Book Worms

Tonight we went out to dinner. The entire time we were at the restaurant, Kate didn’t say two words to us. And it was perfectly ok with me.

She had her nose in a book.

On the way to the grocery store… not a peep. She had her nose in a book.

At the grocery store, she sat inside the cart instead of walking beside me. She had her nose in a book.

It was Junie B. Jones, not a literary masterpiece, and while Junie B.’s grammar drives me bananas, I can’t really describe how good it made me feel to see her unable to tear herself away from the story.

I love, love, love to read. Books have been such a companion for me throughout my life, and even though I hope Kate continues to be less backward and shy than I always was (her outgoing personality still catches me off guard at times), I hope she will develop a passion for reading the way I did.

Just this weekend, I remembered how much I enjoy a good book. I hadn’t read anything for a while… I had been plodding my way through a less-than-compelling book for a couple months, but I finally put it aside and grabbed some fun books as we headed out on our road trip.

While we were gone, I read these books:

They’re by two of my favorite authors, and I loved them both (as I have everything else those two have written).

Now, much like Kate, I have the bug. I am back on the reading wagon, and I’m looking for recommendations. We’ve got a week at the beach coming up and I need a stock pile!

So… whaddya got? What’s on your summer reading list this year? I can’t wait to find out!

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History Lessons

I love to read.  I’m not sure I’ve talked much about my reading habit on this here blog, but I am pretty much always reading something.  I love it all: novels, biography, historical fiction, and non-fiction.  I’ve loved reading since I was a child, and I hope my kids come to love it as much as I do.

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of historical non-fiction.  Despite my poking fun at Emily for her desire to further her education, I’ve been furthering my education unofficially with history books for years.  I love learning about the past, and I love switching from subject to subject.  I love thinking of something I’d like to know more about, looking it up on my library’s online site, and reserving a couple of books on the topic.  If I were going to go to graduate school just for funzies, I’d totally get a degree in history.  Obviously, just for pleasure, and not for practical reasons.

So.  I thought I’d share with you some of what I’ve been reading lately.

Recently I re-read a book my mom had loaned me a couple of years ago called Slaves in the Family. It was written about a dozen years ago by Edward Ball, a white man whose family had been one of the largest slaveholders in the South, rice planters from the South Carolina low country.  By the time he was born, that was all long gone, but as an adult he set out to learn about what had happened to the descendants of his family’s slaves.  It was a fascinating read!  I learned a lot from it, and was happy to learn that Ball had written another book, about the family of an African-American woman he had might while researching Slaves in the Family, who was a very distant cousin of his.

It’s called The Sweet Hell Inside and it’s the story of a mixed-race family, the Harlestons, who lived in Charleston, South Carolina in the decades following slavery’s end as part of a small group of the city’s “colored elite”.

They were undertakers, and made their fortune because no white undertakers would handle the remains of black citizens.  The Harlestons had more money than many whites but still struggled mightily against the racist laws in place at the time.  They were wealthy, cultured, well-educated, and – forced to live as second-class citizens outside of their own neighborhood.  Yet, it should be noted, that they were light-skinned and snubbed other African-Americans with darker skin, thus propelling discrimination instead of ameliorating it.  Ball’s narrative, with recollections from a Harleston family member Edwina Harleston Whitlock, is a really fascinating and heartbreaking read.

After reading Ball’s two books, I decided I wanted to read more about how slavery and race relations affected a specific family, so I reserved and read Annette Gordon Reed’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Hemingses of Monticello, about the family enslaved by Thomas Jefferson (though they came to him through his marriage to Martha Wayles, having belonged to her father.  He had plenty of slaves of his own before he married, however.)

The book details the lives of many members of the Hemings family and the social context in which they carried out those lives.  The most famous Hemings is Sally, who was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister (her father’s child with one of his slaves) and whom Jefferson took as a “concubine” (if you will) after his wife’s death (even though she was about the age of his own eldest daughter.)  He and Hemings had seven children together, four of whom survived infancy.  Three of those four left Monticello to “pass as white” – leaving slavery with Jefferson’s blessing to live in the white world (Sally Hemings was also mixed-race, and her children with Jefferson, being only 1/8 “black” were “white enough” to pass somewhere far away from home.)

Hemingses was dry in parts but so, so thorough and really, truly heartbreaking.  The lives of the Hemings men – Sally Hemings’ brothers and nephews were very fascinating.  Jefferson had many of them trained as artisans and allowed them to work on their own and keep their earnings when he himself was traveling away from Monticello – so long as they would hop to it as soon as he called for them.  To this end, he allowed them to get tastes of freedom many times – but it was always temporary.

So there’s a brief summary of what I’ve  been learning lately.  Next up, I’ve decided to conquer World War 2 Germany.  What books have you had your noses buried in?

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WFMW: Making my own cleaning products

Today’s WFMW post is brought to you by my sister Anna. She is pretty cool.
— Emily

I was spraying my bathroom sink with my favorite cleaning product a few weeks ago, when the warning label caught my eye. “Hazard to humans and domestic animals. Get immediate medical attention if swallowed. Beware, danger, poison…” And as I watched the bubbles ooze down the sink and into our water supply, the thought occurred to me that perhaps there was a better way to make my sink shine.

I went to the library and checked out “Clean and Green” by Annie Berthold-Bond. When I brought it home, I couldn’t wait to try it out. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I already had may of the needed ingredients, most of them in my kitchen cabinet. “Clean and Green” tells me how to clean all kinds of things – everything from rugs and carpets to bathrooms to cars – and all the recipes are non-toxic.

The first one I tried out was a glass cleaner. I chose this because it was easy to make and because I had the necessary ingredients on hand. It worked great.

Next, after picking up washing soda and borax at the store, I tried out a recipe for a tub and shower cleaner. For me, this was the real test for how well these recipes worked. I hate cleaning the bath tub and shower. I’m using the word “hate” here. But what I hate even more than cleaning the tub/shower is cleaning it with a product that doesn’t work. On many occasions, I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed, only to discover that spots remained on the shower walls. The “Clean and Green” solution worked well, as least as well as the cleaning products I had been using, maybe even better. And the apartment didn’t smell like chlorine for the rest of the day. The “Clean and Green” solution didn’t leave the faucets and fixtures as shiny as I would have liked, but the book does have some recipes specifically for them that I will try out next time. I’m also eager to try out the recipe for cleaning the oven.

I’ve found making my own cleaning supplies to be strangly motivating. It’s like doing a science experiment. I make no promises on how long this will last, but for now I’m much more excited to clean if I get to test out some new concoction.

I haven’t really researched it, but it seems to me that putting poisonous chemicals down the drain isn’t the greatest idea. I don’t know for sure if using brand-name cleaning supplies is harming the environment or not.

But here’s what I do know:
When I use the tub and shower cleaner from “Clean and Green,” I can stand barefoot in the shower while cleaning, without fearing that the cleaning product is going to cause the skin on my feet to melt off.
It’s cheap to make. Many of the ingredients you probably already have, and those that you need to buy last a long time, as the recipes usually only call for a tablespoon of this and a teaspoon of that.
They work. (At least the ones I’ve tried). I’ve been very satisfied with the results of the solutions I’ve made.

Cleaning supplies that work, are cheap to make, and that won’t harm me, my family or the world… that works for me.

For more Works for Me Wednesday tips, check out Rocks in My Dryer. Thanks, Anna!

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