
“There are hills on the further sid in whose woods birds are singing, and some stoat or rabbit pauses, in dead silence, with paw lifted to listen intently to rustlings among the leaves. To look over London from this hill Keats came and Coleridge and Shakespeare, perhaps. And here at this very moment the usual young man sits on an iron bench clasping to his arms the usual young woman.”

Abbeys and Cathedrals
“Something of the splendour of St. Paul’s lies simply in its vast size, its colourless serenity. Mind and body seem both to widen in this enclosure, to expand under this huge canopy where the light is neither daylight nor lamplight, but an ambiguous element something between the two.”

“This is the House of Commons”
“Dipping and rising, moving and settling, the Commons reminds one of a flock of birds settling on a stretch of ploughed land. They never alight for more than a few minutes; some are always flying off, others are always settling again. And from the flock rises the gabbling, the cawing, the croaking of a flock of birds, disputing merrily and with occasional vivacity over some seed, worm or buried grain.”

Portrait of a Londoner
“When Mr Smedley, for instance, said that his daughter was engaged to Arthur Beecham, Mrs Crowe at once remarked that in that case she would be a cousin twice removed to Mrs Firebrace, and in a sense niece to Mrs Burns, by her first marriage with Mr Minchin of Blackwater Grange. But Mrs Crowe was not in the least a snob. She was merely a collector of relationships; and her amazing skill in this direction served to give a family and domestic character to her gatherings, for it is surprising how many people are 20th cousins, if they did but know it.”



Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Everyone is starting school!


We haven't except some summer reading for my literature class. I asked them to choose a Jane Austen book they haven't read. Many haven't read any and many , especially boys, asked me if all her books are romance novels. 
I just smile as I think of Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail reading Pride & Prejudice to woe his online romance with Meg Ryan!  I also think of Peter Leithart who wrote Minatures and Morals : The Christian Novels of Jane Austen .
The first chapter is REAL MEN READ JANE AUSTEN. 




Guess what Emma is reading?





 

Thursday, August 16, 2012

Going to be busy this weekend...


Another wedding in the family!
Number 3 this year with so many other weddings of their friends and  friends' children.
This time  is my nephew's wedding on Saturday right here 
where we live! Yeah!

Chris lived with us during his internship with PWC  (accounting firm) while #2 son was in the Police Academy. 
We would sit at dinner hearing about their days: guns, physical training, tasers, pepper spray, and taxes! 
 
Have a great weekend too!
  

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Butter....and Julia


I think I saw Julie and Julia 4 times in the theater then I've watched it up to a dozen times since then.I still find it funny, beautiful, and can keep hearing so many lines even when I know they are coming!So did Nora Ephron when she directed and wrote it. 



Then there is the soundtrack which I do have. I feel better putting it on even while cooking. Here are some of the actors on  Thoughts on Food:



 HAPPY EATING
and here.  
happy birthday Julia. 

Julia Child: [on her book being published by Knopf] Is it kuh-NA-pf or NOFF?
Paul Child: Who cares!

Paul Child: [to Julia] You are the butter to my bread, you are the breath to my life.

Julia Child: You and I are vaches enragées.
Simone Beck: That's exactly what we are. Mad cows. 

Bon Appetit!



Monday, August 13, 2012

Thinking of blogging


This blogging is a different sort of writing! 
I'm sure YOU as a blogger have this feeling when something strikes you that you have to BLOG it. 

It happened today at the DMV getting Emma's Driver's Permit.  We drove out of Charlotte to the next smaller city : Monroe. Line too long. We drove out of Monroe to a tiny town: Polkton. There, we did have to wait BUT the two DMV ladies were worth the wait and drive. I had stepped into the pages of Jan Karon's Mitford! Truly, they knew almost everyone who was from the town and asked how their wife was and how so-and-so was. One of the ladies came back from lunch SO MAD at the waitresses. She is a regular , you see. I laughed  as she exclaimed that  she had to get another waitress who knew what she wanted! The whole waiting room was listening. It was a small office so we heard everything, even the ones renewing, changing names ( a newly married young girl with her young husband ~~ who got teased to death that he was needed for the FEE), and getting new licenses.   "Miss Emma" passed. That is who she was today with the wonderful DMV lady who helped you with the signs if you couldn't really figure them out. 
Miss  Emma knew them. She just finished Driver's Ed. Saturday so everything was fresh. 

Did she drive home? Actually no. It was highway driving and alot of trucks so she will drive to the grocery store soon.

I felt like writing down everything they said and getting out my phone for pictures! Blogging moment hit. 


Emma ( in  green lace dress) with 4 other students of mine at the middle one's Graduation Party yesterday. She is going to SCAD. #4 from Emma is going to New College Franklin.





Friday, August 10, 2012

Friday thoughts


Yesterday was a day of accomplishments. 
Small and large:
~ Target shopping
~ returns to my daughter in law and to Bed , Bath, and Beyond of the umbrella that broke at the beach
~groceries at Trader Joe's 
 new magazines from Barnes and Noble
~ good dinner on the table
~ Driver's Ed for my daughter
~ planning with my husband for some things needing to get done
~ got a ways in a new book
~ made a feta cheese ball for a Grad party for one of my students
~good plans for a birthday dinner for two daughter in laws next week

  AND now it is friday. It rained heavily last night 
and today I could curl up on the couch and finish that book. 
The kitchen walls are almost ready to be painted. Where did that energy go from yesterday? 

What do you do on a day like this?
Might need some of this:



Great time in Letters of Van Gogh this morning:


I have a more or less irresistible passion for books and the constant need to improve my mind, to study if you like, just as I have a need to eat bread.  .......

So you would be mistaken should you continue to think that I have become less keen on, say, Rembrandt, Millet, or Delacroix or whoever or whatever, for the reverse is the case, but there are many different things worth believing and loving, you see - there is something of Rembrandt in Shakespeare, something of Correggio or of Sarto in Michelet and something of Delacroix in Victor Hugo, and there is also something of Rembrandt in the Gospel or, if you prefer, something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, it comes to much the same thing, provided you understand it properly, do not try to distort it and bear in mind that the elements of the comparisons are not intended to detract in any way from the merits of the original individuals.

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.


Thursday, August 9, 2012

Come with me into the field of sunflowers




Brandie Buckingham and her dad:






























The Sunflowers
by Mary Oliver 


Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young -
the important weather,
the wandering crows.
Don't be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds -
each one a new life!
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in th
e earth
so uprightly burning. 




* sorry for the space here...........had the photo here first but it cut off the SUNFLowers
I give up trying to fix this!



Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Angela Wright's WOOL



"189 MILES" WOOL INSTALLATION (ver 2) -  BRADFORD CATHEDRAL : by Angela Wright.












ALL HALLOWS CHURCH on the Wall, London






 







Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Letters of Van Gogh


This is my devotional now. I've always wanted to spend a year reading them and digesting all the paintings. 
I was struck by this  important part of a letter : Couldn't one learn something from these work:

 Dear Theo  ~~ Amsterdam, April 3, 1878 

As far as being an homme intérieur et spirituel is concerned, couldn’t one develop that in oneself through knowledge of history in general and of certain people of all eras in particular, from biblical times to the Revolution and from The Odyssey to the books of Dickens  and Michelet . And couldn’t one learn something from the work of the likes of  Rembrandt or "Mauvaises Herbes " by  Breton  or "The  Hours of the Day " by  Millet or " Benedicite by   de Groux or   Brion  or  "The Conscript"  by de  Groux  or else by  Conscience , or his Apothecary or The large oaks by Dupre or even the mills and sand flats by  Michel?

It is by continually holding fast to these thoughts and deeds that we are filled with a good leaven at the last, that of being sorrowful yet always rejoicing, which will become apparent when our lives have come to fruition, bearing the fruits of good works.


                       Les Mauvaises Herbes   Breton



                                       The Hours of the Day by Millet

                   Benedicite ( The Grace) by De Groux

                       The Large Oaks by Jule Dupre


Monday, August 6, 2012

Snail Mail



A wonderful article at Curator Magazine on letter writing: 

An Epistolary Confession

 

 

 


 I live for good snail mail days.....

Or even better, an envelope or package bearing return addresses from family and friends.

 

 

 From today's snail mail:

 "I hope your time at the ocean edge this week has been relaxing, refreshing, and awe inspiring. The expanse of water and sky , the tide, and the mystery of the deep: remind me of God's power and mystery, His sovereignty over all creation and that all will NOT continue as it has been! He is coming; He will accomplish all He has said . And I am thankful for  His love, 'the Deep , Deep, love of Jesus." 

 

I felt so loved and yes, the week at the beach was that. So thankful. 

 

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Home again



“Learn the psalms and ponder the ways of the early church. Know what must be known. Ancient fathers taught their ancient children, who taught their ancient children, these very things. Puritan Milton with his pagan muses. It is like a voice heard from another room, singing for the pleasure of the song, and then you know it, too, and through you it moves by accident and necessity down generations. Then, why singing? Why pleasure in it? And why the blessing of the moment when another voice is heard, dreaming to itself?”
Home, Marilynne Robinson

Back from the beach!