Strolling around the old neighborhood

I wanted to check my memory on something, so I have been over here reading through the archives. It's unleashed a flood of memories (although, sad to say, has not provided the clear details I wanted on a particular incident).

I spend more time on Facebook these days. I'm blogging only occasionally, over at Wordpress. To say I'm blogging is perhaps a bit of a stretch. Mostly I'm doing links these days, when I do anything at all. I'm still transitioning after the death of my husband last year, and I'm also in an interesting season as a Christian convert, and so I'm taking more time in quiet, while I get my feet under me. Facebook's privacy settings are much appreciated. I like choosing whether something goes out to friends of friends, or just friends. For that matter, I'm sending more personal correspondence, one on one, these days. Not that I'm writing much, but what I'm doing is more often for a specific audience. That might change, of course. Life has its seasons.

But I wanted to see if I could still figure out how to log in, and post, over here, and I guess, in a way, I want to try to keep this old site alive a while longer.

And now that I've wasted a minute of your valuable time saying close to nothing... why don't you go play in the archives? Enjoy.

Testing, testing

I'm thinking of moving my blog back here, for various reasons. This is just a test, to see if I can successfully navigate in now-unfamiliar waters, so to speak.

Moving to a new address

Begging your pardon for any inconvenience, but I'm moving over to http://suitableformixedcompany.wordpress.com/. Please come visit me there.

My thanks to Blogger for giving me a soapbox since early 2005.

The Gratitude Community

Over at Holy Experience: The Thousand Gifts, posted back in late 2006, Anne Voskamp tells of deciding to write down not the gifts she wanted, but the gifts she had, aiming for a list a thousand gifts long, and she invited others to start doing the same. She was two years into her project then, and already past a thousand gifts. (Note: Holy Experience is one of those blogs that features music that starts on its own. There is a control panel partway down the righthand sidebar.)

Hat tip: A Circle of Quiet, who just joined The Gratitude Community this fall, and is posting her list online as she compiles it.

Report from a small town that's suddenly big

Barbara Curtis at Mommy Life invited a Wasilla, Alaska, resident to report on what it's like to live there these days, and serves up Our Wasilla correspondent on the aftermath of Hurricane Sarah.

The $5 book club

Russell Roberts has an idea for getting his newest book into the hands of people who "are either highly skeptical or influential (teachers)." He wants private donors to subsidize sales to that demographic. You join the book club, somebody you probably don't know gets to buy the book for $5. Such a deal.

We've had problems from teachers who think the rest of us for some vague reason owe them discounts. I've even had teachers threaten to tell their students not to shop at our bookstore if I didn't cut them a special deal. The school administrators, luckily for us, could see why we thought that was dirty pool, and with their help we've pretty much stopped getting extortion demands. So, anyway, I wish Roberts success in influencing teachers, but I hope he doesn't feed their entitlement mentality, if they have one...

Publishers and conservatives

Harry Stein muses on The Future of Conservative Books (City Journal, Summer 2008). That would be nonfiction books.

Side note: what the publishing industry (at the mammoth levels) and I call "conservative" aren't always the same thing. If I were in charge, verbal assaults would have to be called something else.

Stein has a nice overview of how big publishing houses are generally at odds with conservatives, even to the point of failing to promote books they might agree to publish, or somehow not getting around to printing enough books to meet demand should demand pop up despite their neglect. And it's not just the publishers. He also looks at the press, and trade publications, which tend to ignore those non-PC titles they don't savage. Conservatives have to work around these obstacles, which can be substantial.

hat tip: Phil at Brandywine Books

Baby announcement protocol (or a lack thereof)

A friend recently gave birth to her first baby, and we heard about it in a series of phone calls.

The first call came from a mutual friend, who heard from the new mother's sister, who had been present in the birthing room at the hospital, from which, we are told, she had kept a circle of acquaintances acquainted with all sorts of bloody and embarrassing details for a period of hours. The birth of the baby was announced along with a disrespectful report of the mother's response to the pain and some serious complications. (The sister, in case you're wondering, is childless. And she was supposed to be there as coach. I'm trying to give her the benefit of the doubt and write off her tactlessness and sneering to disguised fear, but I'm not having much luck, since she's known for being snarky and uncharitable, to the point it's pretty much habitual with her...)

The second call came from the husband, announcing the birth of his first child.

The third call came from the husband's mother, who, upon finding that we'd already heard from her son, said something along the lines of 'That darned son of mine. This is the third call I've made where he's beat me to it.'

Uhm. Is it just me or should the father and mother have been given a fair chance to make the first round of calls? I kind of, sort of, feel like the sister and grandmother were trespassing a bit.

(Mother and baby are home now, and doing fine.)

Ladies for Life blog and blogroll

I've just set up a Ladies for Life blog. Right now I'd like to concentrate on compiling a blogroll that lets pro-life ladies of all ages find like-minded ladies easily. So if you are a well-mannered woman or girl who believes in protecting human life from conception to natural death, please pop over and let me know in the comments if you'd like your blog or website listed. And please pass the word. Thanks.

Gov. Palin on "Alaska's Promise for the Nation"

Just so what I wrote in my last post isn't taken out of context, one working woman who decidedly seems able to work and simultaneously honor her marriage is Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. The September 2008 Imprimis, by the way, has an article based on a speech she made on "Alaska's Promise for the Nation" back on August 2, 2008.

From it, there is this little bit of info that I wish more people knew about (emphasis mine):

To repeat, Prudhoe Bay has produced 15 billion barrels of crude oil, and there’s more where that came from in ANWR, which is home to more than ten billion barrels of oil and nine trillion cubic feet of natural gas. I know this is a controversial issue. But most Americans do not realize that of the 20 million acres that make up ANWR, we are asking for the right to access just 2,000 of them—a mere 1/10,000th of the total area. Opening up just that sliver of ANWR—which would create a footprint smaller than the total area of Los Angeles International Airport—could produce enough oil (an estimated one million barrels per day) to ease America’s fuel crisis and greatly reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The article is wide ranging, so do go read the whole thing. Alaska will be celebrating 50 years of statehood next year, and she uses that as a jumping off point for a look at how the young state is doing so far.

Reliance versus dependence

We've been having a running discussion around here (offline) about how so many marriages where the woman works outside the home either don't seem very solid, or have ripped apart entirely. Mind you, we know marriages where the wife works that appear solid (I've worked off and on through our marriage, as an example), so we've been comparing. (Discreetly, of course.)

The working hypothesis (such as it is), is that the rocky-marriage women seem to subscribe to a notion that it is, somehow, a good idea to prove that you don't 'need' your husband. We know of at least one instance where the wife actually said to her husband, "I don't need you, so you'd better be nice to me." The sad thing is, we know of several more instances where that sentiment isn't put into words, but comes through loud and clear.

One theory behind that sort of behavior, I guess, is that if you take money out of the equation, you can (supposedly) concentrate on love (or what passes as love when you take trust out of it). Another theory is that if you prove your independence, the other person has added incentive to mind his manners because he's got no other 'hold' on you.

Having been inside the feminist camp in my sometimes-somewhat-misguided youth, I think I know where these ideas have come from, but be that as it may, shall we try putting the shoe on the other foot to see if this sort of thing sounds like a good idea when examined?

Let us say, for instance, that a husband rents and furnishes an apartment, and tells his wife about it, in the form of 'I have another place to stay, so you'd better be nice to me, because I don't need to live here with you.'

Let us say, for instance, that a husband takes a cooking class, not so he can be a better cook or so that he can pitch in more often, but to remove one obstacle to a potential divorce. Let him say to her, 'I know I don't know how to cook, and therefore it would be tough for me if we got a divorce, but this cooking class will take care of that. You can divorce me and it won't hurt me much. So, now that I don't have to worry about that, let's be nicer to each other, shall we?'

Do you think the wife, in either case, would feel that the husband was committed to the marriage? That he was making the team stronger? That he loved her? That he was aiming for a contented old age together, God willing?

Would she not be likely, instead, to see it as some sort of extortion? Or at least emotional distancing?

Would she not be inclined to wonder when he was going to bolt, since he seemed to be laying the groundwork for bolting?

And yet again and again I see women in effect laying the groundwork for an 'easy' divorce (the long term damage of divorce is usually worse than they anticipate, so it's rarely as 'easy' as they hope), and then being dumbfounded and angry when their husband feels threatened, or runs for his life.

Go figure.

Anyway, if you're young and haven't figured this out, it's entirely possible to rely on a husband without being overly dependent. And when a husband and a wife can rely on each other, that's a good thing.

So, to get back to the opening point, the working theory, such as it is, is that it's not the working outside the home per se that damages the marriage. It seems to be the 'lining up circumstances and setting aside provisions to make it easier to run away from home' that's the problem. Yes? No? Maybe?

I mean, living with somebody who insists on keeping her hand on the exit door can't be easy. Or encouraging. Or comforting.

(To be clear here, I think Christians are forbidden from divorcing for any reason except adultery. I believe that marriage is a covenant. I also recognize that the broader culture has a problem seeing the wisdom of that, much less the value of it. But can we agree that a 'marriage' where the wife and/or the husband is perpetually poised for divorce is not a healthy relationship? And can we agree that the brand of feminism brewed in the 1960s and '70s tends to encourage that? And that this is not a good thing? Or very smart, for that matter?)