Hatcher's Pass in May

I didn't take very many pictures in Alaska but here are a few, mostly of Hatcher's Pass and my mother and daughter:

I love the way the mountains looked.

Liam's Graduation

Clare took a few pictures of Liam's graduation.











Unfortunately my camera was acting weird -- at first I couldn't take any pictures at all, then I ended up with some purple-tinted ones , as you can see below.

It was a beautiful day, though.

(Paddy, Liam and Clare)

(The chapel of Our Lady of the Trinity)

Picture Search

Can you locate Liam in the dedicatory mass on March 3rd at TAC's new chapel? Probably not, huh, unless you just happen to know us IRL -- that would be you, Chari and kids, and just a couple of others.

Detail, Liam foreground and just left of center,, with the dark grey suit. The seniors got to be part of the dedication ceremony. In the bigger picture he is on the left, towards the back, behind the doors. He's also quoted in a Ventura Star news article on the subject. LOL, since this blog is the closest to a scrapbook I ever get, I hope you don't mind this : ).

He is graduating May 17th, exactly one month before his birthday and just short of one month after we visited the TAC campus for the first time.

Dedication of Chapel at Thomas Aquinas College

Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel, photo courtesy of Thomas Aquinas College

More photos of the dedication of the Thomas Aquinas College chapel, last week on March 7, courtesy of A Faithful Rebel:

• At Thomas Aquinas College, a House of God and Gate of Heaven is Dedicated
• Holy Tradition Takes Center Stage

Snow in the High Sierras

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever. --- John Muir

Our House

Our road (and our dog)

Our trees

The view behind our house

Looking eastward from the summit of Pacheco Pass one shining morning, a landscape was displayed that after all my wanderings still appears as the most beautiful I have ever beheld. At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide, five hundred miles long, one rich furred garden of yellow Compositae. And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light. -- John Muir

California Landscapes

Central California, the I-5, early on a Sunday morning. What more can I say? I love California, though as a transplanted Alaskan I never thought I would be able to say that. I even love its flat, endless yellow spaces and that hard blue sky like a bowl, though I miss my Alaskan mountain ranges and cloud patterns.

We've been on this road many times before. The wind, though, and the snow on the Grapevine, made it unusual (sorry, not very good pics; taken from the window of the car).




See that tumbleweed in the third picture? A whole bunch of them rolled across the road in intervals. Kevin said it was like a video game, trying to avoid them.

This is what the view from my window looked like a few days ago. .... before this most recent blizzard. I'll take another picture in a few days. Right now the whole world is white out there.

Everything is flowing— going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks... John Muir

Sequel to the Squirrel Invasion

I think this little fellow is one of the same family who spent their babyhood in our rafters. He appears to be a Northern Flying Squirrel. We found him downstairs this morning and Kevin managed to get him in the live trap. One less set of little scurrying feet in our ceiling space to keep us awake at night.


The house from a squirrel's eye view -- see Brendan back there?


Check out the big eyes. They are nocturnals, and seem half blind in the light, which is how Kevin caught him, I think. He certainly didn't look or act sick.

We took him out in the woods a safe distance from the house (hopefully far enough so he can't get back).
Once the cage door was open he got out of there way too fast for me to get a picture, but here's the tree he scampered into.

We've glanced out our window at night and seen this type of scene but this photo is a National Geographic one.


Kevin reset the live trap and we caught a Douglas squirrel which he will drop off somewhere in a few minutes. It seems to want to chew through the metal.

Blog in Review 2008

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot

I'm going to try this blog review 2008 I found on UK Bookworm's blog. I had been puzzling over how to manage a retrospective when I remember practically nothing of what we did last year, and my blog seems to be no help. It lists minutiae of daily life and what was going on in my thoughts but nothing much more... so no way of telling what the Big Memory of each month was.

(Check out my daughter's blog for her photo retrospective, though; she kept better track than I did. )

This blog in review idea is from Kelli of "There is No Place Like Home", and you can go there and leave a Mr Linky link if you do this:

Post the first sentence of your first blog post of each month. You can also add a favorite picture from each month.

January

I have to say I am not one of those who is longing to get back into a normal routine. I wish these days after Christmas, before academics start up, would simply last forever.

The famous chocolates of happiness from Amy!

February

(For Lent, I gave up blogging -- so I guess that explains the big empty space in my archives???)

Picture of our deck taken by me

March

This evening we have the privilege of participating in an Easter Vigil mass up at our "station church" -- this is a first and we are looking forward to it. My daughter will be cantoring, and my two sons will be altar servers and help light the candles for our procession into the church .

Picture of Paddy taken by Aidan R.

April

Liam was describing to me his stay at the Benedictine monastery and the balance between ora et labora, study and meals, active and contemplative.

Picture of Liam taken by Clare R

May

This morning, Sean and Kieron played the Age of Imperialism game again for some time. They don’t play by the rules — their interest is in employing their formations.

Picture of Paddy taken by Clare R.

June

Now for the venting. I am so bad at planning! Once I get into gear I do all right. My problem is that I can’t seem to settle down to plan until I’m almost up to the wire.

Picture of Dora Clare and her toddlers taken by me

July

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit)

Picture of Paddy taken by Clare R

August

Haven't had time to write much. We went on a ten day trip to our extended family's lake cabin..and now have friends visiting.

Picture of Brendan and Kevin on Mt Tom taken by Clare R

September

Whenever Aidan’s really into something, he brings his Pikachu pillow over to share the experience...

Aidan playing on the keyboard with his Pikachu sharing the moment.

October

Back Home Again.... Yes, that is the title of a John Denver song, and yes, we did listen to it on the Ipod during the journey.

Picture of Aidan and Clare on Oregon coast taken by me

November

I did a lot of moving of posts this weekend. If they showed up on your reader, I apologize.

Picture of Sean (#14) and team taken by Clare R

December

Sean had to read The Scarlet Ibis today and answer questions on it for his Language Arts class at high school.

Picture of Aidan taken by Clare R.

Well, there you go, 2008 in blogging! Note to myself about New Year's resolution -- blog about things that happen, at least sometimes : ).

Happy 2009 to you all!

the people living in darkness have seen a great light

Picture by Liam R

Christmas brings hope, hope is our only treasure now: we were poor, and now even the little we had has been destroyed. But Christmas means that Christ is born, and every birth means a new life. Jesus came down from heaven to save us from this misery, from the pain, from abandonment, from our homelessness. His power fills us with hope, love, and forgiveness.”

from the mother of this little girl

The Gospel readings today were from Luke 2:

Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his mother:
Behold this child is set for the fall,
and for the resurrection of many in Israel,
and for a sign which shall be contradicted;
And thy own soul a sword shall pierce,
that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed.

Christmas 2008

Merry Christmas to all!

Two Days Till Christmas

Here in the Sierras, we managed to dig our way out of our ice-covered driveway with the help of the three big boys in the family, and drive down to town, getting through all our remaining errand checklist for before Christmas, including:

• Aidan's bi-monthly blood draw,
• Clare's monthly orthodontist appointment,
• pharmacy pick-up of Aidan's anti-seizure med, and
  
• the last bits and pieces of shopping.

We got back up to our log home yesterday evening and this morning the streets were newly covered in snow, which we can enjoy peacefully without having to drive in it. Oh, the rewards of getting things done : ). I won't think about the wrapping I still have to do.






















The boys, the ones that aren't down with the virus, playing pick-up nerf football in our loft.

More photos of the boys outside in the new snow, taken by Clare.

First Snow!

Snow and the newly stained logs : )

Season's End

Clare took some pictures of Sean's Final Game of the Season. Sean is in the foreground in this picture which I borrowed from her-- he is #14.

Today, he will turn in his football gear. Today, he will get back home at 4 pm instead of 6:30 pm. This will make it a lot easier for him to get everything done before the next day. Extreme time management was a way of life last term -- come home, eat, take his shower and get his homework done and be ready to get up at 6 am the next morning.

Unfortunately, early home because of no football is like cutting off your head to lose a few pounds of weight. School with no football ....? where are the priorities there? : ). Something's wrong, somewhere. A new, quieter time will start. No tension about the upcoming game, but none of the expectant electricity either. Just school. Interesting to find out how that will be.

It will be happiness to see him walk into the door before dusk -- Kevin and the older kids had gotten into the habit of going down through the dark (COLD) forest to meet the late bus, and now Sean can head up by himself in the late (still cold) afternoon. But it will be a bit sorrowful, too, to know what is missing from the day for him.

Yesterday I gave Sean some dividers for his school binder and it he was quite pleased by this simple solution. He takes notes in class but then can't always find them when he needs them -- a couple of the teachers ask for them on occasion. Now he can put the relevant notes behind the proper color coded, labelled divider. He was happy about that. Football, for Sean, is enough to make it OK to have to go to school and get used to a significantly different way of learning.

Next week is Thanksgiving Break -- the high school kids get the whole week off, and Liam will be home. Sean is looking forward to that. We all are.

Homeschooling for us has always been most essentially about family. I wish I could find the Chesterton quote where he said that education was primarily about equipping the person to live in a family. He said it way better than that. I think part of it is that the education of the child also is a stage in the education of the parents. Someone said "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your kids." I think learning is like that, too. Because learning is a matter of forming relationships, raising kids brings a whole new richness to relationships, to others and to the world.

This bleacher picture is titled by Aidan:
Bleachers with nobody on them... Nothing. Football has been a way to tie our family together even when Sean is gone 11 hours times 5 every week. Every Friday evening was about sitting on the bleachers cheering for our team, celebrating their highlights and agonizing with their difficulties. Now the rhythm of the week will change. It's sad to see a season drawing to an end, even when we know it will be replaced by a new season that will bring good things of its own.

not quite ready for winter

These pictures turned out a strange color; I'm not sure what I did to my camera settings to make these pictures so khaki-colored. But I wanted to memorialize today -- the day Kevin and Brendan stained the front of the house!
We are having unseasonable warmth, and Brendan had taped the windows, so they were ready to go. Maybe the odd colors work, sort of. Or maybe not.

Aidan and Paddy had a great time outside, blowing bubbles and painting a stump with acrylic paints (they had intended to help Dad paint the house, using bright blues and pinks and greens, but were redirected in time). But Paddy did paint Aidan's face, as you can see.