Graveyard fun

My periodic immersion in early American history led to the discovery of Okau Settlement, a forgotten community of 30 or so families who, in the 1820s and 1830s, pioneered an area a couple of miles north of my hometown of Findlay, Illinois, 50 years before Findlay was founded. It turns out that there are also many old cemeteries in that neighborhood, not one of which has been put online so I can tour it from my comfy office chair.

So I had a bright idea yesterday: take the whole family out to these old cemeteries to explore and document them by taking gps-tagged photos of each headstone, then putting all the information online with photos, coordinates, maps and transcriptions. Then, by golly, I and everyone else could tour these old cemeteries from our comfy office chairs.

Update: looks like I need to google for advice about how to conduct a cemetery survey.

7 on the 7th

Our 7-year-old daughter just up and started reading books today! So far she's read seven with just a little bit of help from her 11-year-old sister. The first was "My First Colors Board Book", and the rest included the 8-year-old's first book, "Ducks in Muck." September 7, 2010 is a date to celebrate.

In my tribe

Kathy Shaidle keeps saying, "We will ALL default to our tribes when the time comes." Who's your tribe? Mine is basically small-town Midwestern WASPs, people who keep their yards mowed and research genealogy and take care of old forgotten cemeteries and raise big batches of kids.

Speaking of which, we went to a family reunion recently - our small branch of the Bragg family. One of the older ladies noticed our large crew - Lisa, me and four of our five kids, and noted with a bit of sadness that "there aren't many children anymore." It was a chilling moment. Our family reunions used to have more kids than adults, but at this one there were only five - our four and one other little boy. Things change so slowly it's hard to notice the changes day-by-day; but when someone stops to compare life today to life fifty years ago, the changes for the worse are shocking.

Around town

My Grandpa was a small-town building contractor in his younger days in Findlay, Illinois, and it's good to see that the houses he built are still lived in today. Here's one on the north edge of town that was rented by some hippie painter back in the early 70s - Mom may still have one of his psychedelic works in her closet. Here are a couple more; I grew up in the one on the left and Grandma and Grandpa lived in the other (hey - they cut down his evergreen tree!)

If you look to the north from that first house, you'll see a gloriously flat horizon.

He'd walk a mile for a merit badge

Did you know that Google Maps has a super-handy measuring tool? You have to enable it by clicking on the lab beaker icon, then click to enable "Distance Measuring Tool". Using this amazing little thing, I found that a walk around our yard, avoiding the poison ivy behind the shed in the top left of the picture, will take you almost exactly one-tenth of a mile. Our oldest son has to walk a mile as a prerequisite for a Boy Scout merit badge, so he's out there now walking around our yard 10 times.

Update: I was wrong about the merit badge.  His pediatrician recommended more exercise & this is what the boy chose to do.

Happy birthday!

Around here it's pretty much always someone's birthday or half-birthday or name day or whatnot. Today it's our youngest child's turn - she turns five today. Here's my wife:

My baby is five! That's right. Today Quinta, my youngest child, turns five years old. I spent six months on bedrest to get this child full-term. She was worth every minute. I had a caesarean section to deliver her. She was worth every anxiety. There were complications with her delivery and I ended up with a hysterectomy. She is greater than my wishes for more children.

This sweet child on her fifth birthday is a bright shining jewel: a tremendous blessing from God. She fills our lives with laughter and dancing. I am more grateful than she can know for her very being and her being in OUR family. I love you, Sugar. Happy Birthday, Baby!

She's requested a chocolate heart-shaped cake with pink icing (to be delivered by Mamaw), and a birthday menu: oatmeal for breakfast, McDonald's for lunch, and biscuits and sausage gravy for supper. Her favorite Sodor engine, Hiro, is among her gifts and Mamaw and Papaw are on their way have arrived from Indiana.

I'm, like, happy and everything

"Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"  That's Psalm 137, talking about the happiness of those who dash their enemies' children against the rock.  In Patristic exegesis, happy are those who take even the beginnings of temptation and dash them against the Rock, Christ.  In homeschooling, happy is the Dad who can dash against the rock his son's misuse of "like" the first moment it ever happens.  He was talking about looking for a paper airplane that had landed on a ceiling fan.  He reported, "I was like, 'Where is that plane?'"  We don't allow such offensive barbarisms in their speech and he was instantly, gently and firmly corrected.

Why, yes, I am uptight about some things.  Why do you ask?

I guess I can trust Highlights

"Crimson Harvest" - that's the title of an article 11yo Secunda is reading in the current Highlights magazine. When I saw the title I thought "oh great - some liberal bigot going on about how the Inuit seal harvest is so damned cruel, lots of bloody pictures, lefty propaganda for the kiddies, etc." Well, no - it's an article about harvesting cranberries. It seems we really can trust Highlights. Unlike the sadly politicized National Geographic, which is basically a polysyllabic Time magazine. We cancelled that crap after a few months' subscription.

Ha! I just went to the National Geographic website - the title of the homepage is "National Geographic - Inspiring People to Care About the Planet." In other words, we have a BBC-style climate-nut agenda we'll push in every article.

Small Town's city

Just back from Small Town's fireworks show. On the way there as we passed Small Town's very tall grain elevator the 4yo exclaimed "Wow! A city!" For you city slickers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_elevator

Welcome to our secret book society, John

7yo John has devoured 35 Boxcar Children books in the last few weeks and now he's started on his first "real" book: Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. He's covered five chapters since an hour before bedtime tonight, and he's taking full advantage of our rule that allows kids to stay up as long as they want as long as they're reading.

The sound of a dying industry

Lisa and I stopped by Barnes & Noble last night to browse a bit. They had lots of big stacks of books we didn't want or need - stocked, I suppose, in the hope that someone would buy them. We finally found a small connect-the-dots book for the 6-year-old's birthday and trekked all the way back across the store to the checkout counter. Half-a-dozen registers there but only one cashier, and she was attempting to sell some discount plan to the customer ahead of us. Selling these things is a long process when you're next in line waiting for the one open register, and it takes even longer when the customer realizes she will have to fork over 25 bucks for the privilege of saving money. She balked at the price, which she hadn't heard during the hurried sales spiel. Paperwork then had to be undone, a phone call (?!) had to be made, and it dragged on and on while we waited and the line grew behind us like cobwebs in an empty house. Which the bookstore was, pretty much - there were so few customers we parked two spaces from the door. Just our little band of unhappy customers and the annoying jazz they piped in to hide the silence.

During the long wait while we listened to crappy jazz, I formulated White's Axiom: the longer the wait in a bookstore line, the better amazon.com looks.

The Mountain Dew Song

From our goofy 12-year-old, to the tune Jingle Bells:

Charging through the glue
with a can of Mountain Dew.
It's such a wonderful drink,
it would make a freighter sink.

Just take another sip,
and your black cat won't nip.
And we'll be running through the cheddar cheese tonight.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew
sipping all the way.
Oh what fun it is to have
a can of Mountain Dew.

My Mom at work

Mom spent a day recently handing out certificates of appreciation to all the folks who volunteer at Shelbyville Manor, a nursing home at which she's an assistant activity director. That's her on the left. You can view the whole photo album here.

Libraries!

What better way for a booklover to prepare for the coming Obamapocalypse than to obtain a library card? We'll save a bundle! So ten-year-old Sarah and I went to our small town's public library Saturday to sign up for cards and see what was available. After filling out the forms (the cards should be available there next week) we looked around. She hit the motherlode and came away with Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, L. M. Montgomery and a healthy dose of Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children. I found nothing by Dorothy Sayers or Elizabeth George among their thousands of mysteries and romance novels, and the friendly lady behind the counter couldn't find anything in the system by Fred Kaplan - either no library in central Illinois has a copy of his Lincoln book, or she didn't quite know what she was doing.

So the local library is a bust for me, but with their card I'll be able to check out books from the Champaign library when I'm in town for office hours Wednesdays and Fridays. I'll just need to be careful not to visit when the Bedlam across the street from the library releases its lunatic inmates for the day.

A note on tax hikes

"Rich" people are looking for ways to avoid slavery, as any sensible person would. I don't understand the notion of raising taxes on the rich. Personally, I've never received a family-sustaining regular paycheck from a poor person. If the President has his way, fewer families will receive them from rich people.

Funny how things work out

We've never put much into our 401K account, which is handled by Vanguard and invested in stocks and such. We figured we needed the money now more than we'd need it in the far future, and anyway, we knew we'd never have some vast account on which we could retire comfortably. And then early last year we raided the account for all we could get to pay off our very last medical debt - there was just enough available in those last few months before the crash when the Dow was above 14,000. Now the Dow Jones is in a nosedive, taking investment accounts with it, and it doesn't matter all that much to us - there isn't much money in there to lose. One less thing to worry about.

Though I do wonder, along with Thurston Howell III in an old Gilligan's Island episode, when the Dow will break 1000 - heading the other way this time on its way into a crater.

Antediluvian

• Seven-year-old John: "Did you watch Star Trek The Original Series on computers or TV?"
  
• Old, old Daddy: "On TV - we didn't have computers back then."

Amanda and Josh

My cousin Mike's daughter Amanda got married just after Christmas in Tampa Bay - here are wedding photos from Missy Duncan of Tampa Bay, who does great work.

For you compulsive wedding-photo junkies, here's a slideshow of all 603 photos.

Puck of Pook's Hill; or, my middle-brow reading list

Kicking around for things to do with the new blog, I figured I'd post a note for every book I finish. I have trouble finishing books, so this may be a small category.

Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill

One of the kids' favorite topics of mealtime conversation is what might have happened on our little third-of-an-acre of the prairie in past years, and what might happen right here in the future. That's exactly what Kipling does with a little patch of Sussex in this book, and it's a delight. He continues the idea in his short poem The Land, which follows the ancestors of Puck's Hobden through the millenia.

Hard day's night

I've pulled two all-nighters in a row, followed by all day with the kids at home while Lisa works at the bookstore. The owners of the store are taking a short and well-deserved vacation and with my flexible schedule Lisa is able to cover for them. So the kids and I are organizing around the house, thanks to some good "clean-up" music: Jaco Pastorius's album Invitation, the Meat Puppets album Too High to Die and the Red Hot Chili Peppers album with their remake of Stevie Wonder's Higher Ground. What's it take to get on our playlist? You've gotta be at least as harmonically interesting as the Beatles.