It’s spring!

9 Apr 2014

It is spring! Spring is finally here!

We got the bikes out a couple of days ago and my middle child discovered he could prop his bike up on the snow and spray water up everywhere. These pictures are from three days ago – the driveway is mostly bare of snow now. Yes, I know his helmet is tipping, but he was basically stationary when I was taking this picture so I wasn’t worried.

We are again taking just a little break from schoolwork and just enjoying the chance to be outside more, and working on random things like Easter eggs. I grew up in a community with a large Ukrainian population and I want my kids to know how to make pysanka.

One Comment

Clara

10 Apr 2014 at 12:21 pm Reply

It’s terrific! I Love Spring. Your photos are wonderful. So nice to get outside and breath the air. 🙂

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Christy's Houseful of Chaos

16 hours ago

The last few days I've been letting my writing focus on conversations between different characters in a novel set in ancient Israel. There's a decent chance the conversations don't make it through editing, but it is fun seeing the questions the characters ask one another. What stories do they tell one another? What questions would they ask? How would they explain their beliefs to one another? The process forces me to think things through over and over.I am taking the different contradictions in the ideas available in 722 BCE - 701 BCE an assigning them to different characters. Why might a character argue that believing in Yahweh alone means accepting the yoke of Assyrian rule, while others might argue that Yahweh will free them from Assyrian rule? How might an Assyrian understand the fighting between different Egyptian leaders? How might the people the Assyrians captured and potentially resettled relate to the Assyrian gods? ... See MoreSee Less

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Christy's Houseful of Chaos

3 days ago

Spring can be a deceptive time of year, taunting us with a few warm sunny days before lapsing back into clouds and cold. I feel like my mental state has been doing the same thing. I have a few days of energy and inspiration interspersed with many more days where I have to drag myself from one task to another. I miss seeing people. I miss being around more people. But, there are fun little adventures to be had.We had one day this past week where we noticed a duck had laid an egg on our neighbour's lawn. It was probably the world's stupidest nesting site, considering the number of dogs that are walked on our street so I wasn't surprised when, later, we realized the egg and duck had both disappeared.My new writing project brought my an initial burst of excitement followed by a couple of weeks of self-doubt as I struggled to get a sense of the day to day life in my setting. My desire to make everything historically accurate runs into problems as I try to write about a time period where not everything is understood, and I have to brace myself for the fact this is fiction, and it is my job to just make choices about how I portray it. Some days that goes easier than other days.I found a one-star review on my Amazon listing for my Bible study book, with someone saying it is inaccurate and misleading. The person says it relies too strongly on "Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan, whose claims regarding the Bible - although still popular amongst edgy anti-religious types - have been widely disputed and rejected by reputable scholars across the spectrum of beliefs (nonreligious, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.)." I do like Crossan's work, though most of the work of his I've read is focused on the writings of Paul, so not relevant to the bulk of what I've written. (I find it interesting the reviewer says Crossan and Borg are popular among anti-religious types, since they are popular within the United Church of Canada and they themselves are very religious.) I'm curious as to what scholars this anonymous reviewer is calling reputable. I've read one of the books he or she references too, and did not find it remotely convincing as it seemed to twist the archeological evidence to fit the Bible stories in ways that contradicted other works I had read. I'm thinking about all the many, many sources I have read by other people. Besides Crossan, I was influenced also by Albertz and Gottwald, and by the writings of Nadav Na'aman and Mary Douglas and so many other authors. I would love to have a discussion with the reviewer about the different ideas he or she takes objections too. Since finishing writing the book I have continued to read more and more, including very academic works by Ancient Near Eastern scholars and though there are some details I might change in a later addition of my book the bulk of it continues to be supported by what I read. It is funny reading things, how there are books that make it seem like the past is known and there are other books that outline the sketchiness by which we know things. I've been loving attending online presentations recently where researchers present about their work and the ways in which the conclusions are drawn. I love reading enough about a single topic that I can recognize in books where they got their information even before checking the footnotes.Anyway.... life continues on. My children and I have been playing Blightfall, a modded version of Minecraft, which requires lots of teamwork and cooperation. We've also been sorting and reorganizing the house some. I'm happy to watch some of the perennials come up in my garden, though I'm faced now with the job of weeding some of them back. I hate doing that.When I'm absent from Facebook it is often due to my ambivalence about the medium. Even besides the bigger questions about algorithms and effects of echo chambers on society and such, I face the problem that Facebook stats for pages play into my competitive nature. It is too easy to look at the numbers of people who saw a post or who liked or unliked a page and think any of that matters. At times I make the effort to post regularly, enjoying the comments and discussion, the sense of community and being heard, and the hope of increasing sales to my books and classes, but at other times I withdraw, scared that any work on the platform will feed into the competitive, nervous parts of myself that worries about popularity and gets jealous of other's successes. And when depression does pull me down, it can be tempting to think that any thing I write just reveals my own flaws to everyone. So I find my balance, sometimes writing more and sometimes writing less, hoping I won't later judge myself too harshly for what I've written. ... See MoreSee Less

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Christy's Houseful of Chaos

4 days ago

This is fascinating and creepy. The priests were showing an ability to use the gasses to kill animals without themselves being killed by them. ... See MoreSee Less

Ancient Roman 'Gate to Hell' Killed Victims With Its Deadly Lake

www.sciencealert.com

A cave ancient Romans believed to be a gate to the underworld was so deadly that it killed all animals who entered its proximity, while not harming the human priests who led them.

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Christy's Houseful of Chaos

6 days ago

My husband and I have been going through old newspaper articles online, looking up family history but also other people, like the missionary woman connected to my hometown. We're stumbling upon so many stories. In looking up my hometown, we stumble across a story about a man who was tried but found not guilty for murdering a 'woman of ill repute' and then soon after he married. Five years later, he's on the run from the law. His wife tried to leave him and he murdered her. She claimed she had been forced to marry him, and I'm curious how that happened. Who forced her? Was it him? Her family?There's other stories.... my hometown was built where a train passed about fifteen kilometers north of where an earlier village was. The earlier village, built on the river, was abandoned and people moved north. The old newspapers talk about people objecting to the route of the railway. That protest isn't talked about locally much. There's also a report about a secret meeting being held, with no explanation of why.During WWI there were newspapers articles advocating for the rights of the Ukrainian immigrants in Canada if they fail to accept conscription.So many fascinating stories. ... See MoreSee Less

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Christy's Houseful of Chaos

7 days ago

I was listening to a lecture today where someone mentioned the Bible as a cultural icon - an icon of what people believe it contains, and not actually reflecting the actual content of the Bible. That really struck me as an important distinction to make. Lots of people have an image of the Bible in their mind based on stories they learned in Sunday school and based on their assumptions about what Christianity contains. They assume the Bible is about respecting your parents, or not having premaritial sex, or whatever else it is they think it must teach. That isn't the Bible that I wrestle with at all. It's a totally different book that doesn't really exist. Occasionally I have students join my classes expecting to learn about that cultural icon. ... See MoreSee Less

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Clara

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