Monday, May 29, 2006

Memorial Day


Happy Memorial Day! Our family is enjoying a day off to catch our breath, do a little backyard barbecue and relax. This is, I'm sure, what the majority of Americans do on this great holiday. I do want to take some time to remember the meaning of the holiday. It's a day to honor all of our fallen soldiers who gave their lives so we could have such a great country. In spite of its faults, I believe our country to be the greatest country. I'm thankful to live in such a great country and don't ever want to take it for granted. As one of the founding fathers of our country once said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Balzac and Coffee




This is the coolest coffee maker ever. All you do is pop one of the "p-cups" in the coffee maker and push the button. Voila, instant cup of great coffee! And there's no coffee grinds to make a mess, just throw away the used p-cup. We got the coffee maker for half-price a while back at a Robinson's May store closeout sale, and it's been great. The only drawback is that to get a good price on the coffee, you have to order it online and that means planning ahead so you don't run out of coffee.

I like my coffee in the morning. I used to drink it all day long but now I only have a couple of cups in the morning. I recenly read this little essay by Balzac on coffee. He takes coffee drinking and caffeine addiction to another level. It makes me wonder what kind of coffee he's using.

By the way, I recently read about half of Cousin Bette by Balzac. I tried to like it becauase I wanted to like Balzac. But I didn't like any of the characters and Cousin Bette was the worst. So I just returned it to the library half-read. There's a certain freedom in deciding to not finish a book. There are too many good books out there to waste my time reading about people I can't like. I'm collecting quotes about books as friends which I'm sure will show up on the blog sometime or other.

But here is the Balzac essay about coffee:

“The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee”
by Honore de Balzac
translated from the French by Robert Onopa
Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.
But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. It is on this last point, in particular, that I want to add my personal experience to Brillat-Savarin's observations.
Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.
For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.
For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.
When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thoughthe'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.
When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie.
The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

Saturday, May 13, 2006

My Mom





Ethel Margaret Cashen was born on May 31, 1922 New Orleans, Louisiana. She was the youngest of four children born to Marcus and Alma Cashen.
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Here she is as a young woman on a windy day at the lakefront with (from left to right) her older sister, Dorothy Cashen and her mother, Alma Demoruelle Cashen and then Mom (How about that windswept look?) Three pretty ladies.

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She met and fell in love with Roy J. Tourne when she was fifteen years old. Six years later, on October 8, 1943 they were married in Corpus Christi, Texas where my Dad was stationed in the Coast Guard. Shortly after they were married my Dad was shipped out to the war in the Pacific. He was gone for two years.
Here they are on their wedding day in front of the church in Corpus Christi. From the left, Dad, the mother of the bride Alma Cashen, Mom, and her maid of honor, Muriel. It was a very small wedding since Dad was getting ready to ship out to the war. Mom had to take a train from New Orleans to meet him in Corpus Christi before he shipped out. Then she didn't see him for two years.
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As a war bride she spent a lot of time at the mailbox mailing letters to Dad.

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Here is the happy couple in 1951 on the porch of the house they built in the suburbs of New Orleans. Don't they look proud?

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Here we have the great baby switch incident. From left to right: Mom's sister Dorothy, my cousin Judy, Mom, my Grandmother whom we called Mia, baby me, and my Aunt Mae.
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Mom died in 1979 before I met Chuck and had her two wonderful grandchildren. But on this Mother's Day I want to honor her as a great and loving Mom who left a legacy of love for her grandchildren.

Stay tuned for more of her poetry at the Flowergirl Poetry blog

Friday, May 12, 2006

The Englishman

One of my good friends sent me an email letting me know that I've been slacking off on my blogging lately. I know, I know. First of all, I'm glad someone noticed. Of course I can always count on my wonderful husband to let me know that he's reading my blog and waiting for another post. I appreciate that.

Well I have no excuses, except that I'm busy teaching homeschool and driving to gymnastics. And then, I don't want to post when I'm feeling kinda bothered or discouraged. Ranting is one thing but I don't want to do it all the time. So I guess if I'm not posting I'm either extremely busy, a little down, or both. It's down to the homestretch of the school year and I'm ready for a break.

So it was a rare night off from the gym last night and Chuck and I even watched a movie together. Well I watched it all the way through and he had to leave part-way through to pick my son up from his acting class but it was nice while it lasted. We watched a movie he picked up from the library called The Englishman, with Hugh Grant, from 1995.

I was pleasantly surprised by it. I loved this movie! It was quirky, funny and had a nice message about a community pulling together for a common goal. It was based on a true story and the Celtic music was great too. I highly recommend it.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Outrageous California Bill

Okay, I need to pull my nose out of old books and kid's activities long enough to take a look at what's going on behind the scenes in my state. This is really amazing isn't it? Is it just that I'm out of touch with what's going on or did this just kind of slip through without a lot of attention. I'm having trouble finding out exactly what the status of this is as of today.



Outrageous Bill Passes Judiciary Committee in Sacramento
Excerpts from Capitol Resource Institute
from Wednesday, April 05, 2006




California Bill to Force Pro-Homosexual Message in Public Schools Passes Committee

Today in Sacramento, one of the most outrageous bills in the California Legislature this year, passed from the Senate Judiciary Committee.

SB 1437, introduced by Sen. Sheila Kuel, Democrat of Los Angeles, would require school textbooks to highlight the positive contributions of homosexual and transgender individuals to society and would prevent textbooks, teaching materials, instruction, and ''school-sponsored activities'' from reflecting adversely upon persons based on their sexual orientation or actual or perceived gender.

If it passes through the entire Legislature, SB 1437 could potentially require gender-neutral bathrooms in our schools and all references to ''husband'' and ''wife'' or ''mom and dad'' removed from school textbooks as the norm.

''The reason this is such an outrageous bill is because it is the most extreme effort thus far to transform our public schools into institutions that disregard all notions of the traditional family unit,'' said Karen England, executive director of Capitol Resource Institute. ''SB 1437 seeks to eliminate all 'stereotypes' of the traditional family so that young children are brainwashed into believing that families with moms and dads are irrelevant.''

SB 1437 not only affects textbooks and instructional materials for kindergarten and grades 1-12, it also affects all school-sponsored activities.

''School-sponsored activities include everything from cheerleading and sports activities to the prom,'' said England. ''Under SB 1437, school districts would likely be prohibited from having a 'prom king and queen' because that would show bias based on gender and sexual orientation.''

''Under SB 1437, school districts would also likely have to do away with dress codes and would have to accommodate transsexuals on girl-specific or boy-specific sports teams.''

The full effects of SB 1437 are broad and sweeping. ''SB 1437 disregards the religious and moral convictions of parents and students and will result in reverse discrimination,'' said England.

Capitol Resource Institute is an organization committed to ''opposing legislation that uses our children as social-experiments and tramples upon long-standing traditional family values.'' To read more about Capitol Resource Institute, visit the group's website at: www.capitolresource.org

Saturday, May 06, 2006

The Enemies of Books


by William Blade (London 1888)

Another day at the gym, more time spent finding quotes, pictures and books about books. Here's an excerpt I found entertaining from an out of copyright book published in 1888 about the enemies of books. Apparently these include zealous housewives bent on spring cleaning and those most uncivilized of creatures, boy children.

For your reading pleasure:



What boys can do may be gathered from the following true story, sent me by a correspondent who was the immediate sufferer: --
One summer day he met in town an acquaintance who for many years had been abroad; and finding his appetite for old books as keen as ever, invited him home to have a mental feed upon ``fifteeners'' and other bibliographical dainties, preliminary to the coarser pleasures enjoyed at the dinner-table. The ``home'' was an old mansion in the outskirts of London, whose very architecture was suggestive of black-letter and sheep-skin. The weather, alas! was rainy, and, as they approached the house, loud peals of laughter reached their ears. The children were keeping a birthday with a few young friends. The damp forbad all outdoor play, and, having been left too much to their own devices, they had invaded the library. It was just after the Battle of Balaclava, and the heroism of the combatants on that hard-fought field was in everybody's mouth. So the mischievous young imps divided themselves into two opposing camps -- Britons and Russians. The Russian division was just inside the door, behind ramparts formed of old folios and quartos taken from the bottom shelves and piled to the height of about four feet. It was a wall of old fathers, fifteenth century chronicles, county histories, Chaucer, Lydgate, and such like. Some few yards off were the Britishers, provided with heaps of small books as missiles, with which they kept up a skirmishing cannonade against the foe. Imagine the tableau! Two elderly gentlemen enter hurriedly, paterfamilias receiving, quite unintentionally, the first edition of ``Paradise Lost'' in the pit of his stomach, his friend narrowly escaping a closer personal acquaintance with a quarto of Hamlet than he had ever had before. Finale: great outburst of wrath, and rapid retreat of the combatants, many wounded (volumes) being left on the field.

Blades, William . The Enemies of Books
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library