On car doors and locks

My husband went to the store yesterday. When he got there, he noticed a group of people in the parking lot, bunched around a car, trying to get into it using a piece of wire.

No, no, don't get ahead of me, here. One of the people was a respected grown-up my husband recognized. It was clearly a case of a young woman having locked herself out of her car, and people on hand coming to her aid as best they could, given their lack of knowledge of car thievery and the car's doorlock design.

When my husband went back outside, the group was still at it. On a hunch, he walked over and said, "You have tried the back door, haven't you?" as he reached out for the door handle for the passenger seat behind the driver's seat.

Which. Opened. Nice. As. You. Please.

I'd laugh harder except I've made mistakes just as silly in my lifetime. Ahem.

As it happens, I read a locked-out-of-car post just the other day. See Joe McKeever's It Takes a Professional for a story taken from Ron Dunn's book "Don't Just Stand There, Pray Something."

Apron Power!

Barbara Curtis over at Mommy Life recently hosted a contest for women who love aprons. It's over now, but pictures are up at Picasa Web Albums - Barbara - Apron Power!.

I applaud Barbara's comment explaining her contest:

I say it's time to bring back the apron - and I don't mean the unisex cloth chef's apron, but the frilly feminine - even to the point of useless - kind.

What's funny (or perhaps sad) is that up until last fall I might not have agreed. I remember that we were required to make aprons in home-ec class at school, but we were embarrassed about it. My friends and I didn't want to be caught dead in an apron. We were beyond aprons.

Last fall, I chanced upon some cheap (I mean $1.99 cheap) aprons at a local store. Feeling faintly ridiculous, I bought one, just because it seemed it might be practical to have one, and because I really liked the colors. If nothing else, I told myself, it would be a nice decorative touch, hanging on the wall.

Practical it has been (and how). But more than that, it has been fun. I've got two aprons now, both rather the chef's kind but in vintage prints (to go with my wonderful old-fashioned kitchen), and I'm thinking of making some frillier ones. Just because I feel like it.

Barbara elaborates in a post called Further thoughts on aprons:

As I told you in the beginning, I just started wearing an apron a year ago. It was only after the contest began that I "got" the significance of the apron - how feminism had changed it into a symbol of oppression. Funny how all those little womanly things that were passed down for generations were thrown out the window and now people like Martha Stewart make a fortune teaching us how to do them again :)

So my question is, have any of you had any further thoughts on the significance of aprons? Have any of you tried them for the first time and found them to be empowering? How about the fact that your clothes stay cleaner? :)

I think she's on to something. I'm having a grand time rediscovering the worthwhile know-how and wisdom and heritage and folkways that were given unwarranted bad press (or suppressed, or reinterpreted out of all recognition) in my formative years.

Like aprons.

I felt uncomfortable putting one on that first time, several weeks ago. Sheepish, you might say. Bad steers from bad company in your younger years can linger, worse the luck.

Then I went through a very brief defiant stage, a la Take that, you misguided mentors of my youth! I've outgrown you! I CAN wear an apron!

(Childish, I know. But there it is. Does it help any that it was just a flash, gone as quickly as it came?)

And now? Now those aprons are a part of my everyday routine. They make working in the kitchen easier. And they bring a smile to my face. They fit. Not literally. I'm short and they don't fit me well, but I've decided aprons in general are my style.

So's helping to run a business. And writing. And studying. And trying to learn something every day. (And blogging, when I've got the time. You might have noticed that.) And being neighborly. You know, trying to be a well-rounded, complete human being, improving as I go, if I can, but never (I hope) taking myself too seriously.

Tell me again why we ever bought into the ridiculous notions that a woman who liked being mistress of her domain - who enjoyed running a home - had taken two steps back and was somehow letting other women down? That wearing an apron was a badge of shame? Puleeze. How provincial can you get?

Feminists tend to panic too easily, I've decided.

That's their problem. Heh. Aprons for me, please.

Addition: Randi has a tutorial for making a "Mommy's Little Helper Kitchen Apron".

Addition: (via SFO Mom) My goodness, the blogger The Kitchen Madonna is organizing a National Wear an Apron Day! (An Apron Manifesto or How to Get All Tied up with Apron Strings of Love, The Kitchen Madonna, January 24, 2007):

There is an apron renaissance going on out there and much of it is recorded on the internet. Women everywhere are taking pictures of their aprons and posting them on certain blogs. They are scouring the internet looking for vintage patterns and materials. They are writing about what being a mother and a housewife means to them. These women aren’t depressed. They don’t need valium or to secretly drink or to watch a wildly popular television show that is a diabolical inversion of their lives.

I think a National Wear an Apron Day should be May 14th during the month of Immaculate Mary and the day after Mother’s Day. Amidst the quiet drama of our everyday lives, we can celebrate in gratitude our homes and families by toasting each other with tea and homemade cookies and fresh buttered bread. And go ahead, on Career Day at your local school, invite a girl over to see what your life is like. She most likely will have no idea how to hold a baby or how to make a stew or how to bake a casserole to take to a bereaved family or how soft your apron is for drying tears.

The devil very well may wear Prada but authentically feminine women wear aprons!

If you support a National Wear An Apron Day, please email the Kitchen Madonna...

This is my kind of revolution. :)

I don't think I'd go so far as to insist that authentically feminine women wear aprons. But if y'all want to sort females out into apronphobes versus the rest of us, well... let me think about it some more but it does have an appeal, I must say.

Update: Kitchen Madonna writes (see comments):

I need to clarify that while I love aprons, they also symbolize something THAT DOESN"T REQUIRE AN APRON TO ACHIEVE OR TO BE. You can be authentically feminine and not wear one. Don 't have to. I'm just taking a homey, common object and trying to say what women do in the home is so important...

New blog watch: Jay's World View

Now, this could be interesting, not to mention fun. It's a boy's blog from Kenya. So far, amongst other things, he's posted on a really cool treehouse, the coolest bug he's ever seen, abseiling down a really steep cliff!!...

hat tip: Nairobi Paul (that would be Jay's father)

The future is what you make it: Eastern Europe housing edition

You know those awful prefab high-rise apartment buildings of Eastern Europe? There's a move on to not tear them down, but instead to make them more energy efficient. (Making Eastern Europe's Tower Blocks Energy Efficient, Deutsche Welle, 04.02.2007)

I guess saving energy trumps feeding the human spirit with beauty if you're a certain type of efficiency geek. Or if you're a certain type of reporter. The caption on the lead photo with this article actually says, "The prefab's future is looking rosier."

Gee, that's good news. Isn't it?

Well, here, let me be fair. Here's the first part of the article:

Starting in the 1960s, virtually all new public housing projects in eastern Europe were pre-fabricated tower blocks. Millions of people continue to live in the buildings, which were built in an age when saving energy was low on the list of priorities. Now a group of researchers from the University of Kassel is doing their best to make the towers more environmentally friendly.

Engineer Hartmut Hübner and his colleagues have been working in Dunaujvaros, south of Budapest, to convert Communist-era high-rises into environmentally friendly housing. The high-rises aren't just inefficient in terms of energy consumption, they are also a potential source of social conflict, according to Hübner.

(Don't hold your breath. It's not what you think...)

"Here in Hungary, as in other eastern European countries, heating costs are still subsidized," he said. "But that will change. And with rising energy costs, it'll be difficult for the people here to pay their heating bills."

The Solanova Project, of which Hübner is a part, has already succeeded in retrofitting a seven-story building in the small town. The biggest problem was that prefabricated components for the buildings no longer exist, so the engineers had to experiment with parts such as solar panels or energy-efficient windows.

OK, OK, I have no objection to making existing buildings more energy efficient, especially if the government is about to hand over the costs to people who are stuck there.

But does it strike anybody else as somehow tragic that somehow all this gets reduced to 'efficiency good, energy waste bad'?

A little catechist humor, and a question

From Catechist's Journey, a blog I stumbled on this morning thanks to Georgie Tamayo Clemens, here's a child's take on Psalm 23. (He seems to have the gist, even if the words aren't quite right...)

On a slightly more somber note, from the same blog, where do people get the idea that priests are supposed to be perfect? I grew up in a secular environment, and I know I was taught wrong on this, but why do so many people from religious families get so messed up on this?:

...It’s no wonder that young people shy away from the thought of a vocation if they think it means being perfect. Yes, we need to teach them a respect for priests and religious, but we also need to help them see that all people, including priests and religious, struggle with the call to holiness…a call we ALL share. In a sense, to be holy is to be perfect but God alone is holy (perfect). When we refer to people as holy, we are saying that God’s presence is revealed in that person. We can all strive to reveal rather than conceal God’s presence in us.

Bibliothèque nationale de France - Virtual exhibitions, and France in America

While looking for a specific Medieval painting for Amanda's color feast (I found the uncredited painting in a book, but have yet to find it online, alas; Medieval art can be sooo colorful), I came across the virtual exhibitions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, aka BNF, and managed to find my way to a version of the website in English. There's some good stuff there.

See, for instance: The sea
Also: Medieval bestiary

Getting out of the virtual exhibits, I found a France in America section:

Conceived in partnership with the Library of Congress - the great library of Washington - La France en Amérique/France in America is a bilingual digital library made available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th Century to the end of the 19th Century.

Through direct digital access to complete books, maps, prints, and other documents from the collections of the partner libraries, the project illuminates two major themes in the history of relations between France and the United States: the major role played by France in the exploration and settlement of the continent and its participation in several events which indelibly marked the history of the United States: the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the cession of Louisiana. The site will be completed in fall 2006 with a panorama of economic, scientific, literary and artistic exchanges between the two nations in the course of the 19th Century.

The missions of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress are to make their resources available to ever growing numbers of people and to preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations. La France en Amérique / France in America is the newest addition to Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France's digital library. With some 76 thousand digitized texts and 80 thousand images to date, Gallica offers the online public an encyclopedic reference collection as well as sites dedicated to particular themes. The companion site at the Library of Congress is part of the Global Gateway project, whose mission is to establish cooperative digital libraries with national libraries from around the world.

[...snip...]

This digital collection takes its place alongside two other websites brought online since 2003 dedicated to the shared history of France and North America: La Louisiane française, 1682-1803 (http://www.louisiane.culture.fr/en/som.html), produced by the Ministry of Culture as part of the "National Celebrations" collection; and the French-Canadian site Nouvelle-France, horizons nouveau (http://www.archivescanadafrance.org/), undertaken by the initiative of the Direction des archives de France, the Library and Archives Canada, and the Canadian Embassy in Paris.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress present these documents as part of the record of the past. These historical documents reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The two libraries do not endorse the views expressed in these collections, which may contain materials offensive to some readers.

So, what are you doing still hanging around here? ;)

Photoperiod-based sleuthing

From Super-Fun Geography Studies with Journey North's Mystery Class (Melissa Wiley, The Lilting House, January 24, 2007):

As one of my little ones used to say, I'm so a-cited! It's almost time to begin a new season of happy hunting with the Journey North Mystery Class. Ten classes of schoolchildren around the world have been chosen to be Mystery Classes, and it's up to the rest of us to track down their location. You too can join in the fun!

Here's how it works...

"Best Silly Kid Arguments" sought

Melissa Wiley is collecting Kids Fight Over the Most Ridiculous Things stories. (It started, as I understand it, when she posted about her kids fighting over dryer lint...)

Share The Love Blog Awards

Share The Love Blog Awards showcases a lot of blogs I don't know, nominated along with blogs I really like. Hmmm. I know my links list is too long already. But... but... this looks like a gold mine. The awards are hosted by the hostess of One Woman's World.

hat tip: Randi

Movie note: The Pursuit of Happyness

In Commentary: Material Goods and The Pursuit of Happyness, Jordan Ballor writes:

Will Smith's latest movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, stands as an extended argument underscoring the truth of conservative values. This may sound like an improbable anomaly given the traditional political, ethical, and social allegiances of Hollywood, but the power of the story lies in its basis in fact, and this in turn prevents it from being appropriated as a tool for liberal political ideology.

The narrative is inspired by the true life experiences of Christopher Gardner, a struggling and homeless single father turned successful stockbroker and CEO. The story begins in 1981...

Movie note: Miss Potter

Javamom recommends the movie Miss Potter, based on the life of Beatrix Potter.

Job opening

From Help Wanted (Cafe Hayek, January 30, 2007):

I'm looking for someone who might be able to do some simple animation to tell economic stories. For example, I have an idea for a narrative that would show how the minimum wage hurts the workers with the lowest skills. You could make it a full-blown documentary or animated story. But what I'm thinking of is a low-level of visual sophistication (stick figures or crayonesque drawings) that would have a certain stylish simplicity so that you could create this kind of visual story quickly and at relatively low cost. But it would be fast-paced enough and entertaining enough that people would want to watch.

Ball's in your court.

What are libraries for?: Social uplift edition

From A Social-Uplift Program That Works by Nicole Gelinas, City Journal Autumn 2006:

The Queens Library is that rare New York phenomenon: a government-funded social-uplift program that works. It succeeds by doing what it has done for over a century: giving New Yorkers with ambition (however modest or grand it may be) the tools they need for self-improvement. These tools get real results in Gotham, where people can earn an incremental reward for each skill they obtain. Learn English, and move from a kitchen job to an office job. Master math, and pass the GED and start technical college. The Queens Library’s crowded branches suggest that many poor and immigrant New Yorkers understand the city’s opportunities for upward mobility and that they see themselves not at all as victims trapped by circumstance but as individuals possessing the independence, the self-discipline, and the chance to get ahead.

That's the good news. For the bad news, Gelinas notes that city leaders don't recognize libraries as poverty-fighting tools and have cut funding.

The article has some nice history (including background on Andrew Carnegie), and showcases the services offered then and now. For instance:

Because nearly half of the residents of Queens are foreign-born, one of the library’s most practical services is to help the borough’s African, Asian, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern immigrants assimilate into American society, just as it helped German, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants become citizens a century ago. The library is particularly effective at this task, because it recognizes a key truth lost on many contemporary immigrant-advocacy groups: newcomers can’t succeed in America unless they speak English. Hence the library’s wildly popular, and free, English-for-Speakers-of-a-Second-Language program—the largest such initiative in the nation, serving 3,000 students annually. Each semester, the program must turn people away, sometimes two prospective students for every one who gets a slot.

The whole article is well worth a read.

Previous related articles:
What are libraries for?
What are libraries for?, revisited

The sign

Donna-Jean recounts going to a March for Life rally nineteen years ago:

Nearly everyone, it seemed, carried a sign. They were both factory-made (big red octagon shapes saying "Stop Abortion Now") and homemade (I remember the quote from Dr. Suess' "Horton Hears a Who" on one: "Because a person is a person, no matter how small.").

I didn't have a sign. I could have asked for one, I'm sure, but I wanted something different - something that reflected why my husband and taken the time to come there.

Then I realized my sign was in my pocketbook. I pulled out my latest photo of our precious just-turned-two year old daughter, got a safety pin from my husband (one of those people who always, always has one in his wallet, because "you never know when you'll need one"), and pinned her picture to my coat.

Click through to her post for more on that rally, plus what she and others are doing these days for women hurt by abortion, and to help young men and women grow up with valor and virtue.

Color feast entry (or would that be entree?)

Does the green outweigh the grey, do you think? (In other words, is it colorful enough for a color feast? Possibly not, but I hope it'll sneak in as warm, heartening, or cheery.)

This shot was taken from inside the house, through a window, the end of October. There were two or three other deer in the back yard, but this trio looked especially at home. We keep the back semi-wild for the fun of it, and are repaid with scenes like this. (Actually, they sometimes also bed down in the more-manicured front lawn, too. Deer around here aren't terribly shy.)

For those of you not up on wildlife of Oregon, those are mule deer. The ears should explain the name.

Previous related post: On color feasts, dog years, and Leap Day, etc

Changeover

I've just changed over to New Blogger. I'm hoping it's a smooth transition. Please bear with me while I learn the ins and outs of the new set-up (and do let me know if I introduce glitches)...

On color feasts, dog years, and Leap Day, etc.

Amanda Witt's family recently relocated to a snowy area, and all that whiteness is getting to her. She's fighting back in a wonderful way (to my way of thinking):

And so I was driven, two days ago, into the arms of defiant El Greco. Today I give you Cezanne, along with an invitation: Bloggers, post something bright, something colorful, warm, and heartening, and let me know; non-bloggers (unbloggers?), if you run across something colorful and cheery in the next week or two, send me a link to it. I'll post the links, and we'll have a color feast to tide us over until Valentine's Day.

I don't know why, but this made me think of one of my favorite bits from The Pirates of Penzance. The Pirate King has come to explain to the hapless (but dutiful) Frederic why he isn't out of his apprenticeship after all:

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February,
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty.
Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the agency of an ill-natured fairy –
You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, on the twenty-ninth of February;
And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover,
That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, you’re only five and a little bit over!

OK, OK, I know why I thought of it. First of all, because of the idea that February is shorter because it's beastly, and it's not nice to add a day to it every fourth year, but you might as well laugh at it. Secondly, because I'd just read this other Wittingshire post on dog years. Personally, I'd like for the concept of "dog years" to become one of those things that dissolves in the mists of time. I don't find it very useful as an adult, and it confused the stuffing out of me as a kid. But the post is funny, and I got to wondering if that household has ever tackled the ins and outs of the folks who have their birthday on Leap Day. I seem to remember being concerned, when younger, about people who only had "real" birthdays every four years. From a child's perspective, it seemed the sort of thing that might scar you for life, being subjected to faux birthdays or, worse, being asked to stoicly not have a birthday party three years out of four. Horrors! ;)

Beyond that, it just seemed a riddle, that some years were longer than others, and Feb. 29 sometimes was and sometimes simply wasn't.

Then I found out that George Washington (along with a lot of other people, of course) had two birthdays, because the calendar got changed during his lifetime. That really threw me. Calendars, to that point, had seemed eternal truths, or something along that line. (A very wrong assumption, as it turned out.)

On Reading Aloud

Kate Pitrone advocates reading aloud. Why? Let her tell you. (On Reading Aloud, Guest Commentary, Ashbrook Center, January 2007)

hat tip: Wittingshire

"Angels Among Us"

See Angels Among Us at A Rose By Any Other Name for a link to a video by the musical group Alabama, taking note of those who make a difference in the lives of others. Good stuff.

Putting his foot down (and in his mouth at the same time)

Mark Laswell, deputy books editor at The Wall Street Journal, takes on Sen. Chuck Hagel's jab at shoe salesmen:

Washington is a city of many diversions, but very little surpasses the pure entertainment value of watching a senator--media chatter about his potential attractiveness as a presidential prospect ringing in his ears--commandeer the microphone during a committee meeting and then posture in a most forceful and statesmanlike way for the television cameras. Sen. Hagel did not disappoint last week. As the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared to vote on the resolution expressing outright opposition to the increase in troops, Sen. Hagel, a longstanding critic of the war, was in ultra-dudgeon about what he apparently regards as an insufficient amount of Capitol Hill kibitzing on the president's conduct of the war.

"I think all 100 senators ought to be on the line" by having to make a "tough vote" on the troop increase, Sen. Hagel said. In a bit of bullying that instantly became the TV quote of the day, he then appeared to call out an unspecified number of his honorable colleagues as cowards: "If you wanted a safe job, go sell shoes."

Whereupon, Mr. Lasswell makes some comparisons between having a Senate job and selling shoes, (which is, as reality would have it, not that safe a job).

But here's the meat in the broth:

It's not clear precisely what the point would be of a resolution opposing the troop increase, other than letting legislators flatter themselves with the notion that they have some influence over the president's war-making strategy. Conducting a periodic opinion poll on Capitol Hill (for that's what nonbinding resolutions are) might be useful. Certainly historians would wish that during the Civil War the Senate had taken its temperature every few months regarding President Lincoln's prosecution of the war. Might have been interesting to compare their vacillations with his single-mindedness.

Hmmmm.

Full article: If the Shoe Fits: Chuck Hagel courageously takes on footwear salesmen (OpinionJournal, Feb. 1, 2007)