A Mainly Feminine Post

...Unless you are a boy who takes a keen interest in housekeeping practices of decades gone by.

Exhibit A: A "Budget Menu" for one week from the 1940s: Exhibit B: A book from 1919 called "A Thousand Ways To Please Your Husband" (It's about cooking, you bad person.) Actually this is just a cute picture I found, here is the link to the book. (The whole book! For free!)

I find that people in past decades may not have eaten as much meat and may have had things like "frizzled beef on toast rounds" for breakfast, but wow did they have a lot of dessert. Serve hot breads and a dessert with each meal, apparently, and everyone eats less of the spendy protien. It's worth thinking about, as I contemplate the meat still left in my freezer that I need to use up before our beef goes to slaughter.

(I know. I'm closer to the source of my meat than most people, and possibly quite callous. But our beef does go to slaughter next week, which means I have three weeks to use/give away the remaining beef from last year.)

I need to use up yet: a tongue, a heart, about fifteen pounds of burger, two packages of short ribs, a prime rib roast, and numerous lumpy and unweildly packages of "boiling beef" which sounds atrocious and looks like dog bones but which makes the best. stew. ever.

As I am planning on foisting this bounty off on unsuspecting relatives and possibly the neighbors, I can't help but think about how long the people in exhibits A and B would have made this last. Wow again, and I feel like someone has been lecturing me about starving children and how they'd be happy to have my dog bones/boiling beef.

(I am trying to stop saying "dang" because Miss Boo yesterday admonished her brother "Dang, baby!" This is unsettling from the mouth of a not-even-two-year-old, but at the same time made me glad I don't say anything stronger.)

So enjoy-- and should you desire to make use of the resources, please do. They are free.

Cheers,

Breanna

Si, We are Alive

Non, we are not healed from our colds yet. (But hooray! the Husband only has to be gone 2 days instead of 2 weeks!)

So I don't have a good blog for you or a good picture.

But watch this. There are four parts to the video. Watch the original too, if you want, to make sure she really is as careless with language as the critique says she is.

A point the critique doesn't address: it's massively unfair for wealthy, educated, people with one or no children (like, say, most of the members of Greenpeace or the Sierra Club) to dictate the ethical choices of poor or middle-class, less-educated people with multiple children. It might be feasible if I was single for me to buy locally-made organic recycled Peaceshoes for $200. Since I've got kids to think about, we all have to buy the cheaper shoes strip-mined in China so that we have something on our feet.

Of course, they would probably rather I didn't have kids. In which case they can go jump off a pier.

Now Brother is snortling and coughing again, so I'd better go suction out his nose.

Cheers,

Breanna

More Policktical News...

... though no cute baby pics today. We've all got snotty noses today anyway and are less than cute. Maybe tomorrow. Today I'm too much on fire with a "see! see! I told you!" to take pictures.

(If you don't want a rant, please click on a link in the sidebar to the "Like Mother, Like Daughter" link where Leila will tell you how to get free fabric, and thank you for your support.)

So. I was over at Fox News today and I note two stories which I think compliment each other like bookends, this one and this one (you can view the video in question from Fox's homepage). The stories, in case you are too lazy to go and read them, involve twin scandals which will probably die the death of the unreported-on-CNN scandal: the forced resignation of a National Endowments for the Arts director who "encouraged" artists to produce works supportive of PBO's policies, and the video tape made by an "unnamed individual" in a public first-grade class of students chanting, among other things, "hooray Mr. President". May I just say see, see, and I told you so.

Let's be very generous, exceedingly and perhaps even stupidly generous, and say that the administration had nothing whatever to do with either of these little scandals. Even if PBO himself and his policymakers are pure as my rich creamery butter is always claiming to be, this is a dangerous example of what his supporters are capable of. Schoolchildren having to learn political fight songs and artists being commissioned to produce works of art designed to stir the stupid populace in the right direction strike me as, I dunno, eerie? condescending? Maoist?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If anyone was going to be able to maintain a conspiracy, it wouldn't be the federal government. These are the geniuses, after all, who pay $300 for a toilet seat and who can't see anything absurd about spending $4 billion on "efficient" healthcare when we currently spend $2.5 billion on "inefficient" healthcare. So I don't think that this is all part of a sinister plan to make us throw up flat-handed salutes whenever we see a picture of the PBO. But I do think it's a troubling sign of the times we live in. I have some advice to dispense:

Don't swallow anything if you're not sure it's fit to eat. This includes things on CNN.

Don't believe the economy is good, bad, or indifferent if your own experience says otherwise.

Wash your hands. (Swine flu is real.)

Get your orders in early for your velvet PBO calendar--they'll go like hotcakes.

And please, please, put everything you hear and see through a critical filter (including stuff on this blog). We all of us make mistakes; some of us are trying deliberately to trick you. Oh, and you may want to unexpectedly drop in on your kid's schoolroom this fall.

Cheers,

Breanna

The Bribery Baby Pictures

See? I never welsh. :)
This is the "swimming" pose Brother does lately.

This is Miss Boo's fabric teaset, a baby present from the doctor who delivered her. Thank you, Dr. Lamb!

This is the "push up practice" pose. He can't hold it very long.

Cheers,

Breanna

ACKIJABIBIBO!

....was the sound I made when the Husband told me that the cement gods have decreed he shall not only 1) go away for two weeks in October to turn on a new cement plant (apparently that is more complicated than simply flipping a switch to "on"), he shall also 2) go away for two days next week to help with...something I don't understand.

I'm trying to have a good attitude about it.

But I'm eating too many chocolate chip cookies in the attempt.

Will you all pray for me? I'll put pictures of babies up in another post, I promise.

Thanks,

Breanna

Curriculum Research

Miss Boo has been doing research today on how to homeschool Baby-O.

You have to read textbooks so carefully these days.

I think she has her doubts about this one.

*sigh* I can't wait until I have an excuse to buy school supplies again. September seems so empty without them. In the meantime, this article by Dorothy Sayers gives one food for thought.

Cheers,

Breanna

"Pictcha?"

Miss Boo knows I put "pictchas" of her on the computer. Today she decided it had been long enough since she was famous. She obligingly modeled for me.

And demonstrated what she is not allowed to do (get into Brother's wipes).

And looked out the back door.

Brother (or "purple boy", as Miss Boo calls him when he wears his Rockies jersey) finds the whole thing boring.

In the meantime, I've been putting up 12 quarts of apples and a couple quarts of spagetti sauce, so I haven't been quite idle.

Cheers,

Breanna