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Practical Magic Blog Party Post (Movie!)

This image was inspired by the murder, resurrection and zombie murder of Gillian’s Bulgarian boyfriend, James Angelvo. Please right click and view image to see full size.   Hope you like it!

A blog party!

Who knew!  I ran across this the other day and decided to join in on the fun!

I will be posting more  over on my new blog:    http://storybookforest.wordpress.com/

But to stay in the spirit, since this blog landed on the party site as well, I will make a picture post here. 

Multiply your pleasure by checking all the awesome blogs listed here:

http://pmblogparty.blogspot.com where the fun begins!

And so ends the life of Jupiter.

Keek got Triops for her birthday about two months ago and today her beloved Jupiter followed his partner Athena into the afterlife.  They both will be dearly missed. Keek has written the following in memory of…

“Athena was grayish orange with two whiskers on one side and one on the other.  She was relaxed and calm for all her life.  She loved to play with Jupiter.  They would chase each other around the tank and dig side by side.  They would chew on the sticks in the tank together like two beavers busy at work.

Jupiter was big.  He dug almost non stop.  He loved to swim upside down just under the waters surface.  He’d do loopdy loops all around the tank and hardly ever sit still.  He had three whiskers on each side and was grayish green with an orange tint.

Now Athena and Jupiter are together again.  I love you and miss you. I will always remember you.”

Pizza toppings and rice dinner recipe

My daughter and I are ethical vegetarians and love to experiment with meat substitutes.  We purchased a four pack of “Field Roast” Italian grain meat sausages for the grill.  They were a huge hit with vegan phobic Dad so we had to get them again.  This is our second time round with the artisan sausages and we all had a hand in the development of this delicious recipe. I’m betting this recipe would be equally delicious with traditional italian sausage, too.

1 cup rice

2 cups water

Italian sausage (12.95 oz)

1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes with juice

4oz  black olives

1 avocado, chopped

5 button mushrooms, chopped

1/3 cup parmesan cheese

Start the rice in rice cooker.  Chop sausage and add to skillet.  Brown.  Add everything else.  Simmer 5 minutes.  Turn off heat and let steam on hot burner until rice is done. The sauce will thicken as water evaporates and it cools. Serve over steamed rice.

It’s like pizza only better!

Accordian book

Made this today.  It’s pocket sized, roughly 3″x4″, and could hold lots of cheat sheets … or whatever…

Made of patterened and colored scrapbooking cardstock. One tag sticker with hole pre-punched and yarn bow.

Four accordian packets affixed to the colored cardstock.

The accordian sections have six folds which show as thirteen sides and one side attached to the green.

planting… reading… cooking and stuff

Planted some watermelons today.  We hope to have them in the dog days of summer, late September.  The tomato’s are growing but we haven’t any new blooms.    One has turned orange! We have one pepper and no blooms there either.  The hail really slowed the garden.

Reading “Island in the sea of time” by SM Stirling.  Harsh… We’re 2/3 of the way done.  The story is great and all but some of the details are stomach churning.

Keek got “the vegetarian teen” by Dr. Charles A. Salter, a cookbook from the library. She really enjoys it and we’ve got a couple of recipes to try.  Keek is an ethical vegetarian and we have decided to purchase all meats from Native Roots Market.  So she’ll be eating meat again. 

Crocheted a bag strap for one of my grocery bags but I made it too short on accident.  Now I think I’ll turn it into a collar for a shirt.

I want to start sewing.  I want to make a couple of dresses, one for me and one for Keek, then winter cloaks.  It should be easy enough to finish the dresses quick and the cloaks are for winter.  Around the house, mostly, like wearable blankets.  Velvet if we can afford it.  I think Fish would like one too, but at this point he thinks they are too girl-y. 

Bounty of a Hail Storm

The hail storm broke new growth off all the trees in our yard, broke window screens, a car window and pock marked every surface available.  Luckily we didn’t lose any windows on the house and, even better, we get to harvest some new growth pine. We’ve got about one grocery bag full.

Pine is high in vitamin C and an antiseptic. We can get at the pine goodies in a number of ways.  One way is by drinking the pine tea. It’s the easiest way to harness the pine’s health benefits.  Simply dry then chop the needles and pour boiling water over desired amount of leaf.  Steep 5 minutes and enjoy with some honey.

We are saving half of the larger needles for pine vinegar. Simple to make it only requires some heated apple cider vinegar, the pine needles, finely chopped, and a jar with a wax paper lid.  It does take six weeks to ripen. The pine vinegar the healthful benefits of vinegar and pine.

I aspire to take the other half of the larger pine needles and make a pine lozenges for sore throats and coughs.  It’s a little more complicated.  I’ve first got to boil the needles in minimal water.  Then strain the water; removing the needles. Measure the pine water volume and double it.  Add 4/5 that much sugar to the pot and the other 1/5 volume in honey: boil until it snaps. Pour onto wax paper lined counter and let cool.  Once that’s done snap off lozenges and store air tight in cabinet. The vitamin C, antiseptic qualities and honey will soothe the throat.  The pine scent will help clear the head and the spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

So there is a silver lining to the hail storm.  I just had to find it.

Homeschooling on weekends.

I know it’s Sunday.  Most families in the school systems count the weekends as days off.  They deserve those days off.

School system families spend so much time apart from one another working under the control of some unknown, distant, superintendent clock watcher.  We, on the other hand, get to see lots of each other and can complete our work quickly with relatively few interruptions.  So school on the weekend is not a big deal. It’s not like we unplug our brains for two days.  Learning still happens whether we record it or not!

The kids have decided to have recorded school this weekend.  Which really amounts to doing some math and recording the reading they’d be doing anyway.  I think they made the decision, in part, because Dad is working this weekend.  No shift in his routine means no shift in the kids’ routine.  So we get two extra days of recorded school and “summer” comes that much sooner!

Maggots

By Keek

We killed another snake.  It’s body is now crawling with maggots.

eww     eww

List of vacation spots in Oklahoma

By Keek

1. Red Rock

2. Heyburn state park

3. Robbers cave

4. White water bay

5. Frontier city

6. Orr Family Farm

7. MbarT Ranch

8. Chief drive-in theater

9. Oklahoma city zoo

10. Science museum of Oklahoma

11. Gardner mansion and museum

12. 1889 territorial school house

13. Broken bow scuba service

14. Rocktown climbing gym

15. Historically haunted  tours of Oklahoma

16. Alabaster caverns state park

17. Laser expedition and great experience

18. Skydive Tulsa

19. Lakeway  marine and watersports

20. Skyway balloons inc.

21. Laser quest

22. Oklahoma adventure district

Oklahoma Tornado Damage 5-10-10

Little Axe school’s administration building flattened by tornado. A school function was taking place and thankfully no one was injured.

The debris field is visible around the remains of the building.  The perimeter fence had been blown off the posts and laid on the grass littered with paper.

Further damage and debris is visible on the opposite side of the road.

More debris and structural damage in the right side of this shot.

A tree was twisted in half, here, right in front of the high school.

ATOS and Lexile Book ratings

“Well, this is just too cool.” Says the sometimes over eager homeschooling mom to her cuppa tea.

At the AR Bookfinder website you can enter a book title, author and/or ISBN# to get the ATOS grade level rating.  The grade level number, like 2.5 means during the fifth month of second grade the child should be able to complete said book.  Now, I don’t think the month number is relevant and even the grade should be taken loosely but it’s a general idea and that’s what I’m after. 

Not every book is listed, which is too bad.  If you can’t find it on the AR booklist look it up, here, in the Lexile framework database. When the results come up on Lexile you get a number, like 1050.  Take that number and find it, here on this comparison chart,(page 2) to see the ATOS grade level approximation.  Again, I’m after a general idea and this list is great!

Not all books are listed in the lexile database either, so if you know of another database with this kind of information… please leave a link in the comments!

An interesting tidbit, too… books are rated differently by each country.  In the US, HP and the Sorcerer’s Stone rated 5.5 and in the UK, HP and The Philosopher’s Stone rated 6.0.  Same book, different score.

Wery wery interesting, no?

Cottonmouth

The kids and I were inside when the door flew open and Charles ran in. “OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!!”  He runs into the other room and grabs the sword.  As he passes through the living room he yells, “It’s HUGE!” I follow him out the door.  He’s half way across the yard and running with the sword out.  It was like a martial arts movie.  He skids to a stop at the base of the hill and chopped once, twice, three times into the tall grass.

I approach slowly and he picks up his prize; a long snake body.  The kids are on my heels eager to see what the commotion is all about. “Cool, Dad.” is Fish’s first reaction. “We’ve got to bury the head.” Keek comments. The writhing  snake’s body (sans head) is as tall as Fish.  It’s a Cottonmouth.  Eeeeke.  After the initial shock wears off, but while it’s still twitching, Keek says, “We should eat it.”  Bear Grylls would be proud.

It’s a Bird! It’s a spaceship! No, It’s a Narwhal!

We were looking at the way water reacts to no gravity in space on youtube and that sparked an interest in the new space shuttle design.  So we looked up more information about the Boeing design.  The first thing that came to mind when I saw it was a narwhal.  Fins, flippers and even the unicorn horn!  lol

So I wasn’t permitted to post a linked image of the Boeing X-40a but really, it’s worth google-ing!

April is National Poetry Month

Happy National Poetry month.  Here is my contribution.

“Red Cent”

Beware the Ides of March is what they used to say
beware the Ides of April seems more apt today.
Taxes argued over by right and left
new parties float around bereft.
The people watch in a lulled slumber
as politicians lead them asunder.
People at war and planet in crisis
what’s happened to the people’s synapses?
Revolution’s in the air on both sides of the aisle
but which of the supporters will carry leaders the mile?
Once again we’re in a predicament
trying to solve it with another red cent.
We’ve been here before and money’s not the answer
it seems to me money is the cancer.
Taxes argued over by right and left
new parties float around bereft.
Beware the Ides of March is what they used to say
beware the Ides of April seems more apt today.

Juvenile Cedar Waxwing

Discovered an unknown bird in the yard.  It appears to have fallen and died.  Had a heck of a time trying to ID it at whatbird.com.  It was a juvenile so I kept clicking the smaller bird category.  And these guys are not supposed to be breeding in Oklahoma, they are supposed to nest far north of here.  Only whatbird has them nesting as close as Northern KS and NE.  But anyway, we finally found it’s true identity by Googling “yellow tipped tail feathers.” Once we were certain we listened to it’s song at birdjam.com

Here are some pictures of it’s beautiful tail feathers.  You can see in the two last photos how it’s plumage was changing to the adult colors but it hadn’t developed the red spots on the wings quite yet.  Poor birdie.

You can find more information about Cedar Waxwings here:

http://identify.whatbird.com/obj/159/_/Cedar_Waxwing.aspx

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Cedar_Waxwing/id

http://www.birdjam.com/birdsong.php?id=10

Mmmm. Smoothies.

1 cup frozen blueberries

1 cup frozen mixed berries

1 cup greek honey yogurt

2 bananas

1 cup skim milk

Dump everything into blender.  Chop to get things going then switch to frappe for just a minute.  Pour and enjoy.

Tofu dinner recipe for two.

With Keek being an ethical vegetarian we venture into tofu more and more.  This is an on the spot recipe.  It earned 5 stars from dear daughter (and I loved it too)!

5oz. #4 firm tofu, chopped

4 good-sized button mushrooms, chopped

1/2 red bell pepper, chopped – no seeds

1 roma tomato, chopped

1/2 cup shredded cheese (we used colby – jack)

1 1/2 Tbs. Italian seasoning

2 tsp cracked peppercorn

fresh washed spinach for 2 salad beds

horseradish sauce – to taste

Take all (except spinach and horseradish) mix well in microwave safe bowl. Microwave on high until cheese melts.  Serve over spinach with horseradish as dressing. I mixed mine all together and it was delicious.  Keek chose to eat hers by alternating one bite of tofu mix then one of spinach with no horseradish anywhere.  I like the spice…

So delicious.  Haven’t a name for the recipe any ideas would be appreciated!

Shrunken Heads (continued)

well…

It didn’t work out like we had expected.  We had two that shrunk up and two that got all mushy.  lol.  We’ll try again as Halloween approaches.