These are my guys! Saturday our state geocaching organization had a terrific all-day event at a local lake and state park. We had to be back at a decent time so I could attend the dinner and Relief Society broadcast at my ward building, but in the meantime we had a terrific day! The organization had 48 caches out, and we located 14 by 1:00. If we could have stayed another 5 hours we would have found more! We met a terrific family from about an hour away with whom we "teamed up" to find several caches. This is a favorite family activity of ours. See www.geocaching.com for caches in your area, then grab a GPS, some insect repellent, a few little trinkets to leave in the caches, and off you go!

Last week we had a lovely afternoon pursuing the migratory birds that have descended upon us! One of my favorite things about living here is our proximity to the Mississippi River Flyway. We had a lovely afternoon, spotting many small birds, large flocks of white pelicans, probably 30 or more of these beautiful great egrets. They are so graceful! We also spotted THREE great blue herons, but they were exceedingly skittish and we didn't get any photos--it was all we could do to get enough of a look to ID them. We are heading out to our nature center this afternoon in hopes of spotting some more species "on the move" south!

Where does the time go? We've just been in our usual whirl. So much for life simplification. I think I'm not good at that. My question is always--so what goes? What do I not need? If there is anything NOT necessary I haven't found it yet, sigh.
Anyway. Just finished reading Wide as the Waters, by Benson Bobrick. Very interesting tracing of the development of the King James translation of the Bible, and how it changed and affected so much around it. Very interesting book. It took me a long time to read it. :-) This book was in the footnotes of Elder Hales' talk last October in General Conference, "Preparations for the Restoration and the Second Coming."
Then in one day I ate up the small assignment for my Mother's Education Course to read one-third of A Girl of the Limberlost. This is my third time reading it. I still love it.
Anyway, so last night I began Eve and the Choice Made in Eden by Beverly Campbell. It's a "thinking and sinking" book. I'm reading in bits so I have time to ponder and think in between. Very enlightening already.
I'm home from church this morning with two coughing kids.
I simply cannot believe that September is half over already.

I'm in need. :-) My endless-towering-stacks are still there, but to my dismay, my nonfiction choices outnumber my fiction choices by something like 4 to 1. For years and years, it has been my practice to read one nonfiction, and then one fiction, and repeat. Lately I have switched that to TWO nonfiction, one fiction, and still I am in real danger of running out of suitable fiction! Alas! Dismay! Help!
I need ideas. Obviously I'm well covered for some time with nonfiction--some forty on my shelves at the moment, waiting. But my fiction choices are dwindling. I just had to consign yet another to the ash heap--Marrying Mozart, by Stephanie Gowell, which proved to have enough crude moments and not enough lovely ones to seal its fate. Most of the ones I have remaining are heavy--two Scott novels, Lorna Doone in very tiny print. Sigh. I have The Once and Future King on my couch at the moment, but am afraid--the Ambleside Advisory has some warnings about it on the site--what if I don't like it? Sigh. I have a fairly low threshold for crudity, sleaze, language, inanity . . . I guess you could say I'm picky. LOL The last novel I successfully managed nearly died a number of times--The Book of Light, by Chaim Potok, which had a few scattered vulgarities which, in a lesser book, I would simply not have tolerated.
Suggestions, anyone?

I just finished Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. It had been recommended to me so many times--every time I told someone I was reading everything I could find on balance in women's lives, someone would insist "You must read Gift from the Sea!" I am partial to Anne Lindbergh's writing anyway, so I was eager to try it.
My first reaction was disappointment. How am I supposed to gain insight from the life of a woman so very different than I--a woman who can fly off to a beach home (a beach home? I can barely afford the home I have!) and spend several weeks alone. Who took care of her kids? Who did the housework? Did she just put them in the freezer till she came back? I'm not really relating here, LOL. And shells. Lindbergh's thoughts were centered around shells. I know NOTHING of shells. I grew up in Kansas and live in Iowa. Not a lot of personal experience, to picture the shells she describes and think "Oh, I know just that shell, and I know what you mean!"
My second reaction was that I did like some of the thoughts that she expressed. A few quotes I liked:
"The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between the two extremes: a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return."
"The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask."
"This is an end toward which we could strive--to be the still axis within the revolving wheel of relationships, obligations, and activities."
"But neither is the answer in dissipating our time and energy in more purposeless occupations, more accumulations which supposedly simplify life but actually burden it, more possessions which we have not time to use or appreciate, more diversions to fill up the void."
"It is fear, I think, that makes one cling nostalgically to the last moment or clutch greedily toward the next . . . how to exorcise it? It can only be exorcised with its opposite, love."
"Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures--an excess of shells, where one or two would be significant."
So, nice quotables for my journal. I picked up some worthwhile small shells, perhaps. But the overall message of the book left me strangely cold--as if Lindbergh and I were really talking at times about different things. She seems to have a quite different view of relationships, of solitude, of religious purpose, than I do. She quotes a passage from Rilke that gives me, for some reason, that creepy chilly feeling up and down my spine: "Solitude is not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. Naturally we will turn giddy."
Silly of me, I suppose, to expect that everyone will understand my religious perspective--but I find my heart disputing this. True, in this imperfect world, we must come to terms with solitude--we are separated from God, from one another, by barriers we rarely contemplate, and only effort and care and thought and prayer can form the connections we want. But we are born for the connections. We are incomplete as we are, and must find the path to constant communion with our Father and also with our eternal companions, even though it take longer than our span of days on earth.
My ideas of this relationship with our companions likewise differ sharply from Lindbergh's. She again quotes Rilke: "And this more human love . . . will resemble that which we are with struggle and endeavor preparing, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." Lindbergh goes on to discuss married life as this--two solitudes that bump into one another at times, as in a dance (the old kind, the carefully choreographed dances of Austen's time, now curtsy to your partner, touch and circle him, and move on, out of contact . . . ) This conception of marriage leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Can this be all our Father meant when he commanded us to be "one"? Not that I have this down perfectly, myself, in my own relationships, but I'd be eternally depressed if this "separate solitudes" is all that there is.
Bottom line: I'm not sorry I read the book--at only 138 pages it did not require much from me, but did not provide much food to satisfy the hunger of understanding the concept of balance and how to apply it to my life.

This is a picture of my dh--he recently celebrated a birthday. I won't tell you which one because we are the same age, lol, and I'm not admitting to it yet. Anyway, he got a new GPS device for his birthday, which renewed our interest in geocaching, a very fun hobby. :-) He came home early Friday, picked up the boys, and went out and found two caches, and then Saturday we went out to our local nature preserve and found three more. Fun! You download information on caches from a site like www.geocaching.com and use the clues and coordinates to find the caches, hidden in a variety of places. There is usually a log book to sign in, and various "goodies" which you can take if you leave more. A related activity is letterboxing, which is very similar except no GPS coordinates are used, just the clues.
It's a fun way to get outdoors, learn some geography, and have fun as a family.